mrngld

I have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission.

To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.

If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.

Agree about YouTube and Twitch. Whatever personality you want, there's someone that fits it. You can pull up a recent stream or tune in and message them live if they're on. In some ways we're in the golden age of some of what the article was saying was lost, because pretty much anyone with a basic setup and a little bandwidth can start streaming and building an audience/brand. No need to get hired, no need to get a letter like in the story that says you might've been OK in a small town but you're not ready for the big leagues.

Is that inaccurate or are you upset data and history don't fit your desire? Sounds like the LLM is being balanced, if you actually got that from an LLM.

It's state-backed, or at least state-directed, scaling to capture market share, standard CCP playbook since the 80s.

Whether dumping is a loaded term of not is irrelevant; it's a specific term of art in economics and policy, it fits with the context of past national actions there, and fits what's currently happening here perfectly. They put money into these models, then give them away for nothing (below cost).

You're right. My elderly mom has fallen victim, or nearly fallen victim at least, to tons of ads or sponsored spots served within Facebook, which are a bit harder to block. They can also outrun DNS-based block lists, probably because LLM's are allowing crooks to move faster and be more prolific.

I actually started making an LLM-powered browser extension that I thought could read the page and determine if it passed a smell test and block it if it didn't meet some strict criteria I'd set for her, but I didn't get very far before I became too concerned about prompt injection. Wanted to do the same on her e-mail, because gmail's built in filters sometimes let her down, but same concern. Prompt injection there may be trivial as well.

Full time journalists do in fact enjoy eating like the rest of us.

Based on alleged leaks in the NYT, they actually may have had a very similar tactic with Ahmadinejad. They just couldn't engineer the situation on the ground the way they thought. They got duped, to some extent, by Mossad.

But it's not as reductive and simple as your comment suggests. And there's probably still more to the story that the NYT hasn't yet (nor will for a while) leak.

If any company, especially one with a global presence, ever even strongly suspected that had happened and a competitor was using something they developed you'd of seen it play out in the courtroom. Hopefully we can all agree that if America is good at anything, it's letting its lawyers be litigious.

The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.

Do we? From a EU-hosted location? Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.

It's certainly more complex than all but a handful of people know.

For example, part of the dynamic was, according to the NYT (though they may have been fed bad intel), that Ahmadinejad was apparently working with Mossad and could've been a partner for a new leadership team in Iran. Who saw that coming?

It also brings to mind Kennedy. He campaigned hard on, in part, the "missile gap" with the USSR. Gets into office, gets read into the real intel, realizes the "missile gap" was essentially a MIC psyop of strategic 'leaks' to the media and that the US was in fact far ahead of the USSR in strategic arms. Kennedy was furious -- but due to it all being classified, could say nothing in public. But it did start a pattern of mistrust that lasted his presidency between him and the MIC. That all didn't come to light later.

Later, like the Ukraine/Starlink thing. The media jumped all over Elon for allegedly holding back Ukraine and shutting off their terminals close to the front lines. More recently it turns out that was the US government, they were afraid Ukraines rapid progress might tempt Russia to deploy tactical nukes. Elon was innocent.

Theres layers upon layers of things we don't see and won't know for decades after the fact. And as Hillary showed with her email server, digital records are more ephemeral these days, so there will be a lot of things we simply never know.

Until it's no longer officially stated strategy, and something else benefits the CCP. See rare earths policy. Changes constantly, to whatever maximizes their leverage.

The aspect that you can count on is that China sees AI as a long term strategic necessity, so they will support domestic players for an extremely long time. But unless you're a Chinese lab that shouldn't necessarily be a comfort to anyone else.

I've always been impressed by the controllers in centers and TRACONs. They can have multiple frequencies they're monitoring in each ear, and no matter how polite we try to be we (pilots) have no way of knowing if we're stepping on a call on another frequency. They just have to deal with it. Not to mention communication amongst themselves to some extent as they hand people off, though I haven't been in a tower for a very long time, that may be automated/digital now.

And it's not like pilot/controller conversations are about weekend BBQ plans. It's as information dense as possible without sounding like a METAR report.

So the US had the USPS stop subsidizing Chinese postage rates... and they innovated to leverage subsidies elsewhere.

Just stop subsidizing international shipping period seems the smart play. If they want to undercut their own high-end domestic competition and destroy foreign competitors then they can at least pay fair rates.

I've yet to come across truly reliable Thunderbolt 3 and above stations. Seems like every brand has, like this 7 port wonder in the article, lots of 5 star reviews. When you dig deep into the weeds of the reviews, Reddit, user forums, etc., you find the undercurrent of people who actually bother to check the stats reported by their OS, or have disconnect issues, etc, etc.

I'm somewhat sympathetic because from what I can tell engineering something capable of pushing that much data requires some exquisite engineering for every part of the process (chips on your computer, your computers port, your cables, the dock, the cable into the end device and the device and its port and chip). But still, they present these products like they're bulletproof.

It's possible I've had bad luck. A Caldigit TS3 had issues with dropping external drives and becoming unresponsive, then died after 2 years. Caldigit TS4 bricked itself after about a year. Got an OWC Thunderbolt Dock now and it just decides sometimes to stop communicating to anything new plugged in until you power cycle it.

We (the people) have pushed body cams on almost all law enforcement at this point, which had a noble enough motivation behind it -- but we also have pushed for and have various public disclosure laws (also well intended!) that mean those body cams are torrents of data entering the public sphere if anyone simply asks for it.

