If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

Chinese models are open source and open weights, so even if they put in all kinds of ideological filters into their models, these filters are easy to remove if you run the models on your own hardware. If Slashdot stands for anything, it is to root for open source alternatives, which now - weirdly - means rooting for China's AI projects. If the CCP get spooked and ruins this good thing, that would be bad for all the people, not just for the Chinese people.

Let's go Slashdot oldsters, with our low-six-figure account numbers, making Monty Python jokes! Maybe 37 is not old, but we are! Hahahaa! Has it been The Year of Lunux on the Desktop yet? Maybe 2026 will be it!

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.

I agree with you about NATO states paying for mercenaries to defend Ukraine. There are many experienced fighters in Africa and the Middle East, and it's likely that their services could be bought at a reasonable price. Without more soldiers in the field, Ukraine's front is doomed to collapse.

I love AI and I would and could pay for it if I had to, but why would I pick OpenAI to pay? Their product is not really better than their competitors' products, and sometimes it's clearly worse. They have the advantage of being the first mover in their field, and that gives them inertia with low-information customers - the new AOL.com. But apart from that, they have huge debts and not much else to distinguish them. Their best employees had left, and their former partners have become wary of the way they operate. Projections of their future profitability must be based on the expectation that their AI will figure out some better business plan than what the OpenAI humans have come up with!

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

It was a flash in the panhandle.

Thanks, I'll be here til Thursday. Oh wait, it's Friday. Don't eat the veal, it's gone bad.

It is going to evaporate, slowly....

You know Blender is free open source software, right? Slashdot even helped it to become free and open source many years ago.

The fact that this was modded up as "Interesting" instead of funny is pretty fucking scary. Of course, now watch my comment will be modded up as funny because that's par for the course these days.

I started playing Mines recently, which is just a plain old free open source game from the repos.
Speaking of which....

Embrace
Extend
Extinguish <=== You are here