Russia has a tiny GDP and spends as much as possible on the military. It's economy is smaller than Italy and also smaller than New York state. But it's specialized in making a crappy army. Because of it's focus on the military it's economy has not grown like other countries. Given time the Europeans could easily out pace the Russian military, but the Europeans have been buying their weapons in large part from the US and while they have some manufacturing capability it's not enough. And the US has imposed constraints on how the Europeans use our weapons. The Europeans have shouldered most of the economic burden of this war -- even in the beginning of the war Biden never spent more than the EU.

This war can and should be the end of the Russian military machine. The Russian economy is grossly over extended. Many of it's most talented citizens are leaving and it is not spending the money to educate more. If that economy dies, then the US and the Europeans can spend less on war and more on growing our economies.

Yes, we can say the EU should be shouldering more of the burden and that's perhaps right, though it is in both of our interests for the Russian military to crumble. But the EU doesn't have the expertise and the plants to build what needs to be built quickly. They could get there in say maybe 5-10 years but what good would that be? If Russia doesn't take over Ukraine and it joins Nato and the EU, I suspect that in a few years we'll be buying drone based weapons from them and we'll all be in a better place. The EU nations have increased their military budgets and I don't think that will change. In absolute dollars the EU funding will probably swamp the Russian military in a few years.

'nuff said.

The evidence that universities have lost their way is that people who never went to a university and certainly not to one of the top schools have lost their trust in the universities? What is that evidence of. Surely universities could improve, but up until now they have been the driving force behind the US dominance of the tech industry around the world. They are under attack from an administration that attacks any form of truth finding that might differ from it. After all at a university you might learn that vaccines work. Or they might teach evolution, or that renewables can be cheaper than coal or any number of things that you should not know. Of course with the presidential megaphone talking about how bad they are people will believe it, just like people will believe that Portland is burning.

They are going to have to raise prices significantly to bring back the customers they lost by kicking Jimmy Kimmel off the air, and then having their corporate partners refuse to run his show. Big network providers are going to have more and more problems because they are really content aggregators and other services (e.g. youtube) can aggregate more than they can. Will we see the Jimmy Kimmel/Stephen Colbert channel on YouTube? What do the customers or the content providers gain from Disney?

What a great way to get all future data centers to be built outside the US. Even if there's negotiations to remove the threatened tariffs, we know he'll come back again and ask for something else. Why bother risking it? Plus by fighting renewables Trump is cutting off the cheapest forms of electricity. Data centers don't need to be near the users. And of course if those users are scientist Trump will try to deport them.

Where did all the data centers go?
Long time passing,
Where did all the data centers go,
Long time ago.

If you ask an LLM to solve a math problem, something they recently have gotten good at, they will use chain of thought and produce a ton of tokens they don't even show you. That kind of prompt can result in a lot of text being generated. If you ask it to produce a summary of a single URL page there's a lot less computation going on. The paper compares to work on smaller models than the ones that are used in say Google's Gemini app. I'm not sure that the results are realistic.

Nice article, except this is not a foolish attempt to save money. This is an attempt as all Fascists regimes do to denigrate the use of facts. Once a people become unmoored from a perception of reality it is easy to get them to do what the regime wants.

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Corporations are for making money. They are not organized for political causes. They make a profit, which can be distributed to people, who are then taxed and who can then give money to political causes. Scotus's ruling prevented me as a stockholder from deciding whether I wanted to join some cause, unless I want to give up my investment. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that the drafters of the first amendment, intended that corporations, which only in Latin mean person but does not in English should have free speech. SCOTUS should have given deference to Congress in determining this, but as the Guardian points out, Roberts is an umpire who has chosen a side.