Now in the era of AI, this means anyone in the vicinity of an officer has a voice sample in the public domain, plus potentially their image.

Complex issue. I like body cams, I like freedom of information laws, but don't love this particular outcome.

The people who own the content you decide to visit opted into it though, and they're the ones paying for it, right? No one accidentally sets up a CDN. I'm struggling to imagine workable economics where we have the rich services that we have today on the web but individual users get to dictate to sites they visit what their tech stack needs to be in real time. Imagine visiting your banks website and they're using Cloudflare, and you decide nope, I want the data delivered by CloudFront. Then the next person 20ms after you decides they don't like either of those, they really want the world to burn so they demand Azure.

That at least would bring back local bank branches at least. And movie rentals by mail.

If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform.

Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great.

That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.

Cost per task, GLM (due to its poor token efficiency) still lags. GPT 5.5 on low seems to wipe the floor with it. All the Chinese models still like to use tons of tokens. It shows up in time per task as well.

But, and this is the problem corporations face, that's the truth TODAY. They need to make decisions for the next quarter at minimum, for a year ideally. I don't envy IT leadership in this environment, there's no right answer along the lines of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Any choice today may potentially make you look silly in 90 days.

Now that enterprise customers are pay-as-you-go with tokens I suspect we'll see renewed interest in OpenAI and their focus on token efficiency. At least I hope so if the alternative is abandoning the tools entirely.

That site is useless though because thinking tokens (and caching) and the efficiency thereof aren't accounted for. GLM5.2 is promoted by every 50 Cent Party the PLA can muster on the internet but it falls short because of its extremely verbose thinking. Anthropic models have the same problem but starting from a much higher base of real intelligence.

Which is exactly why every credible comparison now represents cost associated with completing a task, not arbitrary input and output token costs.

I'm sure it also takes more compute effort to be at the frontier, rather than being able to distill and poach ideas from the frontier. No mistake that it's the same handful of labs taking turns at or near the frontier.

Right? For all the money paid by modern students is it unreasonable to expect some expert human interaction? The cost explosion has been centered outside the classroom, elsewhere in the org, so can't play that card.

Too overbearing though and you get... Mistral? A continent that hasn't been on the leading edge of anything (other that expansion of the regulatory state) for decades, and Europe feels it in their employment numbers.

Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.

Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)

So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.

Yeah, that's what we need, frontier intelligence models open in the wild that, if a jailbreak is reliably established, there's no possibility for anyone to ever patch at the API layer. Because there is no API layer.

Is it supposed to be? I think the point with some of these Macs is you get the capability in something the size of a heatsink from Intel's Netburst architecture era, or a Macbook light enough to stick in a backpack and take with you to lunch.

If you're talking about chaining together multiple GPUs you're talking about a different game -- I suspect, anyway. Seems like a high-spec Mac would be good for development and testing. Arrays of GPUs, better aimed at production use.

Based on DeepSWE, Opus 4.8 gets you more intelligent output at lower price (GLM's token inefficiency is really biting them). GPT5.5 even moreso. And I don't recall about Opus but GPT is much, much faster at getting you the answer (again, GLM's token inefficiency).

It's neat, I guess, that we can compare them against models released last year, but I care about my options today, and the pareto frontier is about as far away as it ever was.

Add on top of that the extra features OpenAI and Anthropic have in their apps and...

What's that got to do with the cost of a thing? Are tradesmen in Thailand entitled to Makita tools just because American plumbers can afford them? I'm struggling to understand the entitlement in some of the comments. And even though it doesn't matter I'd point out it's not like OpenAI or Anthropic are making enormous profits at the moment.

Eaaaaasy now, the Chinese labs aren't freedom fighters on behalf the common man. They're not non-profits, they're not neutral transnational organizations only dedicated to open source efforts.

They're Chinese companies offering open source models now as loss leaders to keep themselves in the game because they know virtually nobody, especially in the corporate world, would contract with them and give them access to their data. They might as well just send a Dropbox link of all their sensitive data directly to their Chinese competitors, same end effect.

They're also doing it as the digital equivalent of what they've done in other industrial sectors for decades. Undercut and flood the market and once you've killed or severely hindered your competition, then you have the market cornered. The moment they can afford to these open source releases will stop.

Then the world will be stuck, just the way the world is largely stuck on rare earths. Instead of being able to regulate the leading companies from DC and Brussels, they'll be stuck watching Beijing call the shots.

That world would likely always have guys like Mistral and Trinity, but it's an open question if they'll ever catch up to the frontier.

And then Beijing will enjoy access to the data (ask any multinational operating in China for more than 2 seconds how useful contracts and Chinas legal system is for protecting IP), and these companies will roll in the money, and the Chinese supply chain will grow up behind the labs.

So, let's not pretend they've got the moral high ground. No. That boot just isn't on your neck yet. They're playing the long game -- and they're good at it.

People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result.

We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.

There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.

Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.

They could (and might as well) give Windows away for free. It's not an operating system for them, it's a sales funnel.

But that sales funnel needs to not exceed a certain maximum level of annoyance to the people traveling down it, or they'll look askance at other options.

I mean, not even all the Copilot silliness has been able to lead to The Year of the Linux Desktop, but Windows 11 as a whole I suspect has been good for Mac and iPad sales. And those are people that now aren't getting nagged by their operating systems to use OneNote, OneDrive, Word, Copilot etc at every turn.