More specifically, the Hong Kong protests were about the possiblity of HKers being sent to the mainland. Here and now we have multiple actual renditions of US residents to El Salvador and elsewhere (including one of the protesters!)…

I gotta say, Hong Kongers put up way more of a fight than Americans seem to be. Hong Kong Polytechnic University went through a full blown siege in 2019. Six years later, in the land of the free, student leaders get picked off and any protests that manage to get going are easily crushed by the police.

The “cheap Chinese labor and lax laws” thing is not exactly the issue, at least not these days. The thing is that Chinese industry has spent decades working out how to refine these minerals, and they’re the only ones who are now able to do it at scale. So other countries that extract and process rare earths (which as noted aren’t actually that rare) often ship semi-processed ore to China for final processing.

Sure, other countries can replicate these capabilities if they’re willing to put in the effort. It’s like China’s challenge with EUV lithography, but in reverse. It will take significant time. Also, building up a rare earths processing industry probably involves not just spending capital, but also major environmental risks while you’re doing your trials.

This headline has the structure of the famous Simpsons joke.

Cyan (Myst, Riven)

Homer: that’s good.

to lay off

Homer: that’s bad.

12 people

Homer: that’s good.

“roughly half of team”

Homer: ??

Narrator: that’s bad.

The Afghans and Vietnamese had nothing to lose. Americans, no matter how much they complain online, have everything to lose.

That article is overblown. People need to configure their websites to be more robust against traffic spikes, news at 11.

Disrespecting robots.txt is bad netiquette, but honestly this sort of gentleman’s agreement is always prone to cheating. At the end of the day, when you put something on the net for people to access, you have to assume anyone (or anything) can try to access it.

It’s seldom the same companies, though; there are two camps fighting each other, like Gozilla vs Mothra.

It’s possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.

Though I don’t think it’s a good use of money personally, because the requirements are dropping all the time. We’re starting to see some very promising small models that use a fraction of those resources.

So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.

Power usage probably won’t be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought (our estimates had been based on well-funded Western companies that didn’t have to bother with optimization).

AI spam is an annoyance, but it’s not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn’t something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.

Unfortunately, this is not going to receive much condemnation from the West given current conditions. The US doesn’t give a crap about this kind of this anymore. The EU needs Turkiye onside geopolitically… not to mention any objections from them are too easily brushed off as hypocrisy given the Romanian situation + efforts to disqualify Le Pen. It’s probably why Erdogan chose to act now after tolerating Imamoglu’s presence for the past few years.

“But… the future refused to change” – game over screen, Chrono Trigger

They released the major components of their training and interference infrastructure code a couple weeks ago.

Deepseek actually released a bunch of their infrastructure code, including the infamous tricks for making training and interference more efficient, a couple of weeks ago.

The strangest twist to this is that Deepseek itself seems to be the only company not trying to cash in on the Deepseek frenzy:

Liang [Deepseek’s founder] has shown little intention to capitalise on DeepSeek’s sudden fame to further commercialise its technology in the near term. The company is instead focusing the majority of its resources on model development…

These people added the independently wealthy founder has also declined to entertain interest from China’s tech giants as well as venture and state-backed funds to invest in the group for the time being. Many have found it difficult to even arrange a meeting with the secluded founder.

“We pulled top-level government connections and only got to sit down with someone from their finance department, who said ‘sorry we are not raising’,” said one investor at a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech fund.

Funny thing is, the price of lidar is dropping like a stone; they are projected to be sub-$200 per unit soon. The technical consensus seems to be settling in on 2 or 3 lidars per car plus optical sensors, and Chinese EV brands are starting to provide self driving in baseline models, with lidars as part of the standard package.

Canada needs to redirect most of its defence spending to asymmetric warfare. You know, the same advice US consultants give to Taiwan to make a PRC occupation more expensive to contemplate. Forget about big ticket items meant to support the US in its overseas wars; start investing in mines, guerilla equipment, etc.

It’s strongly dependent on how you use it. Personally, I started out as a skeptic but by now I’m quite won over by LLM-aided search. For example, I was recently looking for an academic that had published some result I could describe in rough terms, but whose name and affiliation I was drawing a blank on. Several regular web searches yielded nothing, but Deepseek’s web search gave the result first try.

(Though, Google’s own AI search is strangely bad compared to others, so I don’t use that.)

The flip side is that for a lot of routine info that I previously used Google to find, like getting a quick and basic recipe for apple pie crust, the normal search results are now enshittified by ad-optimized slop. So in many cases I find it better to use a non-web-search LLM instead. If it matters, I always have the option of verifying the LLM’s output with a manual search.

Maybe, maybe not – but I’m discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they’re trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.

Pretty much inevitable. Nowadays there are so many robot vacuum cleaners from different brands, and everyone has more or less figured out the tech so they all work pretty well. (I have a Roborock, and have nothing to say about it other than it keeps the floors clean and doesn’t cause me any grief.) There’s no moat, so consumer market success is purely a matter of manufacturing and cost efficiency, and iRobot obviously would have a huge upfill fight against Samsung, Xiaomi, and a thousand other light consumer goods makers.