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.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Can't wait until AI makes a security hole and a billion dollars' worth of cryptocurrency disappears overnight.