I can see the argument that Nvidia has no obvious advantage in LLMs that would make them want to set up their own operation; it's basically everything else about the situation that would make me jumpy if I had bet on Nvidia.

"Investing $100 billion in OpenAI's spend $100 billion on Nvidia stuff initiative" sounds, at worst, like a slightly more legal version of the trick where you shuffle stock around between business units or stuff the channel and book that as sales because you suspect that your real sales numbers will disappoint; and, even if it's not quite that dire, Nvidia being willing to get paid in faith rather than in other people's money (or shift the stock to one of their customers that actually has money) looks very much like an indirect price cut, which gives the impression that either demand is outright softening, and Nvidia has units that it can't simply immediately shift to customers who are actually paying cash right now; or that Nvidia feels the need to help fill the gap between OpenAI's seemingly unlimited appetite for doubling-down money and the, sooner or later, limited supply of VC nose candy.

That said, it's not entirely novel; Nvidia's current holdings are something like 90% Coreweave(under 10% of Coreweave's total shares; but Coreweave shares are the bulk of other-company shares Nvidia holds); and they have an agreement with them obliging them to purchase any unused capacity through 2032; so they've been expressing confidence in AI-related companies and/or trying to keep the music going by paying some of their more fragile customers' bills even before this.

It could be that Nvidia isn't even trying to diversify; but the history of bad things happening when people underestimate correlated risks also doesn't make me feel great about the situation: Obviously it's going to be a bad day at Nvidia if 'AI' cools; stock price will take a hit and they will be left holding at least some inventory and TSMC and other vendor commitments; but it's going to be a worse day the more of their hardware they sold in exchange for stock in 'AI' Nvidia buyers, rather than in exchange for money, since the fortunes of those companies are going to be fairly closely correlated with Nvidia's own, albeit likely to swing harder and have further to fall.

There are at least three different reasons this is bad.

First, this is one more sign (of about 15 court cases at this point) that this court is willing to give Trump massive powers simply because he is pushing for them and they agree with him politically. And there's no reason to remotely think he's going to stop.

Second, it means that the Presidency (already an already too powerful office in the modern form for any one person) is going to be even more powerful under for the first time under a far more authoritarian person without any safeguards in place.

Third, is more subtle: even if we get through this with Trump with only some damage, the long-term damage and threat to stability is massive. In general, parliamentary systems or presidential systems with somewhat weak presidencies are more stable than those with powerful presidencies. One sees this in for example the high instability in many presidential republics in Central America and South America. The standard explanation for this is that when there's functionally a winner-take-all system, the stakes becoming higher and the degree to which any side has an incentive to moderate becomes small. One question then is why this hasn't happened in the US? One explanation is that the US had the illusion of a not deeply strong President, in part because everyone (including the Presidents) agreed tacitly not to push the limits of their authority that much. The precedent breaking nature here undermines that illusion, and makes it more likely that we'll have years (possibly decades) where the Democrats and Republicans will even more than usual treat everything as a zero sum game with no respects for democratic norms.

The bottom line is that everything about this is bad.

Climate change has political ramifications. But that's not the problem at hand here.

Climate change poses big political questions: 1) Do we want this? 2) If not, do we want to do something about it? 3) Either way, who will pay for it?

"Politization" means that people try to answer 3) with "someone else than me" by either claiming question 1) does not exist at all, or answer 2) depending on their political affiliation, completely ignoring 3).

I get the unpleasant impression that we are doing a corporate reenactment of that period in European history where basically everyone was ruled by Habsburgs who were incestuous and incompetent in equal measure.

When shoud that have been? I am in the field since about 30 years, and I can't remember those alleged days.

This might work if the people from your team are in the same office building. But if your team is spread via several locations, the benefit of being in the office is starkly reduced.

The "higher up" would be the Minister of Defense, and if that fails, the Chancellor of the Republic Austria. But as the head of Direktorat 6 and the Cyber corps is not a political appointee, but a career soldier, it's quite complicated for the Minister of Defense to buy Office Licenses while the head of Direktorat 6 refuses to install it on any army computers.

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

Because there is a reasonable suspicion that Disney will sue them for some reason, public domain or not, and they want to prevent that.