Triton Station: “A Nobel prize in physics for something that is not physics”

Nearly forty years on, my concerns about string theory have not been misplaced. And while, in the strictest sense, I don’t think it qualifies as physics – it’s more of a physics-adjacent branch of mathematics – it is at least attempting to be physical theory. But machine learning is not physics. It’s computer science. Computers are a useful tool, to be sure. But programming them is no more physics than teaching a horse to count.

I’m not sure we should even consider machine learning to be meritorious. It can be useful, but it is also a gateway drug to artificial intelligence (AI). I remember the more earnest proponents of early AI propounding on the virtues of LISP and how it would bring us AI – in the 1980s. All it brought us then was dystopian fantasies about killer robots nuking the world. Despite the current hype, we have not now developed intelligent machines – what we’re calling AI is certainly artificial but not at all intelligent. It uses machine “learning” to reprocess existing information into repackaged forms. There is zero original thought, nothing resembling intelligence. Modern AI is, in essence, a bullshit generator. Now, we can all think of people who qualify as organic bullshit generators, but that begs the question:

Why is the Nobel prize in physics being awarded for something that is clearly not physics?

Stacy McGaugh

If you need more proof of the stagnation in theoretical physics over the past decades, look no further than this year’s Nobel Prize.

Chrome for Developers: “CSS Wrapped: 2023! text-wrap: balance and pretty”

As a developer, you don’t know the final size, font size, or even language of a headline or paragraph. All the variables needed for an effective and aesthetic treatment of text wrapping, are in the browser. Since the browser does know all the factors, like font size, language, and allocated area, it makes it a great candidate for handling advanced and high quality text layout.

This is where two new text wrapping techniques come in, one called balance and the other pretty. The balance value seeks to create a harmonious block of text while pretty seeks to prevent orphans and ensure healthy hyphenation. Both of these tasks have traditionally been done by hand, and it’s amazing to give the job to the browser and have it work for any translated language.

Una Kravets & Bramus & Adam Argyle

Nice to see the web platform introducing CSS features such as text-wrap that are easy to pick up and use – as opposed to things like grid layouts and nesting – while also being extremely useful and offloading to the browser tasks that would otherwise need complex work from web developers. The balance keyword is widely supported in browsers already, while pretty is exclusive to Chromium-based browsers for now. Even so, the lack of browser support for pretty won’t affect visitors in Safari and Firefox in any meaningful way, since the text will simply wrap in the default way.

Politico: “Europe should hope for a Trump victory”

A Trump win would immediately revive plans for more common EU debt for the bloc’s security and defense. That idea — initially pushed by Macron and supported by the EU’s new High Representative Kaja Kallas — had even won the tacit support of frugal Northern Europe, but it lost momentum after the French president’s election gambit. The shock of a second Trump term would undoubtedly rekindle it, not least because Germany — the country most reluctant to support Macron’s ideas — is also the country that fears losing America’s security guarantee most.

The same would be true for the Continent’s gloomy economic outlook. Former Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s diagnosis of an €800 billion-per-year investment gap can only be filled by more common financing. It also requires a different approach to EU-wide industrial and fiscal policy that, again, would start in Germany and spill over to rest of the EU — something that a trade war with Trump could help unlock.

Mujtaba Rahman

That may have been the case if Trump would have won a second term back in 2020, but I fear that now in 2024 and beyond the prospects of catalyzing European unity are much slimmer. European leaders have had another four years of ‘American leadership’ under Biden to lull them into complacency – I am using ‘leadership’ here in quotes as this was rather America pursuing its militaristic haphazard foreign policy and European leaders tagging along and pretending US interests perfectly match our own.

The Economist: “Ireland’s government has an unusual problem: too much money”

In September the European Court of Justice delivered a verdict in a long-running legal battle over whether Apple had benefited from unfair (and now closed) loopholes in Ireland’s tax code. As a result, the American tech firm will have to hand over €13bn ($14bn) to the Irish tax authorities, along with over €1bn of interest—an amount equivalent to 4.8% of the country’s annual national income. To the bemusement of other cash-strapped governments, the Irish authorities sided with Apple in its battles with Europe’s courts, arguing that the firm had done nothing wrong.

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Irish policymakers are aware that the tax base is narrow as well as bountiful. In 2022 just ten firms accounted for three-fifths of corporate-tax receipts. Moreover, corporation tax amounted to 27% of all receipts that year, more than double the oecd average. Recognising this vulnerability, the Irish government intends to treat the Apple windfall in the same way that Norway treated North Sea oil revenues: it will set up a sovereign-wealth fund. Two separate pots are being established. Ministers hope their combined value will reach €100bn by 2040, at which point they will start to spend the income generated.

The Economist

I have a rather straightforward answer if the Irish government doesn’t want – or know what to do with – this massive Apple fine: contribute this to the EU budget! It was after all the European Commission who fought this legal battle and won, while Ireland argued against it. And most of these profits on which Apple avoided taxes for years were generated in other EU countries, not on their operations in Ireland.