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Comment Re:US Picked Officials In Ukraine After 2014 Coup (Score 1) 39

Cool, except they''ve had multiple governments, some anti russian, some less so ever since, all because of democracy.

For reference, Zelensky was pro russian. He was also pro european and pro Nato, but he wanted to fix repair ties with the russians. Until, right after Nato voted to reject their application, the russians invaded.

The americans are irrelevant , this war had nothing to do with them.

Comment Re:AI has many uses (Score 1) 30

This is why I think a severe AI market crash might actually be good for AI. We've proven LLMs can be impressive, and occasionally even useful. Now, we just need the marketing people and CEO suite to fuck off and send it back into the labs for another decade or two to work on the more impressive stuff. And let the ethicists and policy wonks have a decade or so to get us ready for it so it doesnt dismantle civil society, the economy, and politics as insane silicon valley loons torch the forests and redirect half the planets worth into building a premature stupid product nobody wants.

Comment This RAM thing is the AI bubble inflection point (Score 1) 13

We've all seen for a while how the AI bubble has led to increasingly irrational market behavior. Nvidia priced higher than the entire pharma industry combined , OpenAI just churning through insane amounts of money while ranting incoherently about trillion dollar data centers. Microsoft just rolling out unprecedented data centers, all for a product that the public by and large appears to resesent and business companies struggle to figure out how to extract any sort of productivity out of it.

But its when the abstract market signals start reifying into real world failures that the bed officially shits itself. In the last major crash, that was when people started failing mortgages toppling the subprime house of cards. In the dot com crash, when a number of billion dollar companies just failed stupidly (pets dot com etc).

I think the tipping points gonna come down to RAM. Think about it. You now have a huge demand for RAM to build these budgeted super datacenters, but the budget just got blown to hell and back. Microsoft has also pivoted hard to rolling out new demand for these shitty "Copilot PCs", but the PC market is about to sieze up because computers are about to get real friggin expensive. (Google the price of 64gb of DDR5 and weep). Theres a whole ecosystem of "dumb shit as a service" companies about to discover their high memory GPU instances get real freaking expensive.

Something has to give, and I think that might be Microsoft, and possibly Amazon. Oh they wont die, Amazon and Microsoft have insane capital warchests. But both are incredibly exposed as major datacenter providers to RAM prices. Add onto that Amazons brick and mortar business taking a massive hit from tarrifs on the cheap chinese shit they sell, and finally the rock bottom consumer confidence hammering market behavior. This shits about to blow.

All because Sam "fucking" altman decided to buy 40% of the worlds RAM supply for his overblown spellchecker.

Comment Re:Crrot and Stick (Score 2) 109

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.

Comment Everyone's bilding stupid junk (Score 5, Insightful) 33

Like nearly every product in this area, these podcasts are scams.

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

Comment Re:TL;DR: Gotta keep the bubble going (Score 4, Insightful) 127

Thats not really how that clause works.

The interstate commerce supremacy thing has always been interpreted to refer to either specifically interfering with interstate transactions where doing so gives one company an advantage over another. Ie "You can only buy from a local farmer now".

I cant imagine any combination of facts that would make the interstate commerce clause apply that wouldnt interfere with almost all state commercial and environmental legislation.

And anyway, Presidents cant make laws.

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