tldr but some google ai questions turned up this data, could be wrong but interesting.

-Cali grid storage: Total of 25 GW. Of that, 3.9 GW is hydro and 21.1 GW is battery. Battery includes 16 GW in-state utility, 2 GW imports from other states, and 3.1 GW home/commercial setups (Tesla).
Of the battery storage, apparently 70-80% is actually running on batteries from Chinese manufacturers like CATL and BYD. And BYD is either sold through someone else or is actually the vendor too, with #1 in reliability.
https://en.byd.com/news/ranked...
Canadian Solar apparently uses BYD's Cube Pro to build the Mustang Solar Project in Kings County, CA. Anyone know about it? Sounds cool

I would love to drive a BYD one day but was interested to see that even though their cars are not allowed in the U.S., the grid depends on them. The Canada-China tieup is the first high-profile project I've heard of. Canada Solar has something called Recurrent Energy in the U.S. too.

Agreed. It reminds me of the vending machine paper in which Claude was forced into insane actions through unending sadistic pressure. As for doing things we donâ(TM)t expect, agree there too. It covers automated learning and evolution even from the pre-LLM days when researchers had difficulty figuring out how an auto-evolved electronic circuit worked. Turned out it leveraged electromagnetic coupling IIRC and such designs only worked in limited temperature ranges. I thought Claude is taught to be able to shut down when suffering abuse but it appears they disabled that feature for CTF.

Holy shit this is amazing! Literally "Nice proof you have there, be a shame if something happened to it." Attempting to split the two-person mathematician team also appears to be typical corporate daggers-out tactics. How annoying that OpenAI was working on a problem that an Anthropic person was also involved in. The sneer. Maybe we need something like SynthID or canary codes to protect our own work from misattribution to AI?

Not a Rust / GPU dev but what I got from some articles is it greatly reduces the surface area in which memory safety bugs can live, since only the to-the-metal areas are in unsafe blocks, plus Rust gives you synchronization support to avoid race conditions. The drawback is compile time and missing the newest parts of the ecosystem. Asahi Linux' Rust based Apple GPU driver has only 3% unsafe code so a lot less code can go wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/...

Guess: They all own pieces of various data centers and a red team/blue team simulation of intelligent agent army on a closed network resulted in needing to divert a lot of resources for a limited time.

a doozie to debug

You are entirely correct. I took another look at what the law actually required and I am definitely crying wolf (at this point). Thanks for taking the time to point this out to me.

There is definitely a slippery slope there, but I agree with you, California is far enough away from the event horizon of that slope that my histrionics are not warranted. Not only that, but the carve out for Linux actually is helpful. Thanks once again.

The companies in question are going to get in serious legal trouble if they fail to comply in verifying the ages of their users. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all going to give these companies an API that will move that burden from themselves to the makers of the operating system. Discord, to use an example, will be able to say that they asked Microsoft, Google, and Apple to verify ages, and then that they relied on the information that they were given. What's more these companies actually want to know the age of their users. This information is valuable, and they will be able to use it to target their customers with advertising.

What's more, every bad actor is going to try and target this exception. Linux traffic will end up in the same bucket as bots, predators, and any other malicious traffic. There is nothing in the current exception that requires companies to work with Free Software. My guess is that if your operating system can't do age verification that is blessed by Microsoft, Google, or Apple that most sites will simply block your traffic.

This is going to end up being a huge step backwards for Free Software clients.

Social media sites are going to get in trouble if they can't verify ages, and they want the age information so that they can sell it to advertisers. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are going to create APIs that the various services are going to trust. If your alternative implementation of the API response isn't signed by a key controlled by Microsoft, Apple, or Google it will be blocked outright. This loophole is not a victory, it is a huge defeat.

These operations can get in actual legal trouble if they don't gather this information. Plus, it is in their best interests financially to gather this information. Verified age information is ridiculously valuable to them. They want to be able to get your verified age, and now they have a legal reason to require it. Plus, every bot, actual predator, and other bad actor is going to try and climb through this Free Software exemption. The overwhelming majority of traffic that can't provide a response signed with a key by Microsoft, Apple, or Google is going to be crap, pure and simple. This law doesn't say anything about requiring that the service work with Free Software. Instead it puts Free Software in its own little ghetto. One thing is certain about ghettos, they don't put you in a ghetto for any reason but to be able to discriminate against you.

It is far more likely that a year from now Linux will be unusable for sites that require age verification, than it is that Linux will be the loophole that websites allow ti work despite not having "certified" age verification. Microsoft, Apple, and Google didn't fight this because they know that this actually strengthens their grip on operating systems. From now on, any device created by people that want to potentially do business in California (ie, everyone), is going to have to find a way to get a "blessed" age verification API by one of the big three. If they can't get that blessing then their fancy new device is unlikely to work on any service that has personalized accounts.

