It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you boil it down, situational awareness is little more than our attempt to maintain a mental model of what's happening around us. And models can be wrong.

Do humans have eyes on the sides of their heads? In the back of their heads? Can they watch all directions simultaneously? No.

Can they instantaneously detect changes in speed and direction? No.

Can they react in microseconds? No.

No to all of that. In fact, numerous studies have shown that most people can only deal with about three events occurring at the same time. Throw one more into the mix and they start to lock up.

And "the fact that numerous people surrender all of that" is precisely the problem. People get distracted. They daydream. They drive on autopilot. They become impaired.They lose focus. They get old and slow down. They're not looking in the right direction when some event occurs. And even when they do they often make poor decisions. They overreact and they overcompensate.

And that's when 40,000 people a year die.

Pretty sure most Model 3's and Y's don't have odor detectors, and those are supposedly the vehicles owners would send out to make money why they sleep.

Tesla's numbers already indicate that it's better. (Then again, they're Tesla's numbers.) But my point remains, if they cut down the number of deaths, injuries, and fender-benders it's a net win.

What, if anything I posted was in defense of Elon? All of the above were facts. That's where the HQ is. That's where the engineers are. That's the Texas law.

Think of the categories as fixed, and the people moving *through* them. Over 65s are exiting the category at a lower rate.

Musk picked Austin for Tesla’s robotaxi trials and rollouts primarily because the city serves as the home base for Tesla's corporate headquarters, and it offers close proximity to company engineers and executives overseeing the project.

Also, Texas law does not permit individual cities to regulate or ban autonomous vehicles, so it's an AV friendly environment.

Finally, other autonomous vehicle networks, such as Waymo, had already established testing footprints in Austin.

So sorry, but I think your conspiracy theory is a bit short lived.... ;)

Not enough to make up for waking up in the morning to go to work, only to find out some drunk puked in your front seat.

Or the used condoms in the back.

That's one of the reasons I never understood the pushback against EVs in certain circles. Put a solar panel on your roof and you're now independent of the grid and gas stations.

I mean, it's a LOT harder to put an oil well and refinery in your backyard.

They are, for the most part, illegal. That doesn't seem to stop the deaths and injuries, now does it?

40,000 people a year. Year in, and year out.

3,000 people die in a WTC attack and we flip out.

Kill 40,000 men, woman, and kids each and every year... and we accept it as "normal".

I agree wholeheartedly that we should do everything possible to prioritize mass transit, walkability, and biking, and minimize car use.

But.

In the US we've spend the last century designing our cites around urban sprawl. Like it or not, that's where many of our homes are and where people live.

You're simply NOT going to solve sprawl, especially in western cities, with mass transit.

As such, some form of personal transportation must exist. And if so, then it benefits everyone to make it as efficient, and as clean, as possible.