Martin Soler

@EmilioSansolini The bus parked.

What happened to Italian football?

@OFalafel You mean is it was 22 against 10? 😳

To be fair it was a bit unfair that Italy had to play Bosnia AND Herzegovina.

In travel tech what is hard to get is API access. Enough of them to real stable growth.

@SuGaR_Babbyyy 12:58

No cheating Do you know the answer?

@thesayannayak They can secretly see the future.

Interviewer: Google Maps knows there's a traffic jam 10 km ahead. There are no cameras on that road. How?

@StateDept Glad we’re seeing some more truth here.

SECRETARY RUBIO: NATO wasn’t just about defending Europe, but allowing us to have military bases in Europe for our national security. If we’ve reached a point where the NATO alliance means that we can’t use those bases to defend our interests, then it’s a one-way street.

@r0ck3t23 He also argued that the metaverse was the next big thing.

Mark Zuckerberg just argued that AI will force companies to hire more people. Not fewer. Three and a half billion people use Meta every day. Not one of them has a phone number to call. Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s clearly just going to automate jobs and like all these jobs are going to go away… that has not really been how the history of technology has worked.” The entire media cycle runs the same story. AI replaces workers. Industries hollow out. The human becomes unnecessary. History has never once cooperated. Voice support for 3.5 billion daily users costs between ten and twenty billion dollars a year. The math made it untouchable. So Meta never built it. AI changed the math. Zuckerberg: “Let’s say the AI can handle 90 percent of that… you’ve gotten the cost of providing that service down to one 10th.” A service that could not exist becomes standard. Overnight. The moment it goes live, the edge cases arrive. The escalations. The problems no model can close alone. Every one needs a human on the other end. Zuckerberg: “I actually think we’re probably going to go hire more customer support people.” The AI did not kill the jobs. It unlocked a service so vast the company now needs people it never would have hired. When execution costs crater, companies do not pocket the savings. They go after problems they could never afford to touch. New markets. New products. New services that were economically impossible twelve months ago. Every one creates roles that did not exist before the machine arrived. The people terrified of automation are tracking the wrong number. They count the jobs that disappear. They have no framework for the ones that haven’t been invented yet.

@sflorimm We have baguette 🥖

USA has ChatGPT USA has Grok USA has Claude USA has Gemini USA has Llama USA has Copilot China has DeepSeek China has Qwen China has Ernie China has GLM China has Kimi China has MiniMax Europe has?

Yes another GPT article pattern. After every big paragraph of text there's a one-line paragraph. Before the next big paragraph. Whoa - how is it educated to do this? Frustrating.

Tesla car delivery tip: They round up the delivery date to the end of the next quarter. My date was for 2nd April. So they called "ETA some time in q2" because "you missed q1". seriously? When getting the numbers becomes more important than the customers. cc @Tesla

@allenanalysis I find it fascinating that some people believe American bases in other countries are for their protection.

Marco Rubio: “If Europe won’t allow us to use the bases we man and fund for their defense when we need them — we ought to close them down and remove our troops from Europe.” Europe’s response to being threatened: Spain: airspace closed. Italy: Sigonella denied. France: airspace closed. Switzerland: airspace closed. Poland: no missile batteries. UK: not our war. Canada: never. Germany: no. Japan: officially no. Australia: no. Rubio is threatening to pull troops from Europe. Europe already pulled the welcome mat.

In video games some form of laws of physics exist. In Marvel movies there are absolutely none. One minute they struggle to jump from a car. The next they’re carrying a building.

@Martyupnorth Scalability matters.

For decades we had phone books. Everyone's address was public knowledge. No one worried about psychos knowing where we lived.

I don't know why I love Bauhaus style. There isn't a lot to love. But somehow I just like it. Is this just a phase?

@freakkydd @MichaelAArouet Somehow correlation seems about right. Not sure it was his policy or what he inherited. But timing seems about right.

@MichaelAArouet France was still a great and enviable country into the 90s, it all went down the hill post Chirac

France was a really great country. It all ended though, when the far-left Mitterrand was elected president. The only thing really growing in France since then has been debt/GDP: from 22% when Mitterrand was elected to 116% today. Don’t be like modern-day France.

@MichaelAArouet True but isn't that the case for most of the western countries? We can blame Mitterand for a lot, but not sure all of that was him. :-)

Would you prefer to be welcomed by a kiosk or a human? Is a bit of a trick question. What about: Would you prefer to wait 1 minute for self-check-in? or wait 15 minutes for human check-in?

@fromedome PS: That American social pressure will also likely be affecting survey answers.

@fromedome Yes. I noticed that in the U.S. the social pressure against smoking in the U.S. is quite high. Less so in Europe. Which is funny because usually US is all about being free to do what you want. Except smoking.

Philip Morris cigarette sales are down in the Americas, but up in Europe, Asia, MEA. "Smoke-free" has been growing everywhere. Cigarette pack sales were down 8% in the US last year, per Circana. (Down 10% in California, 7% in NY.)

@europabridge1 On pricing yes. On operations - it will take a long time. Hotels are physical places.

@martinsoler The larger and more globalized brands become, the more automated?

I wrote a thing about hotel revenue management systems on that other platform. Just for fun.

@europabridge1 Personally I think AI will really replace all the Excel type “software”. All these systems that are not real software but critical for businesses. On hotel revenue mgmt I think it will probably just get automated.

@martinsoler Can we ... use AI to fix this exercise in repetitive system dysfunction? Was trying to imagine what your solution would be, Martin.