In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites . On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity . Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power? A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times ( Les Trente Glorieuses ), good times create weak men ( The End of History ), weak men create hard times (now). The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis. It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment. But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response. And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition. The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline. We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.
This started based off of a hunch. We usually use OpenCode, but were 'forced' to use Claude Code for a while due to issues with Meridian. In that time, we saw the usage meter rise much, much more quickly than when using OpenCode. This was the initial anecdotal evidence, but we undertook this small study to collect empirical data: We added logging between the agentic coding tool (Claude Code and OpenCode) and Anthropic's endpoint, and captured all requests (and the returned usage blocks). With one caveat (toward the end of the post) we found unambiguously that Claude Code was far more inefficient in terms of its cache strategy and its harness token usage than OpenCode. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883275 Points: 514 # Comments: 288
The allure of emerging technology is undeniable, but adopting it rarely means completely ripping out what already works. Instead, new The post APIs aren’t dead. Here’s where MCP fits alongside them. appeared first on The New Stack .
At least two people are dead and at least four people are injured after a shooting on Saturday night at a festival celebrating Latin culture in Canada's biggest city.
Former Tory minister appointed to head review sees the challenges on visit to troubled HMP Wandsworth Scrapping early release for sex offenders could leave no capacity in jails, says Lammy The fortress-like entrance of HMP Wandsworth, one of the UK’s most notorious jails, has become a familiar sight in recent years. In 2023, Daniel Khalife , a spy for Iran, escaped through the gates by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery truck, prompting a nationwide hunt. Two years ago, prisoners celebrated their freedom under an emergency release scheme in front of these gates, thanking Keir Starmer and swigging champagne from bottles. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Deputy PM says opponents have ‘no solutions’ to possible collapse of justice system in England and Wales Drugs, drones and heat: Amber Rudd and David Lammy begin search for answers to prisons crisis Opponents of plans to release rapists and sex offenders early from prison have “no solutions” to halt the criminal justice system’s possible collapse, David Lammy has said. Under pressure from Labour MPs – including the former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips – to curb the early release scheme, the deputy prime minister said failing to implement it could leave no capacity across jails in England and Wales in November. Continue reading...
Editor’s Note: This article contains an exclusive excerpt from Latency by Pekka Engberg, which helps readers diagnose latency problems and The post How async processing hides latency and improves responsiveness appeared first on The New Stack .
The clearest signal of a major pivot in enterprise AI came this week when Anthropic announced its second Global Premier Partner in the The post Anthropic’s newest enterprise partner is training 20,000 people on Claude — here’s the shift it signals appeared first on The New Stack .
A surge of cases of the intestinal illness that causes diarrhea and nausea has been detected in 31 states, according to federal health authorities, but the source is still under investigation.
One in four longer social media posts is entirely AI-generated, according to a Pangram analysis. LinkedIn leads with 41 percent of long-form posts flagged as AI-written. The platform made up only a third of all posts scanned but accounted for nearly two-thirds of all detected AI content. Because the detection model tends to flag content conservatively, the real rate could be even higher. The article LinkedIn is the undisputed king of long-form AI slop, according to a study spanning five platforms appeared first on The Decoder .
Apple's self-driving car program never really got off the ground, but it may have been what made the company's chips the powerful AI performers they are. Early in the development of the self-driving platform, Apple realized that it would need powerful on-device AI processing. While the car processor was never finished, as Mark Gurman details […]
Long-serving South Carolina Republican senator who was an ally of Donald Trump and an ardent supporter of Ukraine Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who has died suddenly aged 71, had just returned from Kyiv after a meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was Graham’s 10th visit since the 2022 Russian invasion ; Zelenskyy, who came away with promises of the aid that had been on and off with the Trump administration, called him a “true defender of freedom”. It was a good demonstration of both Graham’s firm stance on US power overseas, and his opposition to Russia. “Putin will not stop in Ukraine,” he said. “To be weak in Ukraine means you lose in Taiwan.” Continue reading...