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.

I wrote a compiler for an ObjC-like language (with less brackets), which can produce binaries for any of {Mac, Windows, Linux, WASM, Arm A9 (Zynq), m68k or 6502} running on any of {Mac, Windows, Linux}. So you can produce a dev-signed Mac binary on a Linux box. I’m just going through extending that output range to mobile {Android, iOS} and I’ll release it as open source.

The compiler docs for the language (xc) are at https://compile-xc.org/ - feel free to browse.

I didn’t think getting the signing working for Mac/iOS was terribly hard.

Meanwhile I also own a Tesla, and am using a CarPlay adapter with it. Maps is better, particularly lane guidance and actually telling me which motorway junction number I'm coming off at. I can share an ETA with my contacts. I can listen to subscriber-only (paid) Podcasts. I can use WhatsApp (via voice of course), something sadly essential in the UK as the vast majority use that. I can listen to audiobooks from other than Audible. I can use the BBC Sounds app. I can...

You get the idea. I agree with you about integration - the time I will use the built-in map is if I'm on a longer journey that needs charging on the way, or if the journey is so short that none of the above really matters.

Personally I hope the rumours about CarPlay integration being worked on by Tesla are true, although I'd be surprised I must admit. But for me - works well.

Same argument, govt subsidies for buggy whips. The govt needs to set these rules for the benefit of the people, not to support companies trying to keep selling obsolete and uncompetitive legacy technology products.

I'd guess, but stressing guess and agree would need to be studied, that your bias would be correct. I'm not necessarily a fan of the every single person's study plan is different school of thought, and think there's a lot to be gained from structure.

On the socialising I'm not quite so sure though - it's definitely changed the nature of it though. My 'kids' (now all adults, youngest about to enter final year of university) socialising all the time on-line. Voice chats with friends, Discord is how they organise meeting up etc.. They've also all three kept a healthy in-person socialisation side too, which is the part I was initially worried by when I saw this panning out over several years. I think that last bit is key - if you can balance both, then you get the benefits of going out with your friends with also the benefits of having a wider geographical friend base and the ability to stay in touch more easily.

Perhaps read the actual comment? I am agreeing with the study - quoted directly: ""The findings suggest that screen time can support children's and adolescents' cognitive processing. Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," states Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko from the University of Jyvaskyla.".

Yes, it's nice to see a study backing it of course but this has been intuitively obvious for a while. The "screen time is killing our kids!" crowd is just the latest generational re-incarnation of the "computer games are killing our kids" from the 1980s, or "Dungeons and Dragons is killing our kids!" from the late 70s through the 80s, "TV is killing our kids!"...right back to Socrates moaning about writing. Just another moral panic.

Since we're in 80s mode, let's quote The Karate Kid: "concentrate on quality of what you know, not quantity". It's the nature of the screen time that's important, not necessarily the raw bulk. Are you interacting with people online, are you reading stuff? Are you watching some videos where you learn some things as well as just the latest cat videos or TikTok dance? In short, are you using the screen as a portal to the generalities of life instead of just watching brainrot all day every day?

I suspect knowing that will be key to whether the screen time is hurting or helping. And as ever, a balance is required. 100% screen and no in-person interactions is obviously harmful, provably so thanks to the pandemic providing us with data here. I'd also posit that 100% outside and in-person will be good, but not as rounded as a decent mix between the two since you gain access to different experiences online.

At first, I was going to question why environmentalists don't go batshit crazy over these launches. But then, I did some quick research and found that, in comparison, automobile emissions dominate global transport emissions by orders of magnitude. It turns out that despite the impressive exhaust volume from these launches, the global spaceflight industry accounts for only a tiny fraction of global combustion emissions. Obviously, there are many factors, but I've questioned this for decades, and the reality surprised me.

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.

Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

Indeed... alpine touring is seemingly more en vogue these days.

I do like the idea of building a community sourced govt official tracking network. I'm sick of govt officials, both elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, passing and implementing laws that they don't feel should apply to them.

I wouldn't favor a system that tracks cops due to the specific hazards they already face daily, but I acknowledge that some people would believe that turnabout is fair play.