SR2Z

IMO Europe is facing most of the consequences and getting almost none of the benefits.

American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.

Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.

Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.

The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.

Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.

Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.

Some CEOs are engineering leaders. Some are not. The difference IMO will matter more and more as LLMs infiltrate deeper.

The "broken windows" approach would imply that the status quo got worse without good reason, and that bringing it back on track is accountable for growth.

Healthcare isn't like that. Human beings are born dying, it's not like the healthcare expenses could be avoided. It's not clean-up fees, it's genuinely productive economic activity by keeping people healthier for longer.

It's a civil issue because the criminal case doesn't exist; training an LLM is fair use.

You can brew alcohol with atmospheric yeast, yeast on the surface of fruits, etc., and you could just as easily hide drugs in toothpaste.

That might be their explanation but IMO it doesn't make sense.

That whole town (Bentonville) is essentially run by Walmart.

Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.

In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.

How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.

Western countries with freedom of speech have ALWAYS been open for information warfare.

Governments and special interests have always spread propaganda, and they've frequently made criticizing it illegal.

Most people still end up believing some version of the truth. The ones that don't would likely never have believed the truth.

Nations should not coddle their citizens. People should be trusted to hear information and choose to believe it or not - that's a key aspect of our shared humanity and a fundamental human right.

We need hard math for statistical construction of probable cause.

Probably a public model, which is independently vetted against actual detentions, needs to show a 99% probability of an actual crime being committed for police to make a stop like this.

The opportunities for abuse are simply too high.

Having a frontier model is worth something beyond just inference costs, I'm sure. It seems likely that the labs will maintain at least a small lead.

I think that prisoners should be fed normal food which makes them feel comfortable. I'm not saying that it needs to be luxury meals, but there isn't a good reason for prisons in a free country to feed their prisoners bad food.

It's Vegemite, FFS. Not caviar.

DeepSeek announced that each GPU they have makes about $38 an hour in revenue during off-peak times. That's $331k a year, and DeepSeek is cheap.

I think that it's not only possible but likely that the frontier labs are profitable on an ongoing basis, and it's mainly the research and capex which make them look like impending disasters.

Realistically, OpenAI and Anthropic are each probably worth ~$1T each. Anthropic can already easily justify that based on revenue alone. OpenAI isn't far off. Consider how quickly these companies are growing and the fact that they maintain a small but significant edge, I don't think the bubble is going to pop. Just deflate a little.

Nobody is a hero for lighting a historical building on fire, even if its old purpose was to help Nazis relax.

Previous generations of the 737 are among the safest jetliners ever built. The MAX will eventually end up there, too - keep in mind that aviation disasters are increasingly less common as time goes on.

This issue (wearing on the trim jackscrew and hinges) is not one that you would expect to see for many, many years. It's the kind of issue that you see on jets approaching 30 years old, and it's really hard to predict how and when this kind of thing happens.