💡 Warp News #332
📊 No rise in unemployment due to AI. 🛩️ The world's largest electric hybrid aircraft has flown for the first time. 🚭 Tobacco use in India has halved in twenty years.
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🔨 I'm all thumbs, but I'm building houses
I'm not particularly handy, but this summer I've built several houses.
That's how it feels.
It's not houses I've built, but programs on my computer. Even though I know as little about programming as I do about carpentry.
On vacation I got the idea to build a game for myself. First I made it in Lovable, which turned out unexpectedly well. First I made it in Lovable, which turned out unexpectedly well, but with some limitations. So I moved on to heavier stuff: the coding tools in ChatGPT and Claude.
I tried them last winter, but was scared off by the hassle and the need to work in a terminal window. It felt like I was sitting at my dad's computer in 1985.
But now they had the same look as ChatGPT and Claude themselves, and were much more user-friendly for those of us who don't sit in the dark in a hoodie all night.
So I rebuilt the game and it turned out even better. After that it just went poof, and my computer is now filling up with programs both useful and useless.
That's why it feels like all thumbs-me can suddenly build houses.
And the really cool thing is that you and everyone else can do it too. All we need are ideas and to describe them in our own language.
Maybe you think you lack such ideas? You don't.
Or that it seems hard? It isn't.
That's what I write about in this week's Premium Supporter article (open to everyone).
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
🔨 I can't do carpentry, but suddenly I can build houses
I've built an entire cottage village! And you can too.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
📜 Text charred in the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, read in full 2,000 years later
Researchers have read a complete scroll from Herculaneum. The scrolls were carbonised by the heat and are so fragile they cannot be physically unrolled without being destroyed. Instead, high-resolution scans and computational techniques are used to virtually unwrap the scrolls.
💡 Light is 16,000 times cheaper than in the 14th century
One million lumen-hours cost around £34,000 in the early 14th century. By 2023, the same amount of light cost £2.15. The price drop amounts to a 16,000-fold decline, measured in constant prices. New lamps, new fuels, and expanded electricity grids made the development possible.
🚭 Tobacco use in India has halved in twenty years
At the turn of the millennium, about one in five adult Indians smoked. That share has roughly halved since then. Almost half of all adults used some form of tobacco at the time. That figure has also roughly halved. The decline applies to both men and women, unlike the trend in some other countries.
🚗 Electric car sales in Latin America have gone from near zero to rapid growth
Five years ago, almost no one in Latin America bought an electric car. In Colombia, electric cars now account for 10 percent of new car sales. In Mexico, the share rose from 2 to 7 percent in a single year.
🛩️ The world's largest electric hybrid aircraft has flown for the first time – the electricity cost five dollars
Heart Aerospace has flown the X1 demonstrator, the largest battery-electric aircraft ever and as large as a regional airliner. The electricity for the flight cost about $5. The X1 is the forerunner of the 30-seat ES-30.
📊 Payroll data from millions of Americans: no rise in unemployment due to AI
Since generative AI reached widespread use, many have warned that the technology would wipe out jobs on a large scale. Researchers at Stanford have analyzed payroll records for millions of Americans. Employment has grown by about 6% since late 2022, including in the occupations most exposed to AI.
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