skippyboxedhero

He denied, implausibly, all knowledge about Supermicro. I don't think that is going to work this time.

The crime here isn't giving secrets to the Chinese, it is helping them evade export controls. Again, this is something that Nvidia and Jensen has been investigated on repeatedly. If he knew that Megaspeed was a front for China, quite hard to deny given that Alice Huang seems to have brought Chinese execs to every meeting with Jensen then it is very bad. And yes, the stuff that Jensen would have said would have been very useful because, I assume, the inference is that he would have been helping them evade sanctions.

The very best case from here is that the board fires him.

She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.

Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.

I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.

The long-term is considerably easier because in the short-term there are limits on supply so prices aren't really able to move in a way where balance will be found.

In the long-term, the marginal cost of a request is zero so prices will plunge and a lot of the fixed investment will get stuck. The difference between the cost of training a model/infra and serving a request from that model is a clear problem for economics.

What happens with Anthropic specifically is less clear because they, as every company in the same position in the last 150 years has done, are going to push for regulation. A lot of the risk has also been shifted onto neoclouds. The value of the customer relationship is, however, effectively zero. A core part of their strategy has been to build stuff out like CC to differentiate that but, ultimately, that won't work.

The other strategy they have employed is trying to get other companies to stop training new models. Again, seems unlikely to work.

There is no scenario in which they become Google search outside of government intervention. Obviously this is a key part of their strategy now but at best, this will only work in the US and Europe (I would actually say they are much further along in Europe where there is a strong tendency towards corporatism and centralisation of power, they could be "Europe's AI").

This isn't the case. People assume this is the case because only one side is reported for various reasons.

Just to be clear though: the Communist Party of China is not a massive fan of far-right parties, there are certain ideological barriers there.

Russia employed the former left-wing German Chancellor as part of their strategy making an invasion of Ukraine economically viable for them (it is worth pointing out that when right-wing politicians pointed this out, it was received as a crazy conspiracy theory..."liberal voters" distinguish themselves as people who believe themselves particularly unlikely to believe in "misinformation" whilst simultaneously believing in things that make no sense, most people who have a knowledge of politics are required to believe things that aren't true...if they were in touch with reality, they wouldn't vote).

How dare you. It is only the people that I disagree with that are unstable. I am a stable genius. I am furious.

Have you found a way to stop this?

I used that engineering language skill which is good when it uses it...but it doesn't like to use it.

...there are clearly some areas of alignment that they are not looking at.

One problem is managing expectations from non-technical people. You can ship faster but you are also producing tech debt at that same faster rate, and possibly even faster as the gaps in your initial implementation/prompts are filled by Claude deciding to do random shit.

In most orgs, there is also a gap between leadership, even tech leadership and people actually using LLMs every day. And it is challenging for actual devs who are being told that they should be going much faster and the reality which is more mixed. Pushing back on people who are convinced that Claude is God is going to be tough if you are a junior.

I don't feel the job has really changed, I don't write code as much but that time goes into working out the structure...which is what I was doing anyway. But it has changed the general environment, how work is planned, expectations, etc.

You can tell with some of the more recent models that they have been fine-tuned in such a way to produce a lot of descriptions that sound impressive but have no real meaning. In terms of production of semantic text, the recent models are significantly worse than a year ago.

It is not completely useless as a tool but there is still a huge gap in most real-world applications (I work in an org with multiple thousands of devs and I am top 5 AI user consistently, I have used Claude Code since pre-release). If you are building something like an SQL database which has decades of logic tests built by humans then it can work. If you do not have this (i.e. 99.99% of the time) then you still need to be able to issue prompts that give context. And if you start without that context, it will produce shit code in extremely basic scenarios. In particular, humans are far better at producing code that is easy to change (in practice, you need to create unintuitive, non-human rules to govern this i.e. creating many artificial boundaries which would be completely unnecessary for humans).

I am not sure whether the models just capped out in terms of coding or whether they are just trained by people who have never worked on enterprise software but the gap isn't closing. It has just been filled by people who lack the knowledge to identify when they are being bullshitted (the prevalence of consultants suggests that this markets is large).

I have worked on legacy stuff before. In most cases, there is a kernel of reason and logic that can be recovered. I have seen pure AI projects and they are the worst grade of TCS-authored abandonware. They can often do one specific thing but are basically unmaintainable outside of that.

latency lower for satellites, trading firms have looked at this already, no idea if anyone has actually done it

bandwidth would indeed be worse

This article, possibly deliberately because you can read the subtext of exactly what happened with this story, conflates several things knowing that readers won't know the difference.

