mullen

> Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.

Personally, I came to this conclusion early this year. To acquire the data that AI Companies are using to train their models is low cost and once they have it, they can refine and store it. Creating the LLM takes a bit of money but it is not a serious blocker. Clearly, the Chinese companies can make AI so they will drive down costs. There is a need for good AI (Not just Great AI) and it is not cost prohibitive to make good AI (The same with specialized AI).

My prediction is that AI will spilt into two categories, Great AI (High Cost) and Good Enough AI (Low Cost). Which for the long run of AI and companies that use AI, this is good.

I can't believe there is even a discussion. The better you look, the better people treat you and being better looking also means being of a normal weight.

I literally have a weight number where if I am north of the number, I can tell people treat me differently and not as nice and if I am south of that number, people treat me a lot nicer (gasp, Women even hit on me). People are fooling themselves if they think their weight does not matter to the world around them.

Non-sense. In China, you obey. There is no way to challenge the orders in courts or even with your local party official. It's written into law and companies that disobey are shutdown or taken over by a party loyalist and the management is disappeared.

> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere

You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.

This is what I did after struggling to get llama.cpp working at a decent speed on my M1 Macbook. The secret is to very specific with your needs and targeted in what you are using llama.cpp for. Mine setup is just about strictly for qwen3-coder and now, I get a fairly decent speed out of it. I also installed Cursor to check Claude and it all worked out well.

The plumbing systems in commercial buildings are not big enough to handle residents usage. Residents use more water and the outbound sewage systems need to be larger.

An RV is just a nicer tent, it is not a house. If people won't transition to housing, then they need to leave SF. If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.

No way. You need an immigration system that has a "try before you buy" aspect to it. Not all educated immigrates are going to like the US and are not going to be a fit for the US. It's not just about keeping out bad education, it's making sure that those who think they want to want to immigrate to the US want to be part of the US.

No, they have to pay it. Everyone has to pay payroll tax on all employees.

It's too expensive and too crowded. DMZ is such a better deal.

Replacing a Tesla with a Chinese EV is like replacing a person who wants to commit genocide with a person who actually commits genocide.

Chinese EV's do not have any moral superiority over Tesla and I would not be caught driving either.

> Is a big problem for passenger trains in the US, freight has priority.

This simply not true. Federal Laws says that Passenger trains have priority but the law is never enforced. Freight traffic is suppose to take by-passes to let passenger traffic through and freight traffic is never suppose to block the line. However, again, the laws and rail rules are never enforced. Think about it, why would cargo have a higher priority than human traffic? Is cargo getting there an few hours later or earlier going to impact anything? With humans, it will totally impact their schedule and how often trains are used.

If the Department of Transportation wanted people to start taking trains again, they would come down hard of rail companies that slow down passenger traffic.

> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.

Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.

A lot of these medicines that require patients to inject themselves come in a self administrating auto-injector. There are really simple to use, I mean literally anyone can inject themselves, then throw the one-use auto-injector out.

Two things I took away from visiting Pompeii that I did not know from reading books and watch History Channel videos. Like you said, Pompeii was pretty large and it was covered with a lot of pumice and ash. There are a couple of places where the pumice and ash is 30 - 40 feet above the houses and all of that fell within a couple of days.