notahacker

No, but it would mean that they were overhyping how useful electricity was to and it was worth pointing out that if they actually believed what they said, they'd be trying to do everything they said they could do rather than just being a utility company...

afaik Siemens Energy never pushed the argument that electricity would be able to do everything humans can within a year or so...

Yes, obviously there's a whole lot of relationship building and effort and judgement which matters at least as much as infrastructure in building businesses, but the whole schtick of Big AI is to insist their product is better than humans at planning and market analysis and building and sales and marketing and especially at effort and concentration, and they're obviously better capitalised than startups using AI to do something in a particular vertical, so if they believe their own hype, why not?

And yet many parts of Germany have a much more thriving tech scene than Tennessee...

The complicating factor is that whilst it's certainly true that Starshield answers to the US chain of command, not to Elon and highly unlikely he is authorised to exercise any direct control of it, the claims that Elon personally spoke to the guy at the top of the US chain of command and persuaded him that this would be a good idea are pretty credible (and whether credible or not, US officials have been trying to place the blame on Elon rather than their own chain of command). Plus of course Ukraine absolutely does use regular Starlink, and Elon doesn't actually have magic ability to tell which terminals are being used for offensive operations and which for defensive

Mistral isn't even close to the most used AI services in the EU, there are very few industries where EU sourced/hosted models are required (mostly ones where the US also either mandates US models or is seeking to...) and the potential behaviour of the US government (rational and irrational) is at least as big a contributor to European companies being cautious about dependency on US cloud models as EU regulation. Regulatory hurdles exist to building datacentres in the US and basically everywhere else, and don't favour Mistral over any other company, and European states and the EU are busy funding [notional] competitors

It is not, even really stretching the definition, a state sanctioned monopoly.

Lack of capital, datacentres and GPUs being the barrier to competition in European AI giants is the exact opposite of a "government sanctioned monopoly"...

Nobody is preventing other Europeans from setting up AI companies

Also rejecting kings is part of America's founding mythology, whereas if anything America seems to embrace oligarchy more than most democracies...

Oh yeah, I have no doubt there was a lot of knowledge compartmentalization and to many/most employees that seemed like normal practice in an IP sensitive industry. Just wondering how she dealt with the people that started to be mildly pessimistic or suspicious

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

> Also I would argue the people that are obvious in their lying and manipulating aren’t the dangerous ones - those that aren’t obvious, that you don’t spot easily off the cuff are much more dangerous.

Yeah. The person that's constantly bragging about fantasy stuff or reflexively claiming nothing was ever their fault might warrant cutting off because they're tiresome, but they're not likely to undermine you never mind pull off this level of scam because they're so unconvincing, and that might make them more harmlessly amusing than anything else. The manipulative person who's constant spreading false rumours might raise red flags, and definitely isn't someone you want to spend time with once you've spotted that some of their claims simply don't line up. But a large part of why people are often good at covering stuff up even if its the most heinous shit is that they manage to be plausible and likeable most of the time and generally tell the truth on other subjects.

Holmes likely fell into that category, though she didn't exactly downplay her lies in the way someone covering their deep dark secret usually does.

And yeah, in practice whether you cut someone off after learning their deep dark secret probably depends a lot on what it is and how it relates to you (and usually it's more "I'm hiding my affair" than "my billion dollar enterprise supplies fraudulent medical tests")

I think particularly in the case of investors it's that they're pretty comfortable with founders that straddle the fine line between bullish and bullshit, because the ones who back up their claims that seem too good to be true make them money, and the ones who don't are priced in. And some who make them lots of money tell a lot of "white lies" on the way. FOMO is a way of missing red flags too.

Holmes' mistake was to massively overdo the "fake it til you make it" in a regulated industry where the implications of the lies appal people, as well as to have a product that was never going to work so the lies were more "this car definitely isn't just rolling down the hill" than "the person at the wheel is only for regulatory reasons". If she'd settled for fantasy metrics and self dealing in a real estate play rather than faking medical tests she'd have investors lining up to fund her second venture...

I'm more intrigued by how she managed to keep customers and at least some of her employees believing and how often that mask slipped.

True, but gently slowing down on a residential street near a school feels unlikely to lead to other drivers attempting high speed tailgating, undertaking or other aggressive manoeuvres that might result from, say, hogging the overtaking lane without actually overtaking because you're sticking to the speed limit, even before the obvious downsides of speeding near schools are considered...

(Also, the second case is something a car manufacturer should probably be resolving more by not hogging the overtaking lane than defaulting to going 20mph over the limit for extended periods because everybody else does)

FDR had the folksy charm to directly address the public and acquired a lot of power, but in most respects he seems the opposite of a populist. He was a party insider with a complex technocratic response to the Depression voters believed actually worked, not someone who spent his time picking fights and arguing he needed more power to defeat enemies (or making complete fantasy promises like Huey Lewis), he picked up a broad voter coalition including lots of minorities he neither scapegoated nor actually defended, and was a conventional moderate for the time on foreign policy and [future] culture war issues. He was more radical and centralised than previous Presidents when it came to economic policy and the role of the executive, but it wasn't a shouty type of radicalism, especially not compared with how socialists and fascists elsewhere addressed the subject of the Depression...

