Yep, all the biggest from the dotcom era were companies that provided the proverbial pickaxes and shovels, and we *mostly* see that here too (Apple largely being unrelated, Google actually a bit, but not wholly in the game of actually training models, mostly the big players are mostly providing hardware or infrastructure to all these.

The big cautionary tales that everyone remembers like pets.com and webvan had silly high valuations, but no where near the heights attained by Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft of the time. It was just so many of those dotcoms sourcing from the vendors propping up their valuations, but the vendors remained viable businesses just as they were before.

Even OpenAI, the most hyped of the hyped purely AI plays is still relatively dwarfed by Meta. OpenAI would be an example of something more akin to the intrinsically dot-com startup. So OpenAI has probably done more for the market valuation of nVidia and Microsoft than themselves.

Nice, the Zenmuse L3 is $18k, the DJI Matrice 400 drone to carry it $11k. So it won't be long before surveyors and the like will be selling its services.

"The chances of someone being born with excellent skills is equal everywhere"

This is a nice rhetorical assertion, and one I'd like to agree with, but it's (unfortunately, for both the skilled and those in less advanced areas) provably false.

Skill directly correlates to IQ at a population level. The IQ of European-native peoples, Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish peoples is in the 100-105 range average. Africa, India, and the Middle East (to a lesser degree)? Not true at all. A full SD or more different. You've got a huge problem with inbreeding throughout India and the Middle East, for instance. This means that your average person is not going to have the same chance of being "born with excellent skills".

Of course, this is also not without discounting things like upbringing and environment, and it undoubtedly has some play in the matter.

As for this policy, it has absolutely nothing to do with letting the best and brightest immigrate. It's clearly reactionary due to unfettered refugees and other unskilled immigrants who can't speak the language, don't want to speak the language, and bring obscene levels of crime to what would otherwise be an idyllic socialist utopia.

In what ways do you find it superior?

For me, Grok has been pretty consistent at making some pretty wild code recommendations and not following specifications.

It's not like Gemini, which will get stuck implementing things and then get into a histrionic panic loop, but it's not nearly as good as gpt5.1 in implementing correct, complete code per specification.

Rats, as an architect I was hoping it might be useful to the general construction industry, but not at 3m accuracy.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

Of course pre-pandemic, it was around $1200/ounce, and it's been just insane since the pandemic set in until now...

True, still not at the peak, but speaking of adjusting for inflation...

Cisco from 1998 to 2001 had a crazy anomalous valuation that was the biggest of the big examples of the dot-com bubble run amok. That behemoth of a company had an inflation-adjusted market cap of about a trillion dollars. Microsoft was in same ballpark, with Oracle and Intel a bit less, but still big examples of the dotcom bubble.

This time around, Google is 3.8 trillion, Meta is $1.6 trillion, Microsoft is $3.6 trillion, Amazon is $2.5 trillion, nVidia is $4.4 trililon, Apple is $4.1 Trillion....

This bubble is just massively bigger than the dotcom bubble, with just one of the big players this time being valued even adjusting for inflation more than all the big players of the dotcom era put together, and there being a fair number more of them this time. It dwarfs the 2007 bubble in these top few players alone. When this pops, it's going to be mind numbingly severe fall..

Yeah, this is one area where LLM can certainly make one side more successful. A screw up means either the attack fails, which no worse than not trying or messing up the target system, which may not be the ideal outcome, but it's not like the attacker really cared that much about the target system...

You think the companies are deliberately keeping their models from being professional grade because of some sense of social responsibility?

That is hilarious. They are pushing as hard as they can and hyping it up even more than it is capable of performing. Any shortcomings on their part is not by lack of trying or somehow holding back.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.

If only the US had some sort of aid program designed to try to make conditions more favourable in the sort of countries that economic migrants tend to flee from. Maybe the US could call it "US Aid" or something, and give it a decent budget rather than gutting it to save $23 per American.

But the main issue is that the proper solution is obviously to have a formal, controlled, actually viable work visa system for economic migrants, distinct from asylum. The US economy is immensely boosted by millions of (generally awful) jobs being done by illegal immigrants at substandard wages (which are still vastly more than they could get at home), making US goods far more competitive than they would otherwise be and pumping huge sums of money into the economy. Formalize it. Basic worker protections but not the minimum wages or benefits that citizens get. You drop off an application for a sponsoring company, and so long as you're employed with them and not causing problems, you can stay. Fired, laid off, or quit, and you go back to your country (where you can reapply for a different job). You can also promote maquiladoras, wherein immigrants are also working for your companies, but the labour is being done across the border (but the goods move freely without tariffs, so it's like having the work done in your country).

(I find it hilarious hearing people like Vance talking about how he'll bring housing costs down by kicking out immigrants, freeing up housing. Um, dude, exactly who do you think it is that builds the housing in much of the US?)

"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...