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.

There is a reason I qualified that with "open source projects for AI."

Toasters will fly (again) before Nvidia's graphics tech gets open sourced.

Nvidia has been a pretty big supporter of open source projects for AI over the last half-decade or so. Many of the company's technologies are open source, most notably their open-weights model, Nemotron, and Dynamo, their inference serving and distribution framework. So it would be surprising to see them do anything to close off the Hugging Face collection. If nothing else, keeping it open is in Nvidia's own self-interest. The frontier AI companies themselves are all designing their own AI chips (e.g. OpenAI Jalapeno, Meta MTIA), which reduces the amount of Nvidia hardware they need to buy. Whereas smaller operations using open source models will inevitably pair those with commodity COTS hardware, which is where Nvidia reigns supreme.

Epic added a Linux build target to Unreal Engine 4.1 in 2014. And since UE5 in 2020 the entire development toolchain has been feature complete in Linux. Meaning you could make your Unreal game on Linux and then release it natively for Linux (and Windows/consoles/mobile devices/etc).

So while Epic has not been the best supporter of Linux, they have not been ignoring it, either. The core engine is ready. What's left is that the anti-cheat software (Easy Anti-Cheat) and the store need to catch up.

Epic looks to be hiring to improve the anti-cheat situation as it currently lacks kernel-level support, and this latest announcement indicates that they're working on getting EGS running as well.

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.

Then they should pass a law disallowing that but they won't. Because they all do it.

What the hell is that? Is that a salesman in PC-speak?

His podcast Better Offline is squarely targeted at people who are very much online. Indeed his entire gig is the epitome of online living.

If Ed Zitron really felt better offline, he wouldn't be making a living off of a podcast and constant AI bashing.

Not that I necessarily disagree with him though... It's just that the messenger doesn't really befit the message.

The article makes no mention of the source. But everything about this sounds like it's just the CAM release from LuCY. Which has been available for around a week and a half now.

In which case, yeah, the only thing novel about it was that it was posted to a more publicly-visible website.

Xbox 1 emulation is in a so-so place right now. Xemu has pretty good compatibility (80% or so), but it is very, very slow.

To date no one has been able to develop an Xbox emulator using high-level emulation, so Xemu takes a low-level approach based around QEMU. Which makes the computational requirements much, much higher*. To the point where there are plenty of games that run at half-speed (or worse) even on the latest CPUs. The current emulators are heavily CPU limited (and to just a couple of threads at that), and CPUs aren't getting faster very quickly these days.

So if Microsoft has an emulation environment with much lower overhead, then that is a significant development. Because even with third-party emulators available, most games aren't currently fully playable on them.

* LLE extends to the GPU as well. So a lot of cycles are burnt emulating parts of the NV2A GPU and its 25 year old peculiarities

If even he thinks AI is dubious, you know AI is bad news.

Lol

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.

This is the blandest, most watered-down way to say "lost their job" yet. Quite nauseating.