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"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"

I think the question we need to be asking, in order to measure success, is whether export controls on China have encouraged China to invest more money than they would have otherwise invested in these technologies and whether those investments will materially change China's long term trajectory in relation to the United States.

I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation.

And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack.

I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling.

The government is faaaaaaaaaaaar too invested in Azure and AWS for Microsoft or Amazon to give even half a shit. The DOD has no where else to go and the companies know it. They'll sit on their hands until the legal maneuvers play out, which will take longer than this administration will be in office.

Well, you see, that's completely different. Nvidia agreed to give them money!

At least we'll have hyper sexualized child soldiers to look forward to in our upcoming xAI powered civil war!

I'm sure Alex Karp and Palantir are already charging into the breach, promising to deliver things they don't have the capability to deliver! (Otherwise known as just another day for them)

The point I'm trying to make is that this thing we're calling a 'VUI' is shit. There's no reason speech has to be this boring one dimensional thing. It's like the people that designed these things have never had a real conversation in their lives. When you're speaking with another person, or multiple other people, you're constantly exchanging cues that allow the other person to understand and re-calibrate what they're saying. These are verbal sounds, non-verbal sounds and physical movements. A crinkle of the forehead, a shake of the head, an uttered 'aaaaah' or a quiet verbal affirmation in support of what's being stated. It's not a single uni-directional stream of information, it's a multi-directional stream coming from multiple multi-modal sources at the same time.

None of these basic realities are accounted for in current technology. Instead we have these dumb robot voices reading us results from a preprocessed script that it thinks answers our question. No wonder the monkey part of our brain immediately picks up on the fact that this whole facade isn't just a lie, but an excruciating lie. It's excruciating because it's immediately obvious that there's nothing else 'there' to interact with. Even when speaking to another person over the phone, there's a huge amount of nuance you can pick up on. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they frazzled? Are they in a rush? Are they relaxed? And you automatically calibrate your responses and what you say in the conversation based on all of these perfectly obvious things. Normal humans automatically calibrate what they say, how they sound, what they suggest based on these cues. It works really well!

There's no reason voice stuff has to suck. It has worked pretty great for humans for thousands of years. We're evolutionarily tuned to it. It's just that all the technology we've created around it totally sucks and people are delusional if they think it's anywhere near prime time.

Not sure I agree on the core problems.

The core problem is that these systems are just so incorrect in fundamental ways that they're effectively useless.

Imagine a buddy of yours tells you about an event he's pretty sure you'll be interested in. Why does he tell you about this event? Well, he knows your interests, what kind of things you enjoy, when you're free, who you might want to go to the event with, how much money you're willing to spend, how far you're willing to travel, when you like to go out... So when you're on the receiving end of such a suggestion it often feels great! It's like you've struck gold.

Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events. It doesn't feel magical. It doesn't even feel like it knows what the hell you enjoy doing half the time. Forget about knowing about your free time, budgetary restrictions, family restrictions, who you'd be able to go with; None of that stuff is even sort of in the picture. And it's all delivered to you in a voice that sounds like it would be as happy to kill you as give you advice. There's no lively back and forth on the logistics of the event. No feeling of discovery as you two talk it out, honing the plan that brings it from an abstract concept to reality.

It's just dead and lifeless and shitty.

My best guess is they turn off the commercial operations that are costing them the most money (And that they didn't want Sam to push in the first place) and pump up the prices on the ones they can actually earn a profit from and then try to coast for awhile.

Or they'll do something hilarious like sell VCs on a world wide cryptocurrency that is uniquely joined to an individual by their biometrics and somehow involves AI. I'm sure they could wrangle a few hundred million out of the VC class with a braindead scheme like that.

You need to remember that most people on this site subscribe to the ideology that growth is the only thing that matters. They're Michael Douglas 'greed is good' type of people wrapped up in a spiffy technological veneer.

Any decision that doesn't make the 'line go up' is considered a dumb decision. So to most people on this site, kicking Sam out of the company was a bad idea because it meant the company's future earning potential had cratered.

I was able to visit this place last year, it was great! I spent all day wandering around and playing. I would have stayed even longer if they weren't closing, hah.

