PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

The instruction to "eliminate political bias" is in fact an instruction to require political bias. No government AI will be allowed to think thoughts that Trump doesn't approve of!

It seems to me that, if you were developing something like this, you'd want to write the encryption and decryption code separately from the non-trivial key management code, so that you can unlock it easily if someone accidentally locks the wrong system. You only make the build that doesn't have an obvious key when you're really going to use it. For that matter, it's probably wise to do your demos with the version with the master key, so that potential affiliates can't attack a real target for the demo. Then you give the version that doesn't make it easy to unlock to paying affiliates who aren't SentinelOne. It's not like they'd need to redesign the whole system to generate a random key and not write it in plaintext anywhere.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Silicon wafers are the wrong thing to compare against. The CZT semiconductors are like photodiodes (for other radiation), not what they make the logic out of. It would make more sense to compare with InGaN (for blue LEDs), which plays a similarly specific role in common devices.

I'll be surprised if I find out EOs have any authority outside the executive branch of the federal government. Otherwise a presnit could just unilaterally ban abortion, change federal, state, and locals laws and tax rates, disband Congress...

So join ANTIFAI - anti-f*-ai.

Though it might get you labeled as a ter'ist. Especially if you don't buy the products they're pushing.

These days, the market is more trusting of the statement that better tools and processes require fewer employees to serve the same customers if you call that AI. If you get more of your customers to succeed in using your website or app to do what they need without having a human do anything for them individually, you don't need as many employees doing it. But the market doesn't want to hear that you can cut jobs because your website doesn't suck as much any more, so you say AI and they think you've done something futuristic when you've actually done something practical, and you're vague enough about it that the SEC can't say that you claimed to be doing something you're not.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

Sure. But the suggestion here is that they were specifically inviting it, ostensibly because it would harm competitors.

They are not going to support the idea that "glyphosate causes cancer" for some short-term market advantage.

Agreed that AI (in general) is not a dead end, but any particular implementation of AI might be. OpenAI et al are betting billions that their approach will turn out to be the best one, but it really is a bet; there's not guarantee that tomorrow the next DeepSeek won't come out with a better algorithm that obsoletes all their investments.

Apple can always buy out whichever company they decide has what they want. It'll be pricey, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand.

ya basic, son

Seconded on the Tapo line. I got a Tapo C120 earlier this year and they are surprisingly cheap (currently $28 at B&H) and fairly easy to work with. I found that I needed to initially connect it to their cloud service to get their app working with it, but once that worked, I removed its ability to phone home by blocking the MAC address from the internet on my router. I can still connect to it with RTSP and stream with VLC, replay video with their app, etc. with no need for internet connectivity. Just be aware that if it can't connect to an NTP server that the timestamp in the video will be off... but you can disable the timestamp. It also logs decent resolution video and low bitrate audio to microSD which is handy. I get about two weeks of archived 24/7 footage with a 256 GB card. One drawback is that it is limited to using 2.4 GHz WiFi, which I find to have more interference than 5 GHz in my location. Everyone's situation is different in that regard though.

Why will it be "winner takes most"? AI isn't like the Internet where there are network-effects that make first-mover status a huge advantage -- e.g. if I could write a better Facebook than Facebook today, it still wouldn't get used by anyone, since Facebook's advantage comes from its huge user base and my new platform wouldn't have one.

With AI, OTOH, anything the first-movers do, Apple can (eventually) copy and improve upon, a strategy they have used successfully many times in the past. Stepping back and letting others figure out what the works and doesn't work, on their own dime, seems like a good approach. Why burn money on what might be a dead-end, when others are happy to burn their own money for you?