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Comment Re:Chinese Century (Score 1) 55

Your general conclusion is correct, but your analysis is wrong.
Wealth isn't a simple concept. It has no direct relationship to anything physical, but it's got a LOT of indirect relationships.

E.g. part of wealth is being healthy. This depends on physical things, but for most of them there are tradeoffs. Potatoes aren't necessary if you've got wheat or oats. Clean air is valuable, but so is treatment for diseases. And NONE of these things are directly proportional to money.

E.g., part of wealth is having a happy marriage. Lack of poverty sure helps that, but anything beyond that doesn't help much.

The wealth of a country can increase when it stops being "top dog", but this is for sure by no means guaranteed.

Comment Re:5D Stupid (Score 1) 55

Yeah, China is currently getting Nvidia hardware, but it's acting strenuously to wean itself from it. Wherever local stuff is "good enough", then that's what it pushes. And it's pushing development so that local stuff is less limited. I expect this to take them a decade to reach parity, but I've no inside or detailed information. (I'm repeating projections made by someone else.)

Comment Re:They didn't want to pay the nvidia tax anyway (Score 1) 55

Yes, "in five years China will be shipping cheap AI chips all over the world", but they'll only be "good enough", not "top of the line". That'll probably take 10 years.

Well, 10 years still isn't a long time. It will only matter to them if, say, an AGI breakthrough happens before 2030 and still depends on transformer chips. (I've got a theory that the "transformer chips" direction is the wrong direction...well, not *wrong* exactly, but misleading. I think AGI is going to be more dependent on multiple smaller models and close connection to sensors. For that transformers are advantageous, but not really decisive. Check out "SLMs", e.g. https://huggingface.co/blog/jj... )

Comment Re:Heh (Score 1) 55

Sorry, but capitalism has LOS of good points. It's just that it also has more than a few really bad points. Small scale capitalism is extremely good. Monopoly ANYTHING tends to be really bad.

OTOH, some jobs cannot be done without concentrated controlled power. Whether you call the agency that does them a government or a corporation is basically irrelevant, what *is* relevant is the damage they do in the process of doing those jobs.

Small scale capitalism, where there's no significant "barrier to entry" is so far unbeatable for solving problems with few bad effects...IF there's some stronger power that ensures that they minimize the bad effects on others (including those who aren't customers).

Comment Re:"GPT-5 found refs, which solved these problems" (Score 1) 32

I suspect that the people who had the AI "solve" the problem were aware of what it had done, but that the PR guys got (or understood) a simplified story. No actual lies were necessarily involved, as there wasn't necessarily any intent to deceive.

OTOH, the statement was substantially false.

When corporations tell self-promoting falsehoods its not necessarily with any intent to deceive. But you still shouldn't trust them when there's not sufficient transparency. And were this a fraud investigation, I think they should be prosecuted as intentional fraud, even though no individual within the system necessarily intended fraud. The system design intended fraud.

Comment Re:"GPT-5 found refs, which solved these problems" (Score 1) 32

Actually Jackson Pollack paintings had (have?) hidden meaning. I don't think anyone knows what that meaning is, but multiple of his (authentic) paintings have been analyzed and there are strong patterns in the way he used colors and the angles at which the lines cross. Presumably that are other patterns that weren't checked for. It's like a coded message that nobody has the key for. But using this you can easily detect fake Pollack paintings.

So, no, you couldn't do an equivalent painting. Just one that looked the same to an untrained eye. It would be easier to do a fake Picasso.

Comment No pain, no gain (Score 1) 155

It may be a trite saying, but it's as true in education as it is in a gym. If you don't exercise your brain, it's not going to improve.

There's a reason weightlifters don't use a forklift or crane to pick up the barbells and do a dozen reps. The problem is not that the weights are in need of lifting. And that's the same problem with homework. The teacher doesn't need a stack of 5 page reports; what they need is for their students to practice using their brains.

Unfortunately the education system is designed to evaluate output instead of process. It's easier to grade a paper or a test, not evaluate a demonstration of knowledge. It's always been ripe for cheating, but now the cheat tools are everywhere and made legitimate by techbros demanding AI productivity. So either teaching will change, or we'll head straight for idiocracy and nobody will be left with the skills to wonder why it all went to hell.

Comment Re:the human is as dumb as the AI (Score 2) 70

Not really. Diamorphine is a precisely described drug. Heroin might be nearly anything, down to crushed up Draino. Many reports describe it as being cut with fentanyl, which is also a highly useful drug, but the "heroin" that's been cut with it frequently kills people.

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