Comment Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score 1) 75
Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).
For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.
Comment Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score 1) 75
My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.
Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.
The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.
Comment "unauthorized" (Score 1) 73
The fact that they make sure to include that repeatedly tells me that the real reason is they have their own AI agent that they want you to use, possibly for an extra fee, definitely trained to not bypass all the dark patterns they use to upsell you shit.
Oh, and there'll be absolutely no problem with giving THAT one all your personal and financial data, because trust us bro, we're the airline, we're famous for being totally not sleazy...
Comment Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score 3, Interesting) 75
Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.
(For a full-scale exchange...)
Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.
There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.
IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.
(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).
Comment Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score 2) 75
I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.
Comment Re:Someone (Score 0) 98
Trump suggested the extraordinary step of directly involving himself in a counterintelligence investigation, a sign of his friendly relationship with Huang and the possible geopolitical stakes. "I did speak to him today just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing," Trump said. "He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy."
Seriously, where did Trump "(involve) himself in a counter-intelligence investigation"?
Trump is a Billionaire.
Huang is a Billionaire.
Professionally and personally they travel in the same circles.
Huang is being investigated, Trump reached out to him directly (not the investigating bodies, the subject of the investigation), and asked his friend how he is doing given recent events. Oh, and then he went and told reporters he had done just that. Exactly where is the "evidence" that he involved himself in the investigation?
Absent any actual evidence, you're just making stuff up - and honestly, if you have to resort to making stuff up, it just undermines your arguments.
I suppose it would be OK if Huang just called him to discuss the weather in D.C., kinda like how Hunter Biden used to call his dad in the middle of dinners with Hunter's "business associates" to discuss the weather - never, ever to discuss anything political.
Comment Re:I thought Huang was a "not evil" guy (Score 1, Insightful) 98
Ah yes, TDS. The inability to ever accept any criticism of your idol.
That's not how TDS works, Trump Derangement Syndrome is the inability to look at things rationally, instead injecting Donald Trump into all issues, large and small.
The irrational support of Donald Trump, or, if you prefer, "The inability to accept any criticism of your idol." (Donald J Trump), would be properly classified as "MAGA"
Comment Re:electric cars are gay (Score 1) 189
and literally every Uber driver drove an EV
That's because EVs are perfect for taxis. Many short distances, never far from a charging point and time inbetween rides where you can recharge in the supermarket parking lot while getting a bite to eat. And in the city, with stop-and-go traffic, EV are much better at handling that than ICEs who hate that. Plus the lower cost-per-km-driven matters even more when it's a profit margin thing.
Comment Re:More drinking their own koolaid... (Score 1) 26
To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.
Comment Re:More drinking their own koolaid... (Score 1) 26
There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.
Comment Re: Uhh... Cool? (Score 1) 190
No, it's called "Evidencing The Fact That It's A Widespread Shorthand" (in specific, among Wikipedians, where it's in official terminology as well), a widespread usage that was falsely claimed to not exist.
(I'll also take this opportunity to note: rage about the use of shorthand on "copyvio", but not a word about "algos")
Comment Re: Uhh... Cool? (Score 3) 190
Shorthand should be something that other people actually use
TL/DR: "copyvio" is the Wikipedia-standard shorthand for copyright violation, used both in direct speech and in official templates. If a person says "copyvio", they've probably spent a lot of time hanging out at Wikipedia, where copyright violation is a frequent topic of discussion.
Comment Re: Uhh... Cool? (Score 1) 190
I'm sorry if shorthand offends your sensibilities. Should I spell out all shorthand for you? Maybe make sure I only use emdashes instead of "-" while I'm at it?
Comment Re:Uhh... Cool? (Score 2) 190
Oh, also, as pointed out further downthread, any LLM with a training cutoff before the license change date is pretty much assured to be okay for use in a cleanroom implementation. Copyright holders cannot make retroactive copyright changes, and open source licenses generally explicitly grant rights in perpetuity anyway. The threat would be new code. But since the cleanroom side has never seen that new code (it was released after the training date), it remains untainted. And training cutoffs generally lag model releases by many months, so not only should all current models be in the clear, but most next-gen models as well (subject to cutoff date verification, and various kinds of nuance such as avoiding RAG, potential post-training contamination, etc - but there's easy ways to guarantee these aren't problems that are present)