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.

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.

But WE'RE MICROSOFT, and we've decided that YOU WILL GO HERE today!

All our extremely cherry picked analytics data says it's what you really want, deep down, and you KNOW IT, so stop complaining! (Honestly, this is just like the whole "you got rid of our start menu" thing all over again-- Cant you people ACCEPT the new future of computing?!)

1) "smaller" = "Bigger" (in terms of sales, and modern utility. This is exactly what I meant, UV Light has a threshold over which the structures are smaller than the wavelengths you are trying to use to make them. this means you have to use some kind of mask technology, and you get strange quantum effects from the photons doing things photons do when they are restricted by tiny masks.

2) You are forgetting something here, to make a tortured inference that doesnt really fit anyway. Most of the technology used in a fab is either precision electronics (needed to control the energizing source's true positioning to efficiently control its beam), which you can do with less sophisticated chips than the ones you are making. The inverse creates a chicken and egg problem, and is nonsense. You dont need 2nm tech to make 2nm tech. You can make 2nm chips with 14nm ones though. The knowledge of how to make and run fab machines is not to be discredited-- Japan's big LED rise came from a single guy repeatedly rebuilding and tinkering with a vapor deposition machine at a university in the US, where he was treated like ass, because he didn;t have a pHD. DO NOT MAKE THAT MISTAKE TOO.

3) It is not a breakthrough. It's a milestone on independent progress that is occurring at a very quick pace. Again, you are proudly crowing about how big your old growth forest is, while discounting how quickly your competition is doing forestry work.

Correct. The correct response is to massively build out the west's capabilities, and drive down china's market cornering potential.

the problem is that the western countries seem hell bent on doing this the most grift-heavy ways possible, sabotaging every effort, and then wondering why none of those efforts actually produced useful chipfabs--- (at least on one side of the coin)

While simultaneously nodding cheekily to the above, siphoning off every last dollar of grift, purposefully refusing to create local chipfabs (because western workers are too expensive! OUR PROFITS!), and pretending that technological gatekeeping and effective monopolies on supplies are in any tangible way feasible. (On the other.)

China's advancements might be small, but they are meaningful.

Ours? Look big on paper, but mostly just waste time.

I seem to remember a fable about a tortoise and a rabbit written by some greek guy.... Maybe it's my imagination.

UV has a top limit, sure. But homegrowing that tech expands what they can do *now*, builds local knowhow on building fab machines, and primes them to not be as stymied when they move on to building more recent forms of lithography. (You cannot cut off their supply of asics to prevent the manufacture of better fabs)

You kids cant see the forest for the trees, complaining about the saplings china is planting being small, while croaking pridefully about how big your own trees are.

In time, china will dominate chipfab.

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.

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.

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.

JIT emulation is also interpreted code. Not everything that is interpreted code is something high level, like javascript or python.

As for apple's relaxation of interpreted code, they still put the kabosh on most of the more useful applications of it.

Like JIT.
https://oatmealdome.me/blog/wh...

which is why I can still do more with my ancient pixel 4A, than you kids can do with your latest edition ipad/phone.

Apple's walled garden comes at a price.

I'll definitely give you these ones.

PDF manipulation on Android is *TRASH*, and windows 11 is a horrible operating system, that wants very much to treat you very poorly.

Sadly, device makers really *REALLY* do not want to open up their tablets for Linux like they should. Touch interface on linux might be a bit rough, but there are much better tools for office productivity and PDF manipulation for linux, than for either windows or android.

I just dont feel that I would be willing to fork out the extra dough for an apple tablet, where I would lose all manner of other functionality, just for PDF and office tasks.

While support is limited to a handful of models, due to a shortage of skilled maintainers, there are a few android tablets that support lineage OS, or postmarket OS.

Like OnePlus tablets, and Galaxy series tablets from samsung.
Good support from LineageOS for those. The Galaxy Tab A7, from 6 years ago, *IS STILL GETTING UPDATES* from Lineage, for instance.

