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Comment Re:Feels like the U.S. is turning into a dictators (Score 2, Informative) 61

I hate to say it like that but it feels like the U.S. is slowly turning more and more into a dictatorship. Isn't this the kind of things you have to do in a dictatorship? I feel for the U.S. people right now.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

Comment Re: Not an expert (Score 1) 69

No, there was no "empty space" around it. The space itself expanded in the cosmic inflation, per current theory.

Which I've always hated because it makes no sense. If space itself inflated, what did it inflate into? It's illogical, from any perspective, to say the universe was a speck of energy that suddenly expanded to create itself. If it expanded, it had to expand into something. You can't create yourself. If you say that, then all you've done is recreate, "In the beginning ..."

Comment Re: These companies need to bring charges (Score 4, Insightful) 101

We don't need to make up anything new, we just need to start putting CEOs in prison when the companies under their charge misbehave.

Then just step back and watch corporations shift overnight from greedy sociopaths to model participants in society.

"Oh, but you can't do that, nobody will ever found another company!" Bullshit. There's plenty of room to make good money in any market without role-playing a wolf among sheep. They might not make quite as much, but... So what? There is no "right" to profit.

Comment Why would dark energy need to be homogenous? (Score 1) 69

the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy

Is there any competing theory that would explain anisotropic expansion?

Overall, it strikes me as a pretty bold claim to have debunked a "theory" that has zero physical or even high-confidence theoretical underpinnings beyond "something makes stuff move apart faster than it should". Dark energy is little more than a named fudge factor - This is like disproving the shape of jello.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 90

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.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 83

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.

Comment Re:It's just like The Osbornes! (Score 1) 70

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.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 3, Interesting) 83

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.

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