Transferring assets from Cyprus to BVI? Legal, there is no issue with doing this. What the journalist did, likely upon discovering this was legal, suggested that it was for tax purposes knowing that readers would assume this was illegal in some way...when it is not relevant.

An opinion was then acquired from a KC which, to a normal person, would read as confirmation that something suspect was going on but, if you have experience with this thing, says that in a completely different, unrelated context this would be illegal (it is a bit sad that we live in a world where a journalist will get an opinion from a KC and they will both conspire to produce something that is obviously intended to be misleading to readers).

Backdating asset transfer from Cyprus to BVI? Again, legal. The role of an auditor is not to provide advice on the legality of the transfer. All that happens is that they get some paperwork saying the assets were transferred two years ago, they go...yes, the paperwork is correct. If you think they should be doing anything else, you don't understand what an auditor is supposed to do.

What would be more questionable is if the transfer didn't actually happen two years ago but the auditor would have no way to know if that was the case. This would be easy to determine in other cases but in the case of personal property, there is no way to know.

What likely happened with the story though is that the journalist put in a lot of time, realised at some point that they didn't actually have any evidence (implicating the people they wished to implicate) so wrote the story that Deloitte were to blame. Will be quite interesting to see what happens next because at several points in the article the journalist uses words that do not describe the role of an auditor i.e. Deloitte was "advising on the falsification of records"...when they show an email which clearly shows that Deloitte did not do this (and again, generally, this is not what an auditor is supposed to be doing).

Text generation is not the bottleneck. Does everyone work for Accenture and TCS?

Of course...they want to make money off it so they exploit everyone...but no-one else wants to make money selling it cheaper...

No, the problem is that people see rent-seeking behaviour everywhere where it doesn't exist. If you think you can do it better...do it.

it isn't good enough for an efficient market. this is a common idea amongst people who have never traded. if it was possible to trade this way, it would happen already. this is how some non-equity markets trade. equities do not trade this way because people do not want it. the system we already have has ludicrously low costs.

do not give up before other people

i remember trading a us stock twenty years ago, i don't live in the us, i used a discount broker, the flat commission was something like $20+percentage of trade. this was significantly after there had apparently a massive drop in costs.

there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.

what do you mean by bad? you want someone to be on the other side of every investment you make...for free? why don't you do this yourself?

Because the decision to leave the company is largely based upon their sudden, newfound financial security. They may give another explanation but the only thing that has actually changed is the identification of bagholders ready to cash them out.

The other issue is that the narrative about safety within these companies is largely a function of the extreme financial incentive.

As an example, Anthropic was an "ai safety" company that has now produced an AI that fails to listen to basic instructions. If you were concerned about safety, would you produce an AI that was unable to follow instructions? You ask a question, it begins executing commands and doing things.

Safety is product to sell to politicians, not consumers.

Not serious.

The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.

Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?

I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.

Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.

This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.

For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).

You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).

Again, the same mistake.

Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?

If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.

It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).

Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.

"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.

There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.

What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.

From neglect, not enterprise. The level of failure is also too low.

It depends what you mean by add up. Logical? No. Reality? Yes.

Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.

Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.

The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.

Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.

If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.

For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.

Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).

The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.

The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.

I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.

it isn't undemocratic, the purpose of the system is to produce governments that are able to govern

look at the last few governments, now imagine that we had a system that meant it was impossible to form a government if the government wasn't popular. there is no natural majority for any position that a political party in the UK can realistically take.

you don't end up with greater democracy, you end up handing unlimited power to unelected people working in government who end up being the only source of administrative stability

one of the main problems is that people in the UK who are in politics often disagree with voters at a fundamental level. changing the electoral system will not fix this. you will have elections, they will say they will fix problems they don't want to fix to win the election, and then their popularity will plummet shortly after as the insiders take over and do weird stuff that no-one voted for or wants. when you have governments that are repeatedly unable to perform very basic state functions, the problem is not the electoral system (or voters, one of the unusual aspects of politics in the UK is the blame and contempt that politicians have for voters, it is easy to see on this thread...perhaps you realise why they want proportional representation now).

No, they don't. Turnout in the UK has dropped significantly because it doesn't matter who you vote for, the outcome is the same.

There is a massive price war going on. All of these Chinese companies are publicly listed and exist outside the hype bubble required to ship Dario's dogshit paper onto the pauper's pension fund.