LineageOS on android devices push their service lives *WAAAY* past what is normally doable. My now very ancient Pixel 4A is *STILL* getting monthly updates via LineageOS, for instance.

"nothing gets fixed"
Say again? What part of Monthly Updates did you not understand?

*IPv6 support*
My phone supports it natively. Dunno what you are going on about.

*superior AI*
This is a matter of personal preference, and I will assert that my preference trumps yours, when it comes to the device that *I* am using. Thank you very, very much.

*Able to play older games*
I can sideload on old android 2.x games on my phone fine-- Oh, wait, I said sideload, Thats a thing apple products cant do, isn't it? Awww.

*Unless they are old mac games, ironically*
Must really suck that Apple wont let you run interpreted code, huh? As for myself, I can run all kinds of stuff. Emulated game consoles, Winlator for older windows titles, BasiliskII for that classic mac experience you mentioned, ADosBox for classic DOS titles, all manner of stuff. Real shame apple doesn't let *ANY* of that play on their products!

*Able to use UNIX tools because its UNIX*
You do know that you can in fact get access to the console, without rooting, on android devices, right? There's any number of solutions for that, of varying quality, from the playstore-- and if you dont like any of those, you can sideload (Ohh--- there it is again!) F-DROID and get direct-compiled FOSS tools.

*Superior Hardware*
In what ways, exactly? They are all sealed units that you cant easily open, All have unremovable batteries, etc. If you mean "It has an alumalloy frame", I hate to burst your bubble, but there are plenty of such tablets in the android offering space. A great many android devices are built around very mature 3D rendering capable graphics chips as well, so when you load up things like Winlator, you can actually do D3D games on them. Not terribly well, since its ARM64 emulating an X86-64 CPU, but good enough for most things that you would actually find pleasurable to play on a tablet form factor.

*High performance graphically and otherwise for the cost*
Look above in the comments for how a savvy buyer saved over 1000$ buying an android tablet, then get back to me on that.

It also blocks all those dildo popup ads when I'm looking for pirate software!

Thank goodness for Texas!

No, SystemD wants to grow up into a REAL despotic gatekeeping process that locks you out of your own hardware for idiotic reasons that only its developer thinks are important, just like the big corporate offerings do!

Its just a humble bit of free software with big dreams! Wont you love it?

[massive sarcasm]

Less smarmy, I feel that this is just more of the same basic mindset from the systemD development folks. They have yet to find an onerous feature that they have been unwilling to embrace, and then angrily evangelize for.

"oh, but California said they want this done-- Nevermind that they explicitly exempted FOSS projects and OSes, That's not important, we are doing our best to satisfy this new legal requirement! Yes! This requirement that we dont actually have to follow! We need to follow it! Yes! We're doing our part!"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

For clarity.

But CITIZEN! THAT is an OBSTACLE to police investigations!

Don't you want police to investigate crimes!?
You aren't SOFT ON CRIME, are you!? Only criminals would have anything to fear from expanded police powers, citizen!

Remember Citizen, Reauthorizing FISA is absolutely ESSENTIAL to our national security, because the gatekeeping by all those bad, onerous warrants we used to need were OBSTACLES to INVESTIGATION! Those mean, bad terrorists that hate our way of life are aided and abetted by our heroic men and women being stymied in this most important work! (Pay absolutely no attention to what's in the Kissinger memos! We're good guys! You can TRUST us!)

--- That is to say, 'We gotta be able to do this whenever, however, however often, and for whatever reason we want!' Is indeed *exactly the thing they cannot be allowed to have*, (for the very reason you just illustrated), and is also expressly they very thing they have been crying publicly about until govt gave it to them.

There is not a category where it is at once cheap and easy to do, and 'does not get abused'.

That means it cannot be cheap and easy to do, if you want to prevent its abuse.