loudmax

Since we're already in the realm of far out engineering, you could get the energy from a laser beam from a source orbiting the sun. Your spaceship would have some kind of array to capture the energy beam.

This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.

In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.

A (fairly obvious) historical analogy is how the Roman Empire survived the reigns of maniacs like Caligula and Commodus. It's hard to ascertain how reliable historical sources are, but as presented, both of these emperors were at the least pathological narcissists, and at worst completely out of their minds. They each squandered an enormous amount of the Roman treasury on vanity projects and undermined Roman institutions and the rule of law. And yet, the Roman Empire survived both of them for centuries.

Like you, I'm impressed with how resilient the American economy has been over the past few years. The tariffs, the war, the incompetence and open corruption seem like they should have done a lot more immediate damage. What's disconcerting is that much of the damage is to America's long term interests. So much of America's greatness has come from attracting talent from all around the world into a stable lawful society. That's what we're losing.

Part of the problem is surely that we know how milk should be produced and consumed safely, but we don't know how AI should be produced and made accessible safely.

Should we be more concerned about malevolent humans using AI to cause harm? Or should we be more worried about misaligned AI agents escaping their sandbox to cause harm? Or should we be more worried about job loss, or the concentration of political power in the hands of a small clique of billionaires?

All of these are real possibilities, but it's hard to put a finger on the actual probabilities. And even if you're identified and quantified these dangers, what should the actual regulatory environment look like?

None of this is to argue that we shouldn't have regulation, just that it's very hard to know ahead of time what the rules should be. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to regulate, but we need to prepare for a rapidly changing technology landscape.

I tend to favor an open source approach to safety rather than keeping the technology hidden. I'd like to see regulation to mandate that model training and weights be much more open than they are now. But I could be wrong: maybe Dario is right that this should be kept in the dark. The only things I'm fairly certain about is that nobody knows for sure and we're going to need to adjust quickly.

I'd be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

"Infotainment" functions in that require interacting with a touch screen were bad ideas at the time and seem incomprehensibly bad in retrospect. It's a certainty that people have died in accidents that occurred because of this.

On the other hand, backup cameras are a genuinely helpful tool. And so are electric power windows: it's far easier to roll windows up and down pushing a button than manipulating the roller. It takes less concentration, so you can focus more on driving. In 2026, the cost of adding motors instead of a hand crank to control the windows has got to be negligible.

There are other improvements that were luxuries in traditional ICE vehicles, but become necessities in hybrid or electric vehicles. Hybrids like Priuses have CVE transmissions, so there's no manual transmission or stick shift. Electric vehicles have electric seat warmers and even steering wheel warmers because there's no gas-burning engine to heat the cabin.

The data center thing is a complete red herring. Of course you wouldn't want a data center literally next to your house. Neither would you want to live next to a manufacturing plant making automobiles or batteries or solar panels. This doesn't mean we should want to outlaw manufacturing plants.

The complaints about water consumption are even worse. Nationally, the amount of water consumed by golf courses is orders of magnitude larger than the water consumed by data centers.

I say this not to defend OpenAI or Sam Altman. I say this because I want the focus to be on the real dangers posed by AI:

* Power consumption (mitigated by building more power generation capacity, but this is a real impact, and there are legitimate environmental concerns)

* The disruption AI will have on people's careers and livelihoods

* The concentration of political power in the hands of a small cadre of billionaires

* The potential for truly dangerous destructive power if used by malicious groups - eg. bio-terrorism.

We should be concerned about the "bad things" posed by AI. A data center next to your house is very much a local issue, not a national issue.

You should feel angry, and you should be channeling that anger into constructive action.

For now, this means voting Democrat and supporting Democrats for office.

Donald Trump has turned the Republican party into a cult of personality to support a kleptocracy. The GOP is no longer the party of conservative values. The rule of law, respect for traditional mores or institutions, and personal integrity have all been defenestrated by the Trump administration.

Are the Democrats perfect? Of course not. But under the current system, the United States has a zero-sum two party system, and this means voting for one of the two parties. Making room for third parties means adjusting the rules (eg. ranked choice voting, or other). These ideas are worth pursuing. As long as we're stuck in a two party system, this means voting for the lesser of two evils.

Nihilists will scoff at this and point to everything wrong that happened under Obama or Biden. They'll says Democrats are no better than Republicans. They're wrong. At best, they're misguided. At worst, they're actually trying to bring an end to democratic government (that's a lower-case "d" for democracy).

The Democrats are imperfect. The Republican party under the current leadership are far, far worse. It's not even close.

Get out and vote.

> unless you consider that socialism = "social safety net measures", which it isn't

I agree with you that socialism, properly understood, ought to mean something much broader than a social safety net. But not everyone sees it this way.

In my experience, a lot of Americans really do equate social security and welfare as socialism. Or even public education, never mind anything remotely resembling universal healthcare. These people believe that taxation is theft and they're vocal about expressing it. This used to be fringe, but it's a major political movement.

