Oh, for sure, it’s absolutely possible that Trump does not understand the need for refinement infrastructure, or simply believes that its a simple problem that will solve itself. Given his approach to trying to rehome US manufacturing its clear that he has basically no understanding of industry realities.

Seconded.

Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media, period.

Yes, even including the original trilogy.

I want to note on the “mineral deal” thing that access to rare earth minerals has nothing to do with China’s ability to constrain their supply to the US, because getting rare earth minerals is actually relatively easy. They’re found all over the Earth, although some areas do have better naturally occurring concentrations than others. Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of finding a nice large swathe of land that you can easily strip-mine.

The problem is refining them. Digging up a bunch of soil and rock is easy, getting the trace amounts of rare (hence why they’re called that) earth minerals out of the soil and rock is really hard. While it’s true that China does dominate in rare earth extraction, it really wouldn’t be all that hard for other countries to catch up to them on that score if they wanted to. But the reason China controls the worlds rare earth supply is because they also dominate in refining, which is extremely difficult, technically complex, and not easy to replicate due to the highly specialised nature of rare earth refineries.

Trump can get access to all the unprocessed rare earth minerals he likes, but it won’t solve his current problems. First off, even if Ukraine were at peace tomorrow it would take most of a decade to prospect those mineral deposits and begin extracting them at scale. But even then, it doesn’t solve the refining problem. You’d just be selling the raw deposits to China so that they can refine them and sell the refined product back to you at a huge profit.

I tacked it onto your comment because I was chiming in with my agreement on your disagreement, if that makes sense.

The thing about the robotaxi thing is that it only really works as metro level infrastructure. Once you start trying to do that at a level where your vehicles can traverse whole states, the costs balloon like crazy.

Sorry, you’re absolutely correct, I should have added “… or a pair of thigh highs.”

Shameful oversight on my part.

Sketch? Nah bro, that is exactly the kind of “This looked sick in the early 2000s and we haven’t bothered updating it since” level of design that I want to see from a hardware vendor. That’s a company that’s just sitting there quietly trucking along, making nerdy devices for nerdy people. That’s a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.

“The main thing is that they [the Americans] don’t interfere in our affairs and don’t tell us how to live,” said a senior Russian official familiar with the Kremlin’s negotiating logic. “That they don’t hinder us in doing what we are doing.”

That being invading and subjugating weaker neighbours.

Yeah, I contemplated this idea, but you’d need a network of dealerships all within no more than about 450km of each other. Actually, a lot less than that if you want to deliver something like a cybertruck this way. And Tesla just doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure, especially in the Midwest and South. And that means there’s no good way to get a car from Fremont or Austin to anywhere on the East Coast either. At best you could maybe make this work in California.

But also consider the scale of what you’re talking about. Generally you’re looking at selling thousands of cars per day for a successful production model. Can their dealerships handle charging thousands of cars per day?

This is such obvious BS. Putting aside that Tesla are always making claims about self driving that they can’t deliver on, let’s just consider the basic logistics of doing this for any customer who lives more than about 300km from a Tesla factory (of which there are two IIRC, and one of those is in Austin and the other is in Fremont)…

How the fuck is the car going to recharge?

It’s not like it’s going to plug itself in, and there are no staff at Tesla supercharger stations as far as I’m aware. With the range on a typical Model S even getting to LA might be tough if it gets stuck in traffic. Fremont to LA is just under 600km if you’re lucky.

this new gadget makes it easy to take Windows system events, and feed them into Copilot, looking for potentially malicious activity. And while it’s not perfect, it did manage to detect about 40% of the malicious tests that Windows Defender missed. It seems like LLMs are going to stick around, and this might be one of the places they actually make sense.

Yes, the pattern recognition engine is good at pattern recognition.

In all seriousness, it really would be great if we’d focused development of transformer models on stuff like this instead of everyone getting caught up in the fact that they can kinda sorta pass the Turing test and deciding that the singularity had arrived and they could be the ones to sell tickets to it.