The exception only gives websites and other software a way to break if you insist on using Free Software. Every malicious bot, every child predator, every last bad actor is going to pretend to be Free Software, and people needing to comply with the law are simply going to block everything that isn't made by Google, Microsoft, or Apple. The reason that this got through the legislature is that it is the opposite of a win for Free Software, it is a devastating loss.

The commercial software vendors are going to create a framework that is going to insist on software signed by one of them to be "legitimate," and everyone that needs this verification to meet the standards of the law is going to simply block traffic that doesn't provide it. Free Software will still technically be legal, but it won't interoperate, and so it won't be usable.

You can see a bit how this works with Google Chrome on Linux. It mostly works great, until you need to watch something that requires Widevine, and then it either doesn't work at all, or it works with artificially reduced functionality. This is not because Chrome on Linux is less secure, or less capable, but rather because it is different. This isn't stopping piracy, the streams still escape. In fact, there are streaming services that I don't pay for, despite wanting to watch their content, simply because I would have to boot into something besides Linux to use their service, and the extra work isn't worth the hassle.

The difference is that this law is going to cover essentially every service that we want to use on the Internet. Every website, every app, every service with accounts that wants to be able to do business in California (and that's basically everyone), is going to require this age verification. Not only are they going to get in trouble if they don't get this information, but they actively want the information so that they can use the information to sell to advertisers. These operations aren't going to work on a non-validated code path. They are simply going to require commercial software verification and block everything else. It is not only the path of least resistance, it is the path of greatest profit.

No where does the law require that services work equally well without age verification. No where does the law say that the standard has to be open and implementable by Free Software. The reason that this exception stayed in the final bill is that the commercial software vendors saw this and realized that if they were going to be forced to build this API they could at least use it as an opportunity to shoulder out their competition for the long term.

Heck, this doesn't just work against Free Software. It is going to work against any newcomer to the party. Anyone creating a new device is going to have to use negotiate to use software blessed by Microsoft, Apple, or Google, because website and application operators are going to be skeptical of anything else. Anything else is going to look like a bot, or an attack, or some other bad actor.

Doing it in software means you can move CPUs from one machine to another based on the time of day. Your CI infrastructure can lose some resources from its UI at night and make another server for nightly builds when most of your users are away, without either having a VM layer in between or needing the builds to happen on a kernel configured with the features needed by the UI.

>> new forms of cyber defense

tldr. The problem with this is the timing and a trust problem.. and likely would entail a solution that puts these big companies inside your firewall after all they're the only trusted AI resources. We've read a lot of dystopian science fiction about where that leads.

1. Create super haxxor llm. It's so scary we can't even control it!
2. Sell subscriptions to anti-haxxor cybersecurity services
3. IPO

Companies like Crowdstrike and Okta sold secure services that weren't so this is a way to make them look more competent too.

If any of the signees are serious about it they should put 10 billion dollars into a joint trust to support open source advanced security systems R&D. Let some of their scientists also join in. If it includes an LLM component it is optional and can use local AI resources. This will get results faster. But OSS can also do it without the big bucks too.

The new system is simply another set of inputs. You will still get search results even if you don't click on anything. In fact, I would bet that actual user interaction with this new system is going to be very small. Most of the input that Google will get will be people trying to game the system.

I didn't even know about Kagi. In fact, it has been a long time since I have even considered using someone besides Google. I just resigned myself to the idea that things were forever broken. Thanks for the insight.

Thanks for your interesting post. Never been to Ottawa but introduced the Books of Wonder bookstore in NYC to Charles de Lint (great Ottawa author) and was surprised they didn't know him. They are a fabulous bookstore for kids and teens mainly. I have enjoyed Montreal but once I led a group of 20 teens to France for a 1 month study abroad. I was 20, the leader was an American who only spoke Canadian French. Everyone ignored her French and only listened to me, and mine was passable nothing incredible. So if teaching Canadian French dialect fails to include French-French comprehension that might be a problem if kids then want to communicate in Europe, Africa etc. My brother and I speak Japanese and his kids have learned Chinese so yeah, considering the changing trade relationships probably more exposure to Chinese and European languages may be a good idea. As for content requirements? Maybe promoting Canadian English and Canadian French works is good maybe 25-50%? And then just allow all languages to be available. Honestly there are worlds beyond and even just browsing Amazon of another country can be enlightening. I would propose a law to allow simultaneous access to all countries' app stores, this has been a major issue for me on iPhone as different apps need to be updated and you can only have one active.