Young Americans have grown up in an environment where anything publicly beneficial is painted as "socialist" by one of the major political parties. Many of them have taken the message to heart.

I think this is more about tribalism than conservatism. There's nothing inherently "conservative" about opposing renewable energy.

The political movement that's currently leading the Republican party shouldn't be understood as "conservative". At least, certainly not in terms of the conservative values of respect for the rule of law, traditional mores and institutions, or personal integrity. The populist energy that passes for "conservative" is reactionary and much more concerned with scoring points on social media than governing sensibly.

To be fair, the populist left is also ascendant with its own set of bad ideas.

This is an important conversation to have and we should pretty clearly about what the issues are.

I didn't see any objection to LLM assisted development in the abstract. The objection is to relying on proprietary AI providers in general, and Gemini in particular, via Shashiko. The problem is that kernel contributions could become gated by hyperscalers who can draw on compute power normal people can't access.

Devault mentions data centers' carbon emissions and water usage. I find both of these objections to be distractions. It's not that carbon emissions don't matter. Keeping greenhouse gasses in check is incredibly important. But there are far more productive ways to cut carbon emissions than to block data centers. Heavy industry consumes far more electricity than data centers, for less economic value. This is even truer for water use. If carbon emissions is a major concern (as it should be), there are better targets to go after than data centers.

A more compelling argument is the danger that the Linux kernel becomes something that's effectively controlled by proprietary AI providers: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. The photo of tech company leaders at Trump's inauguration underscores their lack of any moral compass.

But if AI-driven kernel development is actually useful and productive, that's going to be hard to turn down. If you believe that LLM use is technically counter-productive, then this whole AI thing is a bubble and you can just wait for it to pop. If you believe that LLMs can be technically productive if used correctly, and the drawbacks are entirely social, then it means giving up something technically useful. That is a real cost.

I think Linus is right here: it would be hard for regular kernel developers to coordinate a fork of the project. It might not be that hard for the hyperscalers to simply fork Linux. They would still release the source code under the GPL, but nobody would be able to keep up with it. Ultimately, this could doom the human-written version of the kernel to irrelevance as most people switch to the faster/stronger/harder LLM-derived fork.

Maybe a reasonable medium would be to insist on using an open model for code review instead of depending on Gemini or any proprietary model.

> Hopefully a solution similar to what was done in Hong Kong can be found.

Citizens of Hong Kong lost their right to free speech and their ability to select their own leaders. If you publicly criticize Xi Jinping in Hong Kong you will go to jail. If you advocate democratic rights in Hong Kong you will go to jail.

China's claims on Taiwan are ethno-nationalist. Ethno-nationalism should be rejected in all forms because it is a rejection of fundamental human rights. Taiwan deserves the world's support because it is functioning democracy. That makes all the difference.

The short answer is no, it won't work on your home computer. In it's current form it needs something like 594 GB of memory, far outside what you can reasonably run on normal consumer hardware in 2026.

If you have really high end hardware, you might be able to squeeze a heavily quantized version of Kimi-K3 onto your rig, but it will be too slow or too lobotomized to be useful.

This does put a near state-of-the-art open weights model within reach of what a small or medium business could afford if there's a case for local inference. It's probably not as good as Claude Fable or ChatGPT Sol. But if you're an organization that has a genuine need to run inference locally, this is a real possibility.

Is this for your homelab? Not in any practical sense.

Is this a possibility for organizations that can justify $1M or so on hardware for a near SOTA model they have full control over? Yeah, absolutely.

The employer selects a financial company to manage the 401k. When you switch jobs, you can roll the 401k from the previous employer into the new one, or into an IRA (Individual Retirement Account).

Usually the financial services company will offer several options: more aggressive/high risk, or less aggressive/lower risk. Most people will just go with whatever is the default option.

So much of the American S&P 500 is dominated by handful of companies that the risk is not that easy to avoid. If or when the AI bubble pops, it's going to take down a lot of the economy with it. You can direct your retirement savings into the lowest yield/lowest risk assets offered by the firm, but you'll forego whatever growth happens in the mean time.

Will the bubble pop next week? Next month? Next year? Who knows. Timing the market is incredibly difficult.

There's a famous quote, attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to John Maynard Keynes: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Absolutely this. If you think about different types of objections to nearby data centers and do some pretty minimal research, you come up with a reasonable set of solutions that most people would agree on.

That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.

We also need immigration because it grows the GDP, makes for a dynamic and resilient economy, increases scientific and technological output and raises the standard of living.

Immigration is what made America great.

Incidentally, here's a recent article about how the economics of ambulances are broken in the US: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-american-ambulance-rides-are

If municipal emergency services in yout area don't cover ambulance rides, that subscription service might not be a bad idea.

Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue.

Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.

You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.

It is common sense, and with literally any other administration in the past century it would seem like a good idea.

I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.

In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.

This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment.

To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.

But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.

Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over.

Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the Falcon rockets. But I don't respect Musk's personal judgement, his moral integrity or his ethics.

