Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

I guess it is true that the exact wording of the amendment says that states can be as restrictive as they want on alcohol, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can be more lenient than the feds.

While your general argument has merit, alcohol is a bad example because states' control over that particular substance is explicitly granted in the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.

Wait... you're going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (founded in 2003, signed into law by George W. Bush) and you're shocked that there was - somewhere in the 400k square foot building - a chart of stereotypes about white people next to a chart of stereotypes about black people?

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'm sure you'd be welcome if you ever wanted to - you're already ideologically highly aligned (and never really were with the US...) :) Honestly, economically and geopolitically it'd be a very strong alliance for both parties, as what Canada offers vs. what it needs is a good match for what the EU offers vs. what it needs. Though admittedly both parties need to rearm fast - but the EU has a lot more resources to do that than Canada has on its own. Canada has raw materials, EU needs them. Canadian automakers/parts suppliers need an alternative market, EU can provide it, etc.

Shifting eastward wouldn't be frictionless - for example, your oil infrastructure is designed to send it south, not to ports that can export it to the east, and European refineries would need to set up to process it, for example. But it's pretty clear that the current status quo can no longer be relied on, as the US is intent on extortion.

They're certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to "How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?") grumble about how they're afraid to use the phrase "diversity of exoplanets" in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word "diversity" will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was "Spell it 'divers' and throw in the occasional 'thou art' and 'exeunt' " ;) )

"another human - like me"

Serious Zalgon 26 McGee vibes there ;)

Yes, I'm sure children in poor countries who may or may not read English are desperate to get ahold of, say, an obscure 1993 book on VCR repair.

These are books that are unsold for a reason.

It's a testament to the interplay of words that forms the tapestry we call language!

But leaving out a comma can certainly make sentences more fun ;)

Anyway, let's eat Grandma.

For some definition of 'they', sure, there's always *someone* paranoid about the scenario.

However there's a fair amount more credible supposition over this one. Trump's sore loser reaction has paved the way for some dangerous moves.

In 2020, he only went to interfere *after* the fact, but he clearly interfered. When the results betrayed him, he sought to overturn them and when that failed he tried to ignore the electors and use their own anyway and as that failed he tried to get Pence to reject the election and as that failed he incited a mom to try to disrupt the proceedings. He learned that in a fair game he actually could lose and that was unacceptable and he was willing to do whatever it takes to replace a loss with a win.

Now he and opportunistic cohorts are already much more proactive about it. Every reason to anticipate any plausible excuse to rig or discard the elections as he has proven himself already willing to do so and is surrounded by a much more all-in administration than his first term. Already trying to mess with mail-in, already openly rigged the representative maps, already been working ICE and national guard troops to get the hang of domestic military operations. Stephen Miller once basically publicly fantasized about sending republican controlled national guard into democratic states against their will to make them bend to his will.

I do anticipate the election will be *held* and if and only if the results are a loss will they try anything like an 'emergency', but I absolutely expect ICE and national guards to be doing operations around strategic polling sites. Ostensibly about immigration or crime, but with the oh so coincidental side effect of voter suppression.

I get the feeling that Zuck is in a similar boat to Richard Dawkins and Kent Overstreet, who have gone off the deep end and believe they have LLMs which are effectively equivalent to human companionship.

Remember Zuck celebrated that people could have AI "friends" and employees could talk to AI impersonations of their management and it would be just as good as actually getting to talk to management.

Nothing quite as publicly really off the deep end as Overstreet and Dawkins (who both seem to have decided that their favored LLMs must be 'girls', which strongly suggests they needed to gender it to make their "crush" make sense for them), with Overstreet getting extra creepy points for insisting his LLM is essentially a teenage girl. I would not be surprised if he at least more privately holds similar feelings and thus doesn't view this as "apocalyptic" bad.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.