Billionaires want everyone to pay the same income tax rate, instead of our current progressive rates. How can they convince people who would pay more so they could pay less? By making it seem complicated for them. If you could just push a button and your taxes would be paid (automation anyone) their whole argument would go away. In Japan apparently you just sign something that fits on a post card. One of my Japanese colleagues didn't understand why our system was so much more complex. So let's get rid of any automation and make the process as needlessly complex as possible. Let's also fire a pile of IRS workers so that they can't audit the more complex returns, filed by those same billionaires. We can say we're saving money even as the government collects much less money than is actually saved. Argh.

People used Geiger counters to generate random numbers decades ago, and sensing radiation is based on quantum effects.

I did a quick web search and found this: https://miamifruit.org/product...{sourceid}&g_merchantid=&g_placement=&g_partition=&g_campaignid=17435653585&g_ifproduct=&tw_source=google&tw_adid=&tw_campaign=17435653585&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA8q--BhDiARIsAP9tKI0IcNK4b44i9SKGq6c7QvxaExNUqQaLK6kdKXFyX-JYPH0X1miF0wEaAmL2EALw_wcB

Finnish National Bureau of Investigation lead investigator Sami Liimatainen says he wasn't contacted by WaPo, which published a story earlier today claiming that an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services holds that recent Baltic seabed cable damage was accidental.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20137924

And the Finns should have the most informatoin

Several things have changed that have made the US less competitive in science.

We have the best universities in STEM. We used to allow people with advanced degrees to pretty easily immigrate. We've made that harder by shrinking the pool of various visa types -- mostly as part of an anti-immigrant fever. And if the color of your skin is not white or you speak with an accent, there are lots of places you don't want to live.

A lot of our politicians reject science. Something like 1/3rd of congress is on record as climate change denial. Many reject the premise of evolution. When I was growing up being a rocket scientist or an atomic scientist was something people really looked up to. Even working in plastic was high prestige as we know from The Graduate. Politicians of course communicate their attitude to their constituents and are also a reflection of those views. Hence the life of a scientist is not as pleasant. After the soviets beat the US to space and after we ended the war in Japan by building a bomb, there was a huge rush based on national security to have more scientists.

Relative to other fields, science doesn't pay as well and the job security of a scientist has diminished.

Here's some facts: Training an AI model uses a lot of compute and a lot of electricity. It can be done on thousands of GPUs in a distributed fashion. You can stop and restart it. You can run it when electricity is cheapest. There are really two costs ignoring the programming costs, 1) the capital cost of the GPUs, or the rental of those GPUs on the cloud and 2) the electricity. Where I live, electricity is very cheap at night and can be very expensive at peak time. If you skipped training at the times the natural gas guy wants to sell you electricity, you'd only miss a small fraction of the day.

For inference costs, using the trained model, you can have various data centers around the world. At any hour there will be some that are not in a peak period. The amount of data sent and received from inferencing is tiny.

In short, the guy wants to sell gas and peaker plants and has no idea what he's talking about.

If you go to the PNAS study this is all based on, they make a distinction between smart charging and I'll call it dumb charging. They really only analyze current dumb charging. They assume that the cars can't do anything to smooth the load as a simplifying assumption. The authors of the study say this is a first step, and then proceed to ignore that this is a simplistic assumption. They point out that most cars start charging when they are plugged in. I have my car set up to charge so it's ready at 8am so it may be a bit warmer in the winter before I drive it. That's just a tiny amount smarter. My car is connected to the internet, it could determine when electricity was in lowest demand and charge them -- perhaps the utility could offer an appealing slightly lower time of use charge incentive. I live in NY and rates are tiny between 12 and 8am, which is when I charge. The grid is massively underutilized at all times during that period in NY. California may have a different time that it's underutilized. Without much infrastructure charges at all but some cooperation from the cars the grid utilization can be much smoother than it is now and most grids are set to deliver in the hottest of heat waves in the middle of the day for A/C and have lots of capacity at other times.

The article to make their job easier assumes that charging patterns will not change.

By the way the article observes that electricity costs are likely to go down as a result of EVs because they will shift all electric use to cheaper production which will help even non-EV users.