He doesn't know me, and he doesn't care about my opinion (or care about ethics for that matter). But there are a lot of people like me who used to respect him and no longer do. He's surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. At some level he's got to know this, and that the people pretending to pay him respect aren't themselves worthy of respect.

That is ascribing far too much strategic thinking to this administration. They're just not capable of the kind of planning and foresight that would require.

The administration's planning is much more along the lines of, Will this look cool when they announce it on Fox News tomorrow? If you think there's much beyond that, you're ascribing strategic clarity where there isn't any. They're continue to flail around and TACO until they have a result they can present to MAGA loyalists as a success, regardless of actual merits.

It's not a question of ethics. It's a question of competence.

For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it answered me in English! The responses were generally incorrect, but no worse than what your average American college student might guess at, though delivered with much more confidence.

This was my desktop computer responding to questions in English, not some fancy server in a massive Google data center. Who cares if what it says isn't reliable? Being able to converse with my CPU in English is like having a conversation with a dog!

The AI-driven data center roll out raises some legitimate concerns that really ought to be considered and discussed at the political level. I doubt that a blanket ban on data centers is the right approach.

These are the data center issues as I understand them, in ascending order of importance:

  * Water use: Almost always a red herring or non-issue, unless the DC is being built in an area with water shortages. DC's use a lot of water, but their use is negligible compared to many other industries.

  * Neighborhood appearance: They're not particularly pretty to have in your back yard, but much less ugly than, say, a factory. They're not inherently polluting.

  * Power draw: This is a legitimate concern as DC's use an enormous amount of electricity. In the short run, it could make sense for deep-pocketed investors to subsidize residential or non-DC power consumption to keep everyone's electric bills from skyrocketing. Longer term, power companies will need to build much more generating infrastructure. I'd love to see a carbon tax to encourage the construction of renewable (or nuclear) power. Sadly, the current US administration seems intent on vice-maxing and ruining as much as they can for future generations.

  * AI-driven job displacement: I think this is the real worry people have. The water use thing is an excuse people are looking for to oppose AI.

IMHO, that last one is the crux of the issue, and banning DCs from being built in New York will do absolutely nothing to alleviate this concern. The tech billionaire class has been harping about how they'll make money for investors by automating everyone's job, and the people have noticed.

My optimistic take is that AI companies won't in fact capture all of the value from automation, because they'll be competing against each other, and against open weights models. But who knows? Maybe a single company will achieve Super-AGI first and they'll own the world. I doubt that will happen, but this is what they're aiming for, and a lot of the money invested only makes sense in light of that goal.

And even in my optimistic scenario, the job disruption will be quite real. New jobs will be created as other jobs are lost to automation. That's well and good after things have settled, but it is very disruptive to people's careers and ambitions in the mean time.

I'm very open to the idea that consciousness is substrate independent. I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from an electro-chemical path, but not from a purely electrical path. Having said that, it should be very clear that LLMs are not conscious.

LLMs process language. I'd even go so far as to say that LLMs "think" and "understand", or at least, they produce a facsimile of thinking and understanding such that it's useful for us to reason about LLMs as if they think and understand. We're not used to interacting with a non-human entity with the capability to process language, so it's easy to ascribe human traits to these things. But their "minds" (insofar as they have anything like a mind) are completely different from ours. These things have language without consciousness.

Chimpanzees are conscious. Dogs are conscious. Maybe ravens and cephalopods? Who knows. These animals do have minds much like ours. Higher order animals are conscious even if they don't have language.

My personal preference is Interstella 5555 is Daft Punk's best music video.

Edit: Jinx! Gracana beat my reply to an 11 hour old comment by four minutes.

Being isolationist or global imperialist implies articulating different strategies and values.

This is an administration that has neither of those.

Humans don't handle all corner cases. People can be slow to react to completely novel or surprising situations. There will be corner cases where humans generally do better than a machine, but the simple rule to slow down and come to a halt if things look too weird or confusing will almost always be the right answer.

Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.

Ideally, robot drivers will some day be better drivers than humans in all road conditions. They'll be able to coordinate fast lane merges and busy intersections by subtly adjusting speed without vehicles having to stop.

Imagine a busy intersection where all the cars fly past one another at 40 miles an hour without stopping but none of them crash. Humans can't do this, but machines could, if, and when the technology gets there. To be clear, there's still a way to go.

While it's theoretically possible that this technology could work effectively, given the people involved, this project is probably a complete bamboozle that will divert funds away from enforcing the deportation of immigrants.

In that light, it's probably a good thing.

Author Philip Pullman published a version of the Grimm fairy tales in 2012. These stories are intended for a modern audience, but in my opinion, Pullman does a good job of preserving a fair amount of the original scariness and general weirdness. Definitely rougher than the Disney versions of these stories. I recommend this volume to anyone with small children.

Yes, my Prius Prime handles highway speeds perfectly fine on battery. In fact, the acceleration is great in pure EV mode.

It just doesn't have much range: only about 25 miles on my 2018 model. Newer models advertise up to 44 miles on EV.