77 million voters voted for Trump after he'd shown them exactly who he was. I don't think you can blame the voter sentiments and information environment that leads to that outcome on the voting system.

A fragmented party system driven by Parliamentary coalition building might actually mean less accountability, since right-leaning independents and ex-Republicans disgruntled at the erosion of democratic and social norms under Trump suddenly have to worry about actual socialists being part of the alternative, and options that genuinely aren't MAGA to vote for who in practice will need to ally with MAGA

The Open University has given academically respectable accredited degrees to remote learners since 1969. Most of the UK university campuses and in-person courses have come into existence since that successful experiment with remote learning. It's almost like evidence of ability to autodidactically absorb a syllabus isn't actually the point for most employers...

They do this. It's called lobbying...

It's not really extraterritorial from the point of view of needing to comply with regulations though. Your datacentre company has registered offices and physical locations. Your downlinks are based on territory. You need to relaunch on a regular basis and you have very restricted choice of territories that you can launch from.

> One shot of vodka in a standard-breakfast-sized glass of orange juice.

So about 1.5 fluid ounces of 40% strength vodka mixed with about 4 of orange juice; a little more alcohol than a regular beer at more than twice the strength.

I think your evident belief you weren't drinking something twice the strength of beer proves my point entirely. And you may well have made the sensible decision to have stopped all that, but I assume at the time the notion of doubles, shots, "on the rocks" or with "just a dash" of cola or lemonade weren't alien to you or more moderate drinkers either. The one thing I can safely say I haven't done with spirits is carefully mix them down to 4-5%

One or more shots mixed with a small quantity of orange juice, typically served at between two and four times the alcohol concentration of beer and typically consumed at equivalent speed. What the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?

Sure, I read your second paragraph, but as I pointed out in my own post, you might as well express skepticism that people harm themselves faster with beer than with shandy whilst treating not mixing beer with four parts water as edge case irresponsibility rather than how people actually drink it. Every drink is equally safe, diluted down enough...

I don't see people carefully mix their liquor in the exact same proportions as beer and then drinking at exactly the same rate, so your argument is about as relevant to real world drinking as "if you mix 5% strength beer with four parts water it's basically not going to get you drunk". With or without normal amounts of (typically sweet) mixer, spirits tend to lend themselves to faster consumption and the carbonation in beer also has the property of giving you that buzzy feeling (and that vomity feeling) earlier so you don't feel quite so much inclination to top up.

> Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.

Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)

As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...

Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...

Code which renders dots on a map isn't going to magically reorder itself if the GNSS endpoints get switched from manned to unmanned assets just because it was authored by Claude, and if the subcontractor isn't auditing and testing the code outputs properly then they're the supply chain risk, not a specific code-gen tool they use. Obviously if instead of being used as code or report generating assistants, LLM agents are used to execute combat decisions in real time that introduces a lot more risk. That's... literally Anthropic's argument against using them for that specific purpose.

It doesn't make much sense to determine that because Anthropic continues to insist that Claude is unsuitable for use as some sort of super advanced loitering munition, Lockheed using it to write job ads is as much a threat to national security as a Chinese comms terminal.

It's not like the DoD and their subcontractors and their subcontractors' subcontractors aren't used to all sorts of fine-grained separation when it comes to what is and isn't classified or export controlled under normal circumstances, or that Hegseth taking a break from fantasising about soldiers' testosterone levels for long enough to decry Anthropic's stance as 'woke' makes the decision look like one based on operational effectiveness.

They've essentially said "pen company won't let us use their pens as neutron flux regulator rods, so anyone building power plants for us isn't allowed to use these pens as pens"

(and yeah, there might be a completely legitimate reason to stop your subcontractors from using HuaweiSpyPens, but determining that ACME Pens is just as dangerous because they refused your neutron flux regulator order looks like a punitive measure, not practical risk reduction)

I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.

Launch requires permits too, you just don't get to jurisdiction shop...

People use that argument because one of the chief bullshit arguments put forward by proponents of space based datacentres is "space is cold", when what they actually mean is "space lacks the possibility of using relatively efficient conductive cooling, so we need to expensively launch large amounts of additional mass to use radiative cooling, consider the extent to which we can shield our miles of active cooling loops from impact, and under current plans all of this mass must be replaced on the same cycles as the chips"

"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...

Yeah. Starcloud is notable for two things: firstly that they've raised a lot of money and secondly that theyve already abandoned the nonsense in their white paper and shifted to a "lots of satellites" model like everyone else exploring orbital datacentres...

"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.