It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

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.

"How might the attorney general address these issues?"

By achieving enough name recognition in the general population to win a US House or US Senate election and move to Northern Virginia for the rest of his life, returning "home" to Alabama only for reelection campaigns.

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.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Good point!

Darl McBride used to refer to the "spiffy agent technology" that was going to find the allegedly infringing code, so that particular grift is nothing new.

I am old and my sight grows dim, but I am pretty sure this all happened before the first 0.01 version of Linux was released.

"If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. "

That was the neighborhood advice going around our area 1-2 years ago. I myself was skeptical that mail theft was going on as I had dealt with the Postal Police when managing an e-commerce site and I knew they are very good at finding things like this. Unfortunately it turned out (1) I was wrong: there was mail theft going on in our neighborhood but (2) everyone else was wrong too: the mail wasn't being stolen from blue boxes; it was being lifted from the bins behind the slot in our postal service center. The perps were eventually caught but it took far longer than I would have thought.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.

Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?

Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.

(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)