At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Heads *need* to roll though, but I'm not sure anyone with a say in the matter at the Pentagon realises that, let alone why is really does need to be the case. The US' own judiciary has been pretty clear on this; whenever a lawyer has been caught using AI-generated submissions that contain hallucinations some form of censure has ensured PDQ. It's similar in industry as well; multiple instances of employees using AI without checking the facts that have subsequently been either disciplined, fired, or (if they are senior enough and the screw-up warrants it) issued a golden parachute.

Now, look at the situation on the ground. This school has been there for around a decade, and it is *very* obviously a school - pink and blue painted play areas, with assembly areas and sports facilities suitable for kids; that is totally NOT a military PT facility within the larger complex. Sure, it's surrounded by IRGC facilities, but absolutely no military anywhere else in the world co-locates their military's family accommodation blocks and support facilities close to the operations blocks and facilities to make it easier for their staff & troops, right? Oh, wait, yes, they do, don't they? Not always, sure, but often enough that the US response here matters, because if they try and sweep this under the rug "because AI", then they just made all their similar facilities viable targets "because AI". There's a reason everyone else, including US allies, were quick to publically condemn this, and even say it might be a war crime because of failure to properly assess the strike's potential for collateral damage, and that's to make it absolutely clear they do not consider this have acceptable levels of collateral damage, let alone be a legitimate target.

Don't forget, the IRGC tend to be fanatics even by Iranian standards, and are often either willing to strap on a suicide vest or can motivate others to do it for them. 123 dead kids means a *LOT* of bereaved parents, brothers, sisters, and other family members, many of whom are probably already linked to the IRGC, who are going to need a lot less motivation to do something a little more radical than just march along the street waving flags and chanting "Death to America!" the next time they are asked to do something for their country. What the US does here is totally going to be interpreted as setting precedent by Iran, and quite possibly by other countries and groups within their axis, should it come to a conflict or just an opportunistic attempt at some terrorism.

I think there's a bit of a difference though. Regardless of hat colour, most hackers have going to have at least some sense of what the likely repercussions of their actions might be and, even when those standards are very low indeed, are probably not going to think doing something that could cause serious loss of life "for the Lulz" is a good life option. They might make a mistake here and there, but how many times have you read about some random hacker *deliberately* doing something that would definitely cause loss of life in full knowledge that it was going to happen outside of on the periphery of an actual conflict?

GANs on the other hand have no such moral compass, sense of self-preservation, or keen interest in avoiding lengthy spells in government run institutions where they'll in all likelihood get to make some interesting new "friends" (unless it's a web forum they hijacked in Germany, apparently). They'll just carry on trying to complete whatever poorly defined objective they have been set, within whatever limited / technically absent guardrails they can't circumvent - the pattern here seems very much that meeting the objective has more weight in the models than any guardrails. If a GAN somehow computes that global thermonuclear war is a required step to its objective of having a nice game of chess, then you'd better hope it warms up with a LOT of Tic-Tac-Toe.

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

Think of the categories as fixed, and the people moving *through* them. Over 65s are exiting the category at a lower rate.

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

"Hi, BYD, set the temperature to 21 degrees."
"Hi, BYD, turn off the air conditioning."
"Hi, BYD, volume down/up."
"Hi, BYD, next song."

Saw this on an Atto3, and it worked surprisingly well. Not perfect, but just about all the controls you might need to adjust while driving that are not on the wheel or stalks are covered. I also prefer physical controls that I can operate through muscle memory for everything, but voice control seems like a good move to address the obvious safety concern that moving to many controls to a touch screen brings. Fact is, this kind of UI is what Millennials and later have grown up on, so barring some safety edict from a major market, like China's ban on retracting door handles, it's not going away. That leaves those of us that prefer physical controls to either get used to it, find a car that keeps the balance sane (VAG group seems to be moving in this direction), or squabbling over the declining supply of roadworthy cars that predate the screens taking over.

I think there may be a bit of back-and-forth while marques work out which controls are adjusted while driving and probably ought to have a tactile control and how best to present the UI to minimise eyes-on time by the driver if they do try and adjust things while moving, but the battle to retain fully tactile controls is probably already lost. Either way, any controls are almost certainly all going to be linked into the same car management / data capture system, and any physical controls will be no more independent that those specialist control keyboard add-ons you can get for PCs. That data can be monetized, and there's no way any marque is going to pass up on that - ultimately, as BMW has demonstrated, they want as much control over their car (what, you thought it was yours just because you paid for it?) as Microsoft has over a Windows PC.

Joking aside, there's a much more subtle change too. Look at the quoted wording from the astronauts: "*our* nation", "inspire *this* nation". Even at the height of the US-Soviet cold war it was still "for *all* mankind".

I get Trump's order is very much aimed at the NASA and the US (and probably getting his name onto it somehow), so can give that a pass, but the astronauts had an opportunity to rise above all that partisanship and slip in a message of much needed global unity, yet failed to do so. There are precious few institutions left in the world that can at least try and claim to be at least somewhat above / outside the direct influence of politics, and it looks like we're about to lose another one. Quite possibly for good once the ISS is finally decommissioned.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.

You don't have to use it (SysInternal's tools are much more comprehensive), but if you just need an overview level of insight into what is going on when your system's fans start to sound like a jet turbine, it's still a pretty good starting point into what's up.