Yeah, well hindsight is always easy..

China is a famously closed ecosystem. Li Keqiang -- a CPP provincial secretary -- candidly said in 2007 that CCP numbers are "man-made and therefore unreliable". on. People interested in measuring China's economy use proxies, which has become an academic cottage industry. In 2020, China famously cut its population by 200 million (!!!) people.

Anyone who takes Chinese numbers at face value is foolish, because the CCP doesn't do that themselves.

Almost all GM cars are built in China. GM basically gave all their technology away for the privilege of doing this. My guess is that these new Chinese cars will be reliable.

The CCPs model is "State Capitalism", which is a far cry from free markets. It's really a variant of socialism; however, that term is overloaded, so we use the term "State Capitalism" for the variant of socialism where the government has the "commanding heights".

The West does massive of amount of government funded R&D. Eg., the NIH, and the NSF.

Precisely. The CCP has relied on widespread financial repression of its citizens to build an impressive industrial base. The key question is this: if Chinese citizens do not exchange exports for imports, then what is the point? It is economically incoherent. China will accrue a massive amount of foreign currency, and then what? Bathe in it while it deflates away?

Economic imbalances have a funny way of correcting themselves eventually. When this happens, China will discover that foreigners can moderate their appetites or find alternatives. The same cannot be said for factories and their workers.

Excellent analysis from economics professor Patrick Boyle.

You are pushing direct lies. France critically depends on the European grid and has in the recent past needed to buy enough electricity to drive up prices all over Europe.

Yes. Trump has no understanding of how reality works. He only can (somewhat, barely staying out of prison) navigate being rich and powerful. He is not even an accomplished liar because he believes the nonsense he claims. But while Trump tries to only give positions to people even dumber and more disconnected than he is, he is failing at that as well and some people in his administration have more insight that he has. They just have no honor or integrity.

I do hope a significant fraction of his supporters (and hence enablers) are recoverable. Because if they are not, they represent a severe long-term problem. And while I think the only path the US has left is into the 2nd world, this will go better and recovery will be more likely and faster if many of the cultists revert to being ordinary people instead of fanatics.

It is not a surprise they overlooked this aspect. They themselves never use data. They already know how things are and if some facts disagree, it is obviously people falsifying data or lying. Hence these complete cretins do not actually understand what the value of real data is. And hence they could not even imagine there are other uses to this real data, because they are convinced all that data is fake anyways.

Incidentally, this little problem is also why they cannot do anything right. Doing things right requires seeing reality. They are not capable of doing that and neither are most of their supporters.

A technology with still zero deployed regular installations, no real prototypes (China has one pebble-bed one which I gather is not what was ordered here and Russia has some sub-reactors on a barge, which you cannot even get approved in the west, both with no public cost figures) not even any real assurance it will even work and they managed to sell three to one customer? That is a great success for marketing and a black day for engineering that now has to deliver on promises that are essentially hot air.

Incompetence at its finest!

Could, may, etc. does not make for useful predictions. And while resilience to hardware failure sounds nice, the things degraded by ageing are the higher-power elements, like com line drivers. These give you full-chip loss and they are relatively homogenous in effect, i.e. they will take out almost all your hardware in a relatively short time.

On the minus-side, LLM results look less and less valuable every day as actual research (not just gut-feelings and hype) starts to roll in.

In theory, your professor was right. In practice, not so much. The thing is theory requires perfect proofs. Practice only "good enough" ones. (We will ignore that the one-time-pad is mathematically proven secure, because it has little practical relevance...)

So that state of things is that ElGamal has a security proof relying on an unproven assumption that is very likely true. RSA is much weaker on the theory side and current block ciphers or crypto-hashes are even weaker on the proof side.

As to QC, the problem is that effort seems to scale exponentially with qbit numbers and (!) computation length. That means there are not very large sizes of computations they will never scale to. And, for example, doing RSA 40960 (i.e. 10x larger than the larges typically used today) is not that much of a problem. The second problem is that there is no quantum computation in existence that actually conclusively proofs it even works. The theory may well turn out to be a tiny bit inexact and then everything fails. And "quantum insecure" does not matter one bit if the machine for it cannot be built.

As to QC algorithms, block ciphers are safe, hash functions are safe, some other things may be as well. The reason is the compute mechanism cannot really break them (half bit length for block-ciphers, for example, still completely infeasible to attack if that is 100 bits remaining or so).

Unfortunately, the CRA only goes active end of 2027.

Shares get taxed on price, not on value.