I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

Disagree on this. That's like saying only shows that trek through the stars should be called Star Trek - and yet the best Star Trek series ever made was Deep Space Nine.

The Stargate is just part of the premise of the followup shows, not a required defining characteristic of them. Even for the original series, by about season 6-7 it was sharing the field with ships and other methods of travel.

As for Universe, it did stumble out of the gate (haha), for sure, but almost every show does. I think it had found its footing by the middle of the second season and season 3 was set up for some great potential. It absolutely deserved a third season.

What kills me is how Repubs constantly use "BUT CHINA!!1!" as their go-to boogeyman for everything from technology and AI to the economy and trade, and yet they conveniently ignore their massive buildup of renewables and nuclear. One of the few instances where the divergence between the US and China actually matters and they pretend it doesn't exist.

Imagine if the party in power actually cared about the energy future of the US. We could be setting ourselves up for the next 50 years of growth by electrifying everything and upgrading the national grid to support it. Instead we're DIRLL BBY DIRLLing, building new pipelines, and putting up as many methane power plants as possible. Stupid old fucks.

The real friends are the terrorists we made along the way.

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

Hey, I saw this movie!

Didn't end well for the guy with the plutonium.

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

We'll all pretend that nuclear-tipped VCs will remain cool-headed and cooperative when the AI debts start to go sour.

I'm not an expert on rebuilding massively exploded launch infrastructure; but I have a suspicion that a 2026-2029 plan is now going to involve less Blue Origin than previously believed.

Oh, they know; it's more that you can't really put "fuck palantir!" in an encyclical; but you absolutely can choose which perfectly plausible catholic author to quote in your piece on how weaponized AI is bad; and going with Tolkien over the other options seems deliberate.

Oh, I don't know. An EV version of the Reliant Robin might be just what the world needs right now.

Bullshit weasel words. "Cleaner" does not mean "clean".

A shit sandwich, now with 50% less shit! is still a shit sandwich.