Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

Yeah, if every other airline makes theirs ai friendly. United will not get those bookings.

Counter point, does united want those bookings?

I don't' know. It looks like they are afraid that these are bargain hunters who would at best buy a ticket near cost for them. And they make most of their money off of branded credit cards.

Counter point, right now people using AI to book travel are sophisticated and on the wealthier side of things. I'm guessing United is just stepping back to see how they can better monetize ai agents use of their systems. Right now they can't show them adds or anything the end user will see, but maybe they could create a MCP server for dealing with them that would also offer deals including that credit card sign up promotion that actually earns them money.

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.

If you've never had a boss like this -- a lazy narcissist -- you're lucky. But if you have, the pattern is familiar and unmistakable:

* Doesn't understand the issues.

* Doesn't do his homework.

* Believes he's a genius whose "gut" overrules people who do understand and do do their homework.

* Plays his subordinates off against one another.

* Highly susceptible to information from random sources: thing he saw on TV, or heard on the golf course.

* Not particularly fussed about contradicting himself because he doesn't care about being right, but does care about being in charge.

* The more chaotic he can make things, the more in charge he feels.

* Has a cynical view of the people he works for but has a genuine gift for flattery when it suits his purposes.

Once you've seen this up close it's really obvious when you come across it again. You can't *not* listen to a lazy narcissist boss because he absolutely will try the stupid shit he says he will. But you can't count on him either, because he has no commitment to anything other than how he looks and feels *right now*.

Neither. Commerce didn't drop it, it got taken away and given to DoJ, but not because Commerce couldn't handle the invetigation of where the chips were going. The case goes to DoJ because we're talking about criminal charges of smuggling, corporate fraud, violation of national security statutes. Also because the Commerce investigation was tained by potential political interference. And possibly because it ran afoul of a counterintelligence operations siloed in the DoJ -- although by this point the cat is so out of the bag everyone must assume they've got a FISA wiretap warrant on them.

However, the *effect* may be to slow the progress of the investigation and delay any actions being taken.

The first reason for this is that criminal investigations are slower, the standards of proof higher, and potentially involve a criminal trial. Commerce could simply make an administrative law determination that put Megaspeed on some shit list and come to some kind of agreement with NVIDIA.

The second reason is that putting this into DoJ's hands is putting it into a department that has had staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge, strife between career personnel and political appointees, and difficulty replacing lost employees. It's also led by lame-duck appointees, facing turnover in the next administration. So if they don't make progress in the next two years, allowing for transition delays, it could be years before anything gets accomplished. By then a lot of people will have left their jobs, memories will get hazy, evidence will go missing, and defensive positions constructed.

So while the investigation hasn't been *killed*; it has been delayed so long that it's effectively in suspended animation. It's not possible for Commerce to sanction anyone because the investigation is out of their hands.

No, it's called "Evidencing The Fact That It's A Widespread Shorthand" (in specific, among Wikipedians, where it's in official terminology as well), a widespread usage that was falsely claimed to not exist.

(I'll also take this opportunity to note: rage about the use of shorthand on "copyvio", but not a word about "algos")

Shorthand should be something that other people actually use

Okay Felicia.

TL/DR: "copyvio" is the Wikipedia-standard shorthand for copyright violation, used both in direct speech and in official templates. If a person says "copyvio", they've probably spent a lot of time hanging out at Wikipedia, where copyright violation is a frequent topic of discussion.

I'm sorry if shorthand offends your sensibilities. Should I spell out all shorthand for you? Maybe make sure I only use emdashes instead of "-" while I'm at it?

Oh, also, as pointed out further downthread, any LLM with a training cutoff before the license change date is pretty much assured to be okay for use in a cleanroom implementation. Copyright holders cannot make retroactive copyright changes, and open source licenses generally explicitly grant rights in perpetuity anyway. The threat would be new code. But since the cleanroom side has never seen that new code (it was released after the training date), it remains untainted. And training cutoffs generally lag model releases by many months, so not only should all current models be in the clear, but most next-gen models as well (subject to cutoff date verification, and various kinds of nuance such as avoiding RAG, potential post-training contamination, etc - but there's easy ways to guarantee these aren't problems that are present)

First off, you can always just use a LLM with an open training dataset (OLMo, Pythia, etc) to prove that the data isn't in it, and have that handle the "clean" side of the equation.

Secondly, you are under the mistaken impression that a LLM that has been exposed (which, BTW, does not mean "memorized", or even any rough understandings of the workings - ask the LLM (ideally an abliterated one to avoid refusals) to reproduce the original code verbatim, it'll almost certainly fail badly) automatically fails in such a suit. It does not. There is no such thing as "homeopathic copyright contamination". Copyvio requires substantial similarity. LLMs will tend to have common algos memorized, but those are the very things that tend to be simultaneously not copyrightable.

The cleanroom is an evidentiary shield, not a pillar of copyright law. If you can prove that the cleanroom team had no access to the original, then you can prove that they didn't copy it, and potentially get summary judgement. If you can't prove that, that doesn't mean that it's not copyvio, it just means that you instead have to focus on substantial-similarity defenses. Access without substantial similiarity is not copyvio. If you read an open-source codebase, close it, and then later write a new program purely on your own that looks nothing like the original, you had "access", but still did not infringe. The same applies to LLMs - but even moreso, because humans are much better at learning from brief, limited exposures to content than LLMs are. A court will usually apply an "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test - they break the code down into layers (source code, parameters, architecture, algos, etc) (abstraction), remove everything that copyright law does not protect (ideas and common algos, things where there's only a limited number of ways to possibly do it, etc) (filtration), and then compare the creative expression that remains to see if there exists sufficient similarity to count as infringement. It is highly unlikely that a LLM-implemented version will fail that.

(That said, you're talking about a long, expensive legal battle if you get to that point, so you obviously prefer to be able to get summary judgement if you can)

What the GP described is known as a cleanroom implementation, and it's perfectly legal, and has been done many times in ways that have been upheld by the courts. The dividing line, by and large, is that the documentation has to be flexible enough that there's multiple potential ways it could be implemented, that you're not just transforming a code flow into "text pseudocode" and back. It doesn't matter if, by chance, it looks like the original - only that there were multiple means by which it could have been done under the specification produced.

There's also some various process-specific factors you need to manage - full separation of the teardown and cleanroom-implementation teams, a judge filtering all communications (with an audit trail) back and forth between the teams to make sure that they meet legal standards of separation, things of that nature. But a competent LLM can help set up the process and run each agent for each role in its own isolated context.