This is the one I have my eyes on, though I'd spend money if someone had packaged that with nice hardware for a complete set that I don't need to spend three days to set up.

Run yourself *on normal hardware*? Yeah, there's a pretty big gulf between that and a frontier model.

It's marketing as they try to stay relevant in the new AI era. Standard playbook but this time they have no control of the players because their OS is not relevant.
When they'd just announced Maia 200 earlier this year and now the 300 which the claim is that it's faster than the Maia 200 it's fluff and puffing hopping to be noticed and seen as 'trying".

After all, they're claiming it'll be used in their own data centers and nothing more. And I'm sure Microsoft doesn't like being just another line item on NVidia's purchasers list.
LoB

The USA has its places with redneck barbarians who don't think about anyone besides themselves, and those tend to be the type that support Trump.

It's not about the specific "BioPykrete" example, it's the technique that's interesting: using proteins to bridge dissimilar materials in composites. It's using them in a way that's sort of like how an emulsifier lets you bridge lipophilic and hydrophilic compounds

Think, say, plastic-ceramic or plastic-metal composites. We can do these today (say, Colorfabb Bronzefill 3d printing filament), but the addition of ceramic or metallic particles makes the material properties generally worse, not better. The plastic just does not bond well to the particles; you have to significantly limit the percentage of metal or ceramic in your mix, and it makes them much harder to work. But what if they *did* bound well? You could easily produce materials with significantly boosted strength, abrasion resistance, etc, but with the low-temperature workability of plastics (note: they'd probably have to be thermoset, not thermoplastic, or low-temperature thermoplastics; proteins have heat survivability limits)

And why stop at metals and ceramics? You could literally just use "dust", just ordinary mineral dusts (clays, silt, etc) as a bulk filler in plastics, yet instead of ending up with a weaker product than working with pure plastic, you'd end up with a stronger one.

Maybe you don't even need a plastic. Maybe you can do what they're doing and bridge cellulose to an inorganic material? Then you're *really* operating on waste. Ice has the advantage of a low melting point in this situation, letting you use that component as a fluid - but cellulose can be dissolved in a number of substances, so perhaps you mix a cellulose-protein slurry with metal or mineral powders and then vaporize/recover the solvent?

Or even forgetting "novel" products, what about conventional composites? If you can bridge high-tensile fibres (such as carbon fibre) better to the polymer matrix that they're in, then you can help eliminate one of the main failure mechanisms of said composites, as well as making the behavior far more predictable. Because like metals (and unlike ceramics), a protein-bridged compound shouldn't be brittle; breaking one bond shouldn't introduce a discontinuity (like a ceramic), it should just reconnect after breakage (like a metal). Such composites should have ductility.

I don't know how widely applicable this will be, but technology that helps bridge dissimilar compounds is nothing to scoff at. And today we have tools like AlphaFold to assist with the design

As for the caveats:

* The concept of coupling agents is also not new, we already use various coupling agents to bond plastic to metal particles in metal-plastic composites and the like - they're just not great at their jobs.

* The aforementioned temperature limits

* Potential production challenges (though industrial enzymes are as cheap as like $15-50/kg, so seems viable?)

* Other coupling agents may offer better advantages; it's not a static field.

Without buying into the conspiracy theory, but this is why I dislike these short lifetimes. It makes my otherwise 100% autonomous website dependent on an external party. I think I'll go back to also offer the site on unencrypted http instead of making an https redirect.

That algorithm should come with a GLP-1 licensure.

I haven't looked up the history, but I would imagine that the "XL" is for the fact that it can handle images up to 1B x 1B pixels (1 exapixel).

Both lossy and lossless, and so much more.

It's this.

And on the compression side, there's a lot of really cool stuff that lets it happen. For example, it dynamically resizes the blocks from 2x2 to 256x256, and they don't even have to be square. It may apply DCT in one, AFAS in another, etc - whatever is most efficient. It uses edge preserving filters to keep the edges of features clean. It can draw in splines and clone regions from one part of an image to another. Where it has to throw away high frequency noise (film grain, noisy textures, etc), it statistically samples the properties of the noise and saves that, and then regenerates equivalent noise. In "busy" areas, like say tree bark or whatnot (where the human eye isn't good at discerning changes), it throws away more precision there, and instead allocates it to details located in fragile flat areas, such as skin and shadows, that the eye is attracted to. It works in default in XYB colour space, based on the actual interactions of the cones in the eye, so it can aggressively quantize things which the brain cannot detect. And in the choice between fast but not-great Huffman coding vs. better but slow and patent-encumbered arithmetic coding, they instead use rANS, which is nearly as fast as Huffman but as efficient as arithmetic coding, and faces no patent challenges. Which is also why you can take a legacy JPEG and rapidly losslessly reincode as JPEG-XL and get a file that's ~20% smaller - you're swapping Huffman for rANS.

(That's the lossy mode - there's also a dedicated lossless mode)

I agree, the real danger of this is that the documentation requirements will swiftly become so complex and verbose that only an AI can write them, and only an AI can read them. Humans will no longer even know what the effect of the documentation requirements is, they can only hope some of the remaining original purpose (keep the reactor safe) survives the AI rewrite.

There are layers to the issue beyond just the purchase price. It is known that the Chinese government is subsidizing the manufacture of EVs to sell them at a price that others can't compete with. It's not fair competition in that regard if a country is fully subsidizing the manufacture of goods to flood foreign markets. It may be good for consumers, but from that perspective, tariffs DO make sense. Also, China has blocked imports of many goods just to protect their domestic companies, which also skews things. So, putting tariffs in place, and limiting imports of select items DOES make sense.

Free market being equal, then sure, tariffs aren't needed, but if the US government 15 years ago started flooding foreign markets with goods at below the cost to manufacture, then you would have seen other countries using tariffs and import limits as well.

Then you have the other side, those who live in areas with a very low population density are clueless about the needs of more densely populated areas, and then can't understand the need for things like homeless shelters, sewers, and trash pickup. When you don't understand that cities need services, many end up as these conservatives who don't even see a benefit to EVs.

Ahem

Don't we all! Hard drives, RAM, *and* GPUs, I'm in the market for it all.

I also want to buy silver-tin alloy for casting, and hey, what do you know, silver and tin are also both at astronomical prices due to in no small part the AI boom.

At one point you have to just stop waiting. Prices could start falling tomorrow, but then again, that could have been said at any point for the past several years.