runeks

I still wonder why some of our key universities in the US aren't building Open Weight Models.

I'm guessing the $100m price tag plays a role. Plus the fact that it will be outdated next quarter.

https://archive.ph/2026.07.09-085648/https://www.economist.c...

I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs.

Interesting. Good enough to make up for training costs?

Also, where can I read more about this?

Good guess. The actual mechanism [...]

Why couldn't both these factors contribute to the result of the study?

enforce right to repair

How much would this change Niño surface temperatures, you reckon?

It's a proof of concept that it's possible to etch a neural net into a chip and get massive performance (and efficiency) boost

If performance per watt is 100x better than GPUs (as GP link claims) then I don't think it's a hard sell at all. That's actually a cost reduction that matters.

But if the growth requires capital (an investment, a loan, or the wealth the founders already have), the situation becomes less clear. How much of the success can be attributed to the contributions of the founders and how much is based on arbitrary choices made by wealthy people?

I don't get it. If I need to raise money to fund my startup, how are my profits more "earned" if I crowd fund $10m by finding 10,000 wage earners who will lend me $1000 each than if I borrow $10m from a billionaire?

So he has set up a system that extracts value from others.

That's a very negative way to describe buying a share in a company.

[...] but their coils get saturated at higher RPMs meaning they lose efficiency at highway speeds (which actually affect the range number people car about).

This seems like a big disadvantage. Highway is exactly where EVs fare worst compared to ICE cars.

I wonder if this could be solved by introducing a gearbox?

I know the new Mercedes CLA (EV) has two gears, the second gear being optimized for highway speeds. But I don't know whether it's related to this.

Consciousness doesn’t require thinking, it only requires perception.

Could we imagine a human being that is conscious but has no sensory input nor any occurring thoughts but is still conscious?

We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self.

That is consciousness.

So thinking is consciousness?

Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious? If so, consciousness cannot be defined as the thing(s) we're conscious of.

https://archive.ph/2026.05.29-114338/https://www.economist.c...

Writing software for which a full spec is available before you begin — in this case the rules of chess — was an easy problem even before AI.

Efficiency is about using minimum cpu cycles or minimum memory or minimum network round trip or more generically using minimum/optimum resources to get something done.

No profitable business wants to pay you for writing code that uses "a minimum" of a resource. It wants to pay you to find the right balance between resource usage, time-to-market, operating cost, code complexity and probably several other factors.

No the assumption is just lower price increases demand

That said the hardware is great, I run Asahi on another M1 MBP and Linux makes it the best laptop I've ever used.

I'm considering going this way on my M1 MBP. Is there anything you miss wrt. hardware compatibility?

I wanted to see how well Akademikerpension has done wrt. returns. This graph shows average yearly return from the financial crisis 2009 until 2021 and they are actually the best performing among other Danish pension funds [1].

[1] https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions...

Why does everyone seem to assume that there is a finite amount of work available?

If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this increase in productivity has caused an increase in the number of available jobs.

Our economy would have collapsed a long time ago if an increase in productivity resulted in a decrease in employment.

[...] instead encourage a wealth tax on hoarding that directly transfers charity from the wealthiest to the poorest (tithe or zakaat).

Hoarding of what?

Commodities? Should I be taxed for hoarding firewood before winter?

Money? Only poor people hoard money. The wealthy invest it.

The total amount due on the bill is $83.89. Please verify this amount with your utility provider or by using Text Detection before making a payment.

1. Use AI to determine how much a bill is for

2. Call up the people who billed you and ask them how much they billed you

3. Pay billed amount

No-one is sitting around going "you know what I need? More software"

I disagree. Every company goes "I need more software — iff its TCO is less than the savings it produces". So if the cost of producing a piece of software, which can save a company $1m per month, now costs $500k per month to develop instead of $5m per month, then demand for that piece of software will absolute go from zero to greater-than-zero.

What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), but still the total usage of that resource increases.

Why is this stated as a paradox? One simple cause is the given task being performed more than it was before because it is now cheaper (since it uses fewer resources).

It was bad legislation because it didn't achieve anything except make visiting websites more annoying.

I don't care what the politicians intended. The outcome is no improvement in privacy but more annoying banners.

https://archive.ph/2026.04.18-122152/https://www.economist.c...

This article is subscription-only for me. Anyone have a link?

It’s market cap today is $1.4T. That’s a gigantic reward for any state actor or entity with the resources and budget to break it.

The market cap of a cryptocurrency — or any commodity, really — is not its market value. If you have all bitcoins in existence and try to sell them you will crash the price to zero. The slope of that price graph — from the current market price to zero — determines how much you make in total. Most cryptocurrency exchanges have public order books, so you can see how much (and at what price per coin) you can actually sell into the market before you eat up all the bids. Last time I checked it was closer to $10bn than $1trn.

I think most people are just going to fly out of the nearest/most convenient airport and hope for the best.

There are many cities in the world with more than a single airport at relatively close distance. Just to name the few I've been to recently: New York City, London, Paris, Dubai.

I think it's useful information if it turns out one of these choices has significantly higher cancellation rates.

https://archive.ph/2026.03.18-021106/https://www.economist.c...

Wouldn't the compiler take care of producing the correct machine code?