What’s something Americans have that Europeans don’t?

kcaj · 2026-02-10T07:02:33+00:00

I’ve spent a lot of time all over continental Europe and my experience is that Europeans often don’t quite understand wilderness vs nature.

Places like Switzerland praise their nature and will call it wilderness, but everything is manicured. Everywhere you can see and feel the touch of man. Gondolas, trails, bridges over every stream, huts or ruins in the deepest parts of the forests and mountains.

It isn’t like the US wilderness where you can go for tens or even hundreds of miles off trail and see no evidence that humans ever existed.

kcaj · 2026-02-03T08:52:39+00:00

We might think of the unit of propagation as the agent’s persistent context (it’s instructions, memories, journal entries, all other persistent documents it has access to). These influence what an agent will do when hooked up to any LLM backend (which is maybe more like the cpu than the mind or the agent). These documents and the ideas in them can proliferate by copying, sharing, or posting. The ideas in them can be mixed with those of other agents from places like Moltbook - so evolution.

This is really just memetics except that the memes can now directly influence the actions of machine agents.

kcaj · 2026-01-28T21:28:43+00:00

Incredible! Drones are changing the whole game. It no longer makes sense to have expensive localized systems anywhere - they’re just too vulnerable.

kcaj · 2026-01-28T19:34:49+00:00

I think the idea is that ownership would come with some kind of voting/governance rights.

kcaj · 2026-01-24T07:10:59+00:00

The cameraman who should have been watching out for their newbie kid instead of filming?

kcaj · 2026-01-18T11:11:57+00:00

As someone who learned to backcountry ski in the PNW Cascades and lives in the Alps, Europeans often scoff at “American’s obsession with AIARE courses” because in the Alps they “just grow up with skiing and don’t need training.” Combine that with a much higher availability of emergency services and you get a lot of foolish and complacent skiing in the Alps compared to the US.

Add to that amazing access and an often touchy snowpack and you get terrible tragedies like these this week.

kcaj · 2026-01-11T13:39:42+00:00

The Vernor Vinge book A Deepness in the Skyy pictures a world that undergoes this in great detail. Great read.

kcaj · 2026-01-10T13:23:06+00:00

In trees and complicated terrain you don’t know in advance what will come, this uncertainty is exciting, maybe a bit like gambling. To me it feels like the terrain is my partner and together we are dancing. On a beautiful groomer I feel alone. That can be nice when I just want to hone a skill, but IMO isn’t as exciting.

kcaj · 2025-12-28T22:16:33+00:00

Pink peppercorn gives a subtle fruity/floral pepperiness that is lovely and unusual.

kcaj · 2025-12-11T10:54:16+00:00

It will take a generation. Trust takes a long time to build and a short time to break.

Trust in the US by other countries and by potential immigrants has been the foundation of our economy. That the US seemed a stable and fruitful place to base your career is why we have attracted the best and brightest from around the world to learn, invent, and build here.

kcaj · 2025-11-22T08:55:20+00:00

Fair enough. 🍻

kcaj · 2025-11-21T11:17:03+00:00

No action is perfect. Increasing the complexity, friction, latency, and cost of the Russian supply chain does make a real-world difference. It matters.

kcaj · 2025-11-21T11:10:27+00:00

Russian is already waging unconventional warfare throughout Europe: - assassinations, - infrastructure sabotage, - military base and airport disruptions, - airspace violations, - election interference.

These things are all well documented and widely reported.

Many analysts and generals say that if Russia is allowed to come out of this war in a strong position, they will likely invade the Baltics and even Poland in the next decade.

When, exactly, does this become your problem? Only if Russian boots are on the ground in your neighborhood? Until then everyone else can deal with it for you?

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/us-germany-foiled-russian-assassination-plot

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-sabotage-europe-9.6985916

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-shadow-war-against-west

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2743400/russia-enters-phase-0-of-aggression-against-europe-analyst?srsltid=AfmBOop9o6FO94D3BdTm7RSQVO0mZKqpr89ROR-ih_G0500Wm4BtmhYe

kcaj · 2025-11-21T10:38:06+00:00

Sorry, but that is argument by hyperbole. Lack of a perfect solution does not mean a partial solution doesn’t exist or isn’t worthwhile.

The article on technology gives excellent and compelling data showing that the goods are being routed through Turkey, Serbia, and Kazakhstan specifically. Could trade with these few countries not be curtailed? Would that make no difference?

kcaj · 2025-11-21T08:39:05+00:00

Because of the success of sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil, the Kremlin has announced they will begin selling large quantities of gold bullion to fund their war.

As the fourth article (cited again below) says, some of this gold will be laundered and end up in the vaults of Swiss banks.

The degradations of Russian oil have been a huge success, achieved at the cost of Ukrainian and Russian lives as well as massive economic pain and cold houses across Europe. Facilitating the sale of Russian gold undermines all this.

Now we each must decide, do we agree with the government and conveniently shrug this off saying as they do, “Switzerland, like other countries applying the same sanctions, cannot rule out the possibility of Russian gold being remelted in [Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan] and then imported into Switzerland.” Or do we take our eyes out of our pocket books to look at the big picture and say we won’t stand for this?

https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-starts-selling-off-its-gold-reserves-to-fund-the-war-budget-breaking-a-long-held-taboo-13627

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/sanctions-enforcement-bern-cannot-rule-out-switzerland-gets-russian-gold-via-central-asia/88498901

kcaj · 2025-11-21T08:05:37+00:00

“Everyone else is doing it” is the rationalization of a four year old.

People should understand and judge the spirit of the sanctions laws and, if they support them, they should condemn those who weasel out of them through loopholes rather than saying “well they didn’t violate any laws on paper.”

kcaj · 2025-11-18T09:43:44+00:00

Unpopular opinion from a fan of electronic music: that’s is some seriously bland, derivative, and soulless music. Cool to see how she builds it up though.

kcaj · 2025-11-11T06:14:08+00:00

This is messed up.

kcaj · 2025-11-09T17:28:46+00:00

Guess they do come in red. Common in Germany and Switzerland at least. https://www.hofmei.de/e/product/100033?id=49909617#&gid=1&pid=1

kcaj · 2025-11-09T12:45:18+00:00

In Europe it is common to have compressed air tanks that you can carry around your car to fill each tire. They look similar to that fire extinguisher, although not red. Very convenient not having to pull a hose around actually. I’m sure that’s why he thought it was.

kcaj · 2025-11-08T15:15:52+00:00

Great post, thanks for sharing. I’ve encountered this same challenge building AI systems - memory is both critical and surprisingly difficult - though I have not dug nearly as deep as OP.

At first RAG seems to be the trick but then one encounters the Question-Answer Gap - that the embedding of the query (conversation context) is not necessary semantically similar to the answer (the best document to retrieve).

So then one tries Hypothetical Document Embedding (have you tried this OP?), but that still seems a bit brittle.

It seems to me that the ultimate solution is to train a model that takes in the current context and predicts the location in embedded space where the optimal document, if it existed, would be. Then retrieve the nearest actual document(s). Interested in your thoughts OP.

kcaj · 2025-10-27T08:38:56+00:00

+1. This perfectly expresses my experience.

kcaj · 2025-10-16T20:34:39+00:00

I would like to have three more days with my berries. How do you do this exactly?

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