a_humean

Yet they passed the amendment, so... that is a decision not a discussion.

It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.

So two ways to look at tax:

1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)

2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1

I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.

This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.

I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.

Seems like a non-story. It sounds like a ban on people using personal accounts with unsanctioned services and sending government data to them. Even most small companies might have restrictions like this.

This is just an IT org asserting control over how data moves in and out of the business/government. Its seems pretty reasonable that a company/government would want a contract in place with any provider they are sending data to. Oblivious that is going to have costs in agility and picking the best tools, but this is reasonable information security behaviour.

I'm surprised they aren't taking the extra step and moving to restrict data sharing to only EU based firms given... geopolitics.

When you wrote that there were no other comments in the entire thread? Bot?

Probably going to take a 1-3 days for support to land in llama.cpp and vllm.

Waiting for llama.cpp support to land, but this might be a big deal for Strix Halo users.

6B active params helps around the memory bandwidth constraints, but a 128GB box can probably run the Q3/Q4 quants fairly easily with a decent context size. This might actually be better for strix users than 27B, which was already very good.

The biggest practical obstacle, other than getting elected, is the dress code for the house of commons which disallows military uniform, disallows face covering (while voting), and requires smart business attire. You could argue that he might be in violation of all three!

The name isn't really that much of a problem.

Spain is currently the fastest growing state in Europe, is the largest source new job creation in Europe, and is currently benefiting from its large scale investments in renewables and grid infrastructure sheltering it from the worst of the Iran war.

If I recall correctly, Russia required that Visa/Mastercard had offices and payment services located in Russia and they simply nationalised those branches and everyone's cards continued to work within Russia with minimal disruption to internal trade.

Unfortunately yes, and its the US that has choosen to do it. Its up to everyone else to recongise that it has already happened, or suffer the consequences if they choose not to respond.

If your business has everything on GCP/AWS/Azure (which is very common) and the Americans choose to weaponinse US tech against your country or business, then unless you have non-US backups you are probably dead and all of your employees unemployed. If you are a state, all of your services and functions are probably dead and you have to rebuild from nothing. That is certainly true of my company and there are some mutterings starting where I am internally about worst case disaster recovery if suddenly one of these suppliers just disapeared.

In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.

The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.

Well yes.

The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.

Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.

On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.

The US Military does use GPS, but ordinary civilians don't have access to high accuracy data. Commercial vendors can license for higher accuracy, but its a hybrid civilian/military system with higher quality data for military use cases.

Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.

Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.