I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale. I don't often run across software that feels so right and when I do it's a great surprise. Every time I see a new feature they're releasing I'm always impressed at how adept they are at targeting modern pain points.

I grew up and got into software by messing around with self-hosting web servers and game communities as a kid. As time has gone on I felt like we had lost some of the magic of easily sharing your machines and your creations with other people. We have a ton of services where you can now deploy and share your creations, but we've moved further and further away from direct sharing. There were plenty of good reasons why this has happened, with security being the most obvious factor, but it still makes me a little sad. I want my things to be able to talk to each other no matter where I am. I want to be able to invite my friends in and have access to my stuff.

Tailscale makes all of that quick, easy and awesome. I think it's really neat, makes me feel like a little nerdy kid again.

The examples in the article seem to be making the point that even when the AI cites the correct context (ie: financial reports) it still produces completely hallucinated information.

So even if you were to white-list the context to train the engine against, it would still make up information because that's just what LLMs do. They make stuff up to fit certain patterns.

They look different because they ARE different. One was shot on film and the other was shot digital and then they used Filmbox to apply the film effect. It's two different pieces of source material, which means they had to act/film the scene twice.

That's only for a particular variant.

Great analogy, and it's what I think about every time I hop on Netflix.

The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts."

Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform.

The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site.

As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.

I guess the question is: What's the alternative to defining models? Just passing around DB cursors directly or maybe pulling the results out of a cursor and storing them in a dynamic collection?

I don't disagree that models are pointless if they're not doing anything other than aping the DB. Why waste your time creating another layer of required translation if it doesn't buy you anything?

With that said, I do think there are some benefits to using statically typed models in languages line C# with larger codebases. It seems like it makes it easier to refactor the application code.

The rules nurses have to deal with around things as asinine as taking PTO are AMAZING. They’re required to put in PTO requests months in advance and the hospital can and will say “Sorry, denied. We don’t have enough people…” As they are intentionally creating skeleton crews of nurses to wring every ounce of profit out of the business.

My mom was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my sister is a nurse and my best friend’s mom is a nurse. I really can’t believe anyone continues to be a nurse given the insane working conditions these folks have to put up with. Twelve hour shifts, overflowing with patients, watching newcomers earn more than seasoned veterans… When I compare it to my laid back software engineering job it’s like I’m living in an entirely different universe. The hospital industry is a hugely demoralizing place.

Could they house their data in a separate company that was founded in Ireland and is not an Alphabet subsidiary to get around this?

This might be my favorite story of the year. So many weird twists and turns. It has to be some kind of money laundering operation, right?

Powershell is so weird to me. It never does what I expect it to do but it’s also full of powerful features. When looked at as a programming/scripting language it feels totally insane and disjointed. I just jump into C# or Python instead of dealing with it, because it just doesn’t make any sense to me as an engineer. But whenever I’m looking up how to manipulate some obscure bit of Windows, a cut and paste powershell one liner always makes an appearance.

Does anyone know if there’s any sort of reflective documentation or anything in powershell? Like, is there a way to ask it what arguments exist for a command?

Good points! I'm certainly in favor of time-shifting demand to meet supply to maximally utilize renewables. Let's grab as much of this low hanging as we can.

I just thought the framework of his argument was rather odd. Better water heaters are framed as being a way to avoid constructing power storage systems that convert variable renewable energy into steady baseline power, which feels like an argument that doesn't hold up. We'll still need some way to supply steady power to run AC units, heaters, and other big power draws all night, no matter what type of water heaters we use!

Am I the only one that find this article incredibly confusing?

It starts off talking about wanting to move energy production to renewable sources. Great, I'm with you so far. A major issue with renewable energy (solar and wind) is that they're variable, not constant. This results in uneven power. The wind doesn't blow, it's cloudy or it's night time. So we need a way to convert this variable renewable energy into constant energy that's accessible around the clock. An obvious solution to the problem is to convert the renewable energy into stored potential energy. This is what pumped hydroelectric dams are all about. Use the variable energy to pump a bunch of water up behind a dam, then release it when you need a more constant supply of energy.