Pro-tip: If you marry said friend, they have to seat you together anyway.

For the Chinese, this is an incredibly sensible way to respond, no question.

As a Canadian, I’m worried. This is only going to strengthen Trump’s case for giving the US direct access rate earth minerals through one sided deals in Ukraine, and by coercing or dominating Canada.

Granted, I assumed yearly, because this is apparently supposed to replace a yearly benefit that Greenland receives from Denmark.

Even if it is only one time, that’s still a lot of money that Trump seems to want to throw at something completely frivolous, rather than making a difference to the lives of Americans. Can’t see how that feels good for anyone who is struggling with the price of eggs.

Not even remotely. LLMs have failed to find any viable market fit.

The problem continues to be hallucinations and limited utility. This is compounded by the fact that LLMs are very expensive to run. The latter problem wouldn’t really be a problem if LLMs were truly capable of replacing a human employee, but they’re not. They’re just too unreliable for any serious enterprise grade application, and they’re too expensive for any low severity application.

For example, as a coding assistant, a lot of people quite like them. But as a replacement for a human coder, they’re a disaster. That means you still have to employ the expensive human, and you also have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for what amounts to a very cool search engine.

There are tonnes of frivolous applications where they work really well. The AI girlfriend stuff, for example. A chatbot that sexts you is a very sellable product, regardless of how icky it might seem to some people. But no one is going to pay over $200 / month for it (as an example, ChatGPT still doesn’t make a profit at their $200/month tier).

LLMs are too unreliable to make anything better than toys, but too expensive to sell as toys.

For anyone who voted for Trump because your cost of living is too high… How y’all feeling about this?

Trump wants to give everyone in Greenland $10k. Where’s your $10k? What the actual fuck has this guy done to help you out so far?

How is it that DOGE has to force your grandma to walk to an office for her social security because a phone line was too expensive, but Trump has money to throw $600m a year at this?

Interesting theory. Total absence of proof.

Does the theory fit the available facts? Yes.

Do the available facts prove the theory? Absolutely not.

Insanely bad idea. You should not be honebrewing anything with the capacity to kill people.

Not that Tesla’s solution is any safer, but that’s a separate discussion.

It really doesn’t. You’re just describing the “fancy” part of “fancy autocomplete.” No one was ever really suggesting that they only predict the next word. If that was the case they would just be autocomplete, nothing fancy about it.

What’s being conveyed by “fancy autocomplete” is that these models ultimately operate by combining the most statistically likely elements of their dataset, with some application of random noise. More noise creates more “creative” (meaning more random, less probable) outputs. They do not actually “think” as we understand thought. This can clearly be seen in the examples given in the article, especially to do with math. The model is throwing together elements that are statistically proximate to the prompt. It’s not actually applying a structured, logical method the way humans can be taught to.

I’ve heard a few different theories about big plays that might be the intent here, and they all fall down on that same basic problem; The US, doesn’t have the reliability or the leverage to make it work. That’s not saying that the theories are bad - they’re all plausible enough - just that no matter what the White House thinks their play is here, it won’t work because no one has enough incentive to play nice with them. The US no longer has the economic dominance needed to force these kinds of changes, and they’re too unreliable a partner for anyone to willingly enter a a long term arrangement with them.

But then I suppose none of this is surprising when you look at Trump’s business dealings. He’s never understood any way of operating other than being an unreliable partner and screwing everyone around you, and it’s why his businesses all failed. He’s never understood the value in being a reliable partner.

Ironically, this would largely achieve Trump’s goal of lowering America’s trade deficits. A big reason why America runs such deep deficits is because the strength of the dollar makes it less attractive to buy from the US, but the dollar never weakens because it’s the global reserve.

Of course, when OPEC discussed moving away from the dollar Trump lost his shit, so it’s not like this is his actual plan. There’s no 5D chess here, they’re all idiots. Nor would intentionally devaluing the dollar to increase US exports be a smart idea, but it is something that has been seriously proposed by one of Trump’s economic advisors.