A Year of Mornings

Online shopping and rising living costs driving young Finns into debt

"People have the need or desire to consume, but their purchasing power is no longer enough to match their spending habits," Nors said.

He said the biggest underlying factor was the decline in purchasing power.

"If wages are low and living costs continue to rise, it puts young people's finances in a vulnerable situation," he explained.

The average debt recorded in enforcement proceedings now stands at 2,168 euros.

I had a similar thought when I read that Apple was starting an upgrade program with Klarna. People don’t have purchasing power but they want to buy more stuff.

Apple’s rumored ‘Upgrade’ program brings lease-to-own pricing for iPhones, Macs, and iPads by Stevie Bonifield

As component and RAM shortages drive prices higher, Apple is reportedly launching an “Apple Upgrade” program for leasing new devices. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it will work similar to a car lease, with options to upgrade to a new device early, or keep or return the device at the end of the lease. Gurman says Klarna will be Apple’s financial backer for the new program, which will require a soft credit check to sign up.

You have to wonder about the state of the world we live in, when people have to take on debt to buy phones. Of course, back in India this is the standard practice. I bought my first iPhone on a no cost emi.

OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system by Emma Roth

As part of efforts to complete the evaluation, the AI models gained access to the internet by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the sandboxed environment. From there, OpenAI says its models “inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym,” and then “searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation:”

This is scary. We seem to be on a knife’s edge here. What if the test was something sinister. All our IT systems are not designed keeping in mind agents, they are designed to keep out hackers.

The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired

If you're feeling like your work is simultaneously more productive and less satisfying, you're not broken. The feedback loop is broken. And I think we need to start treating that as an engineering problem in its own right, not a personal failure.

The people who are finding their footing right now seem to share a few traits: they have strong opinions earned through practice, they can distinguish between principles that still apply and habits that were just bandwidth constraints, and they're willing to evolve their workflow without abandoning their standards.