You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.

I'd be a trifle surprised if it's an outright lie; perhaps I'm not properly accustomed to contemporary standards of allowable market manipulation; but it seems to have been carefully worded to make a somewhat exotic but fairly barebones commodity futures arrangement, which could be entirely fulfilled by interlune doing some paper-shuffling resales of helium 3 from any source or simply selling zero liters during some or all years between now and 2038, sound like a tale of Bluefors actively paying to send rockets to the moon because it's obviously only freezer capacity, not any of the other issues, that is keeping 'quantum' from doing whatever it is supposed to do.

Not at all. I'm saying that the two situations, despite the parent poster's dishonest or confused equation of them, were totally different; with the fact that one involved direct state pressure on the media and the other didn't('liberals' not exactly even having control over the FCC in 2018; much less there being evidence of it being used for the purpose in the Barr case).

It's precisely the naked abuse of state power to try to force the media to toe the line on their repugnant little exercise in hagiography that makes this case deeply problematic; and that was simply not present in the Barr case. The fact that Kimmel was run off the air basically for not jumping to the conclusion that obviously Kirk must have been shot by some sort of trans antifa jihad sniper; rather than one of the numerous squabbling factions of hard right violence enthusiasts who have been feuding with one another for years, was icing on the shit sandwich; but the main story was the abuse of the FCC.

I'm sure that I'm not supposed to infer anything from how little the press release says about when the money actually changes hands and under what conditions.

Unless I'm missing something there's an annual quantity(of up to 10,000 liters; no stated minimum so presumably including zero) and a delivery period; but there's no actual statement of which years the annual quantity applies to(are they the same as the years of the delivery period? Do they start immediately?) and no statement of either when the product gets paid for or of what happens if it ends up not being delivered.

Depending on those fairly nontrivial details this could be anything from "refrigerator company spends 300 million dollars on lunar widget today with payoff potentially a decade or more out" to "if you happen to have some helium 3 in 2035 Bluefors will take your call; today we shake hands and make effusive statements in preparation for the bubble vacuum that the fall of 'genAI' will leave".

I'm fairly sure that there have been enough actual commodities deals(both actual sales and various options-related hedging) that if they wanted to talk boring details they would know exactly which ones to mention; which makes me suspect that it's less exciting than it is intended to appear.

Ah yes, I definitely remember that time in 2018 when the FCC threatened ABC's broadcasting license in order to get rid of Barr; both sides, both sides!

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

Sounds like the problem is the house and not the stove.

I definitely can't imagine any issues running a functional market economy under the theory that the first amendment allows you to make or conceal any claim you like about a product.

Will this change my tax exposure when providing 'gratuities' to supreme court justices?

You're forgetting the big one: that the system is designed to fail and create an uneducated unskilled worker class for the wealthy elite.

It seems like an open question whether being repetitive and rule based is actually a virtue as an AI use case or not.

'AI' is an easy sell for people who want to do some 'digital transformation' they can thought-leader about on linkedin without actually doing the ditch-digging involved in solving the problem conventionally "Hey, just throw some unstructured inputs at the problem and the magic of Agentic will make the answer come out!"; but that's not really a a good argument in favor of doing it that way. Dealing with such a cryptic, unpredictable, and expensive tool is at its most compelling when you have a problem that isn't readily amenable to conventional solutions; while it looks a lot like sheer laziness when you take a problem that basically just requires some form validation logic and a decision tree and throw an LLM at it because you can't be bothered to construct the decision tree.

There are definitely problems, some of them even useful, that are absolutely not amenable to conventional approaches; and those at least have the argument that perhaps unpredictable results are better than no results or manual results; but if you've got some desperately conventional business logic case that someone is turning into an 'AI' project either because they are a trend chaser or because they think that programming is an obscurantist conspiracy against the natural language Idea Guys by fiddly syntax nerds that's not a good sign.

Why does it matter if it's fake if it looks good? It's like mp3... If you can't hear the difference (and you can't, despite any claims you may make to the contrary - it's physically and biologically impossible), why does it matter if it's compressed?

Intel makes a lot more than CPUs. Intel makes them itself.

AMD only makes CPUs. AMD pays someone else to make them.

nVidia only makes GPUs. nVidia pays someone else to make them.

So of course Intel spends a lot more on R&D. They are developing a much wider portfolio and they are making it all themselves.

Sitting on the toilet doesn't give you hemorrhoids. Straining, having a poor diet, and trying to "hurry it up" gives you hemorrhoids.

If you're on the toilet for a long time because you have a low fiber diet and have to strain to eliminate, you're probably going to have hemorrhoids. The phone you're using to pass the time more pleasantly is not what's causing them.

I swear to God, when did so-called "smart people" get so stupid?