I wonder if it's the case that the people being targeted having $100m+ in OpenAI stock options, and those options go away if they jump ship to Meta. That would explain why they might be sticking with OpenAI because they believe it can succeed.

Meta pulled in $160B last year, so a couple billion trying to buy the industry's top AI team isn't a terrible idea, though I'm not sure it will succeed. I think OpenAI has the lead, but the quality of LLMs are starting to converge and OpenAI's lead at this point is mostly mind share.

I was the OP!

I can certainly imagine a company getting a patent for a drug then later on realizing the drug was worthless as it didn't work, wasn't marketable, or there were simply much better options on the market

Canada isn't much, but across the world the fees could add up to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands per yer per drug? Maybe if the drug really is a bust you just let it expire.

It still seems bizarre considering that it must cost many millions to develop a drug to the point of being able to patent something. But I feel there must be a logical path to this screw up other than a manager out of nowhere trying to save a few hundred bucks (Canadian!).

Sure, but they requested a refund of the 2017 fee. I doubt this was some middle manager going completely insane. There had to be some kind of official process at work, even if that process went haywire.

They let it lapse in 2019, before COVID sent folks working from home.

This sounds more like a bureaucratic screw-up, unless at that time they didn't know the true market/application and legit thought the drug was so useless that it wasn't worth $450. That sounds bizarre, but among many drugs and countries those fees probably add up, maybe they do just let a bunch of the worthless ones expire.

It doesn't because the temperatures don't increase much over the scope of a single generation.

Remember how evolution works. The offspring who are best adapted to the current conditions have more offspring themselves.

So if the typical range the species operates at is 18-22C (made up numbers), but the current range is 19-23, then only the ones with mutations that let them operate at the higher temp will survive. The rest of the population will crash and the new population will be less robust because they've lost some genetic diversity and the genes that allow them to withstand that extra 1C might have secondary deleterious effects that would take many more generations to breed out.

Now you shift the range to 20-24C. Now you're going through that whole process again. You'll lose even more genetic diversity and be more dependent on whatever mutations allow them to live at that new temperature. Or new ecosystem that they can exist in.

Sure things will stabilize eventually as long as we don't turn into Venus or something. But in the meanwhile we're going to endure a mass extinction event.

That's not how evolution works.

Yes, life can adapt to higher temperatures, but as the article shows it's not instantaneous as the populations are crashing.

But the problem is the whole point of climate change is the climate won't stop changing. Even if they adapt to the current increase it will take time to do that, and for the populations to recover. But before that happens we'll be looking at another degree and the populations will crash again.

The longer the temperatures keep increasing the more the populations will decline and closer we get to the point of whole ecosystems collapsing.

I always figured a big part of that was expanded use of agricultural pesticides. The thing that gets me with this story is it's inside the nature preserves, so the answer isn't local pesticide use, it's something much larger.

Which does feel weirdly foreboding. I don't think most bugs have a particularly large range. Give them enough local plant life and they should thrive.

And the nature preserves should be pretty free of pesticides, meaning something else, like climate change, is causing the issues.

Where are you getting this from?

The support for reunification is 12%, not 40%. And there's no more "independent provinces" in China, you think the Taiwanese haven't noticed what happened to Hong Kong?

And China would not see it as "randomly invading a country", it would be retaking a rebel Chinese province. And China has been prepping to retake Taiwan for years, they even built a replica of the neighbourhood around Taiwan's Presidential palace to train their troops.

That's kind of my point. If China knew for sure that the US wouldn't intervene they'd invade Taiwan tomorrow. And if China launched a surprise invasion and conquered Taiwan in hours the US wants the option of backing down without a major loss of face.

So strategic ambiguity (plus the US doesn't want to formally ally with what China considers a rebel province) is the policy.

But if China invades Trump might still react, and that might escalate. So his non-backing of Ukraine makes the situation with China very dangerous.

Ukraine was a friendly nation moving closer to the west (and the US in particular). Not a formal ally, but it had formal interactions with NATO.

I don't think Taiwan is much different. They cooperate, but there's no formal obligation for the US to defend them and the official policy is ambiguity.

And this is one of those cases where I think the "simpleminded" analysis is the right one. Even dictators need to justify their actions to their populace, meaning international politics can be very low bandwidth. The rule "no wars of conquest" was a very simple and effective one. In Russia's eyes this got sullied by the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. And more likely by the US invasion of Iraq.

If Bush doesn't go into Iraq, and if he played the NATO expansion into Eastern Europe better, I'm not sure Georgia or Ukraine get invaded.

As to Taiwan, again, simplemindedness wins. How far the US goes to defend Taiwan depends heavily on political expectations. And if Ukraine demonstrates that the US has low resolve for defending a friendly nation then China will be encouraged to act, and that expectation of low resolve makes it harder for the US to sustain a defence of Taiwan.

That's why Biden ignored "strategic ambiguity" and said the US would defend Taiwan in 2022. To discourage the Chinese from deciding to invade during the distraction of Ukraine.

Giving a Nuclear armed nation an open pass to invade neighbours and launch wars of conquest inevitably leads to escalation. And that leads to Nuclear war.

The best way prevent Nuclear war is to arm and support Ukraine until Russia with draws, ideally back to the 2014 borders.

The best way to cause Nuclear war? Cut off Ukraine, let Russia take the whole lot. Then China realizes the US's resolve in particular is weak, so they take the one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invade Taiwan. And that's your shortest path to Nuclear war.

Problem solved.

> the CG actors will be indistinguishable from human actors.

Given that this video is already 5 years old, The Deeper Metrics of Christmas, Deep Fake Poem by Impressionist Jim Meskimen, I'd say we are already past the uncanny valley.

I could see a day that SteamOS runs natively on PCs. Linux under the hood, Proton on top to run Windows games.

---
Path of Exile 2 is a boring, tedious, Ruthless Souls-lite grindfest.