Great, so we've got that much figured out. The world needs a way to convert renewable energy into constant energy.

And the solution to this problem is... the distribution of more efficient water heaters.

Wat

How do more efficient water heaters in any way, shape or form help solve the renewable variable rate energy to constant energy problem? I feel like I must be missing something obvious. Are we able to somehow store energy in heat-pump based water heaters and then extract that energy to run other items in our homes? When you store energy in a heat-pump based water heater does it not need to run at night when renewable energy sources are lowest?

Can anyone explain to me what the heck this article is talking about?

I feel like I'm missing the larger picture, but I don't see how these two concepts (energy storage and appliance efficiency) are related.

To play devil's advocate, how much money did this breach actually cost the pipeline? A few million bucks?

That's probably a rounding error on their quarterly report. Heck, it might have cost them more money to hire more people to provide adequate security to prevent such attacks than to just suck it up and get attacked.

It may actually be economically favorable to stay insecure!

If that were the case, the market would actually encourage CEO's to spend less money on security, not more.

How do you get countries to cooperate that have no incentive to cooperate?

Cyber warfare, whether ransomware or espionage, is largely asymmetric. Why would these other countries want to play ball when they have everything to gain?

The answer tends to be that you make them cooperate by attaching additional costs to the actions, in order to make them less attractive. These costs come in two major forms, which we might want to categorize as passive and aggressive.

Passive costs might include: - Sanctions - Investigation/Arrests

Aggressive costs might include: - Offensive hacks - Military response

The issue here seems to be that the passive responses aren't likely to be strong enough to dissuade the other actors, while the aggressive responses are too costly. Aggressive counter hacks might just normalize cyber hacking and espionage, and the US is on the wrong side of that asymmetric gamble. Normalizing the behavior would be likely to make it worse than it already is!

Military responses go too far. You can't reaaalllly militarily respond to another nuclear power. Not directly. The potential outcomes there are almost uniformly bad. If you want to play the longer game maybe you do some poking and prodding by supporting third party combatants (IE: Soviet support of Vietnam against the Americans) or political opponents. But there aren't really that many great options on that front today for Russia or China.

So that leaves trying to increase the cost of the passive responses. This is kind of troublesome with China, since they'll just throw identical costs right back at you. It's a bit more possible with Russia, but Europe's entanglement with their power sector screws everything up. And it's not like we're lacking on Russian sanctions as it is.

You can try to play a strong defense, but that's kind of like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound at this point.

Yadda yadda yaddad, I don't know what to do but I think it's an interesting problem!

Edit: Maybe I shouldn't say European entanglement with Russian power sector. I suppose it's more appropriate to say gas sector?

Phoenix gets its water from the Salt and Verde Rivers, the Colorado River and ground water (wells). SRP (Salt River Project) manages the Salt and Verde Rivers and CAP (Central Arizona Project) manages the water from the Colorado.

Some interesting data can be drilled into here in the Power BI report: https://new.azwater.gov/ama/ama-data

You don't just 'purchase machines' to magically create cutting edge semiconductors. If this were the case, why in the world would ASML be selling them to TSMC?

ASML's Q1 Net Revenue: $2.79 billion TSMC Q1 Net Revenue: $12.9 billion

Don't you think ASML would just pocket the world's semiconductor income if this were the case?

The machines are only a part of the equation. How you use the machines and the processes you develop to create cutting edge semiconductors are arguably the more important part of the equation. As someone else mentioned in the comments, think of it as the difference between being a chisel manufacturer and a master sculptor. The tools are only a part of the equation. The methods and processes developed by TSMC are valuable pieces of technology. This value has an additional moat surrounding it due to the astronomical capital investment required to use it.

Even if you knew of all of TSMC's process information, you wouldn't be able to use it without tens of billions of dollars in investments, many years of construction, an adequately skilled workforce and right customer contacts.

Not to mention it takes years to build these fabs. Do they think the automotive industry will use the same chips forever?

Thanks!

So what are the benefits to using Tauri over Electron? Are app sizes smaller? Is the memory footprint smaller?