That one was yet another case of Ridley having a script, deciding it was good enough to start building sets and working on effects, and then constantly changing the script all the way up through editing. Whole subplots got dropped, characters who appeared in promo material just never showed up in the movie, character motivations stopped making sense, plot points were retroactively changed, etc. Prometheus suffered from the same problem, if not to an even greater degree. It's like those movies where everybody cries "studio interference!" ... only in Ridley's case, he's the one who interferes constantly with his own movies.

From TFS:

TheMiddleRoad was making a joke about the "cadence" cadence.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

He has. For a long time. The problem is, apparently he doesn't like to pay them, and they're not aware of that before the fact.

Calculus 1 pretty much is the lowest-level math class at Berkeley. There's a math fundamentals refresher class, which is for people who are pretty much at pre-calculus level. But if they're saying students really don't understand fractions, it's a mystery how they even got into Berkeley. California has an amazing community college system that will teach you all the way down to basic algebra if you need it, and once you spend a couple of years there, there are easy avenues to transfer to the many high-quality California four-year schools. I sense the op-ed author has an axe of some kind to grind, because even without the SAT, it's not like admissions to Berkeley aren't competitive.

For me the visualization of direct collapse black hole formation is that there's still a huge mass of gas falling in, at the boundary of the new black hole nearly dense enough to direct collapse itself. The blowback would compress the inflow over the density edge and you get a whole cloud of black holes.

Well, technically, per international treaty, nobody can "have the best spots." Legally speaking, there is no real estate that can be owned on the Moon.

It's pretty cool that they're seeing where the supermassive black holes come from. The models of what's happening in there must be amazing.

MMmmm, I understand the sentiment. But I think you'll find that's not true. The Oracle database, alone, has a long history of engineering behind it that has not truly been replicated by other products. Of course, this is really only relevant for corner cases, but these exist, and they're usually folks who have big budgets (like governments, or large enterprises). And at that level, what they're paying for is not the technology as-shipped, but the support ... which means you have a "throat to choke" in terms of lawsuits, but could also mean building something that's proprietary for your business.

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

And that is a good phone.

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Add to this that all of the applications I use on macOS or Windows are either open source or at least cross-platform anyway. As long as the apps don't change, neither does the way I work; not really.

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?