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.

Because he is not (currently) a dictator, he can't make his own laws. He's limited in what he can do.

Tariffs are one of the few things in which he is mostly able to do unilaterally. When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

It has happened under both.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

My first thought was that there must be larger planes that are not 106 feet and that they were excluding all planes that are not 106 feet when they claim to have the largest. Sort of like "the biggest fish in this tiny little pond"

I wonder what the largest is if they don't restrict it to just the 106 foot ones.

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.

https://xkcd.com/810/

I hate creating Powerpoint slides, so I find it genuinely useful that I can type a few sentences or paragraphs into Copilot and it will do 100% of the slide creation and revision. It'll even pull content from documents.

I recently told it something along the lines of: pull a list of the APIs from this specification and create a slide summarizing the purpose of each API. APIs X and Y aren't mature yet, indicate that on the slide. API Z is the current area of focus.

It created a very professional looking slide with all the APIs summarized and color coded, with a legend for the color codes. A few more paragraphs of text resulted in more slides providing a solid overview of what's been done, what's in progress and what our targets are.

Only a few people need to actually read the API documents from start to finish. A much larger group of people need to be kept informed as quickly and briefly as possible of what the status and progress is.

I can verbally describe something to people, but they'll forget it immediately. I can type up a lengthy text description, but they won't read it. If AI can turn my text into a picture, they'll likely remember it.

Free speech includes lying.

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.

What are you under the impression happens two times per year? The time of sunrise and sunset changes 365 times per year (366 in leap years).

Why not change the clocks four times per year? Or monthly? Or weekly? Answer: because that would be stupid, just like changing the clocks twice per year is stupid. Just like the US and Europe changing the clocks weeks apart every spring and every fall is stupid.

There is no natural event that happens twice per year that corresponds to changing clocks twice per year. Sunrise and sunset times change every day and every latitude. It's absurd to think that there's a particular day in the spring and another particular day in the fall when the clocks need to be changed by exactly one hour.

Many countries do not change the clocks at all, so every year we go through this sequence of Europe changing their clocks, offsetting meeting times with the US and Asia, then the US changing their clocks, resynchronizing with Europe while simultaneously offsetting with respect to Asia. It's just stupid. And twice every year, the people in Asia observe the stupidity of Europeans and Americans (though I suppose they probably observe that more often than twice a year, just in different contexts)

Merit should always consider strictly value.

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.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.