He's not wrong. But it's worth remembering that when China faced a far smaller provocation from their own restive Muslims, in Xinjiang, they responded by locking up a large fraction of the population in vast reeducation camps...

The rest of the developed world has had this for decades.

So I fully expect this initiative to be lobbied out of existence by Intuit and the rest of the tax filing industry.

"Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities

That's some Orwellian shit right there.

Even more horrifyingly, children addicted to books stayed up late, reading under their bed covers using flashlights...

It's nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don't care THAT much about pedos. It's not a cause that's motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

Sympathies to whoever it was at the pension fund that had to work with Google's "customer service".

This is the one that's partly funded by Mihoyo, using the absurd amounts of money they made with Genshin Impact.

The power of the anime waifu, in the palm of your hand...

I feel like 911 jokes should be fair game by now...

"EV winter" is a silly framing. Many Chinese EV companies are on a roll, with BYD just surpassing Tesla in EV shipments in the last quarter. EVs are now mainstream in China and the car markets in other countries won't be far behind. Obviously, Tesla faces more challenges from the fact that it no longer has the market to itself, but competition is a good thing.

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

The crazy thing is, they had a nascent social network going with Google Reader, populated by people who were engaged and interested in the content. And they threw it all away to chase a Facebook clone, which was doomed anyway.

Some of the prior cases described in this article, as precedents that could spell trouble for OpenAI, frankly sound like miscarriages of justice. Using copyright to prevent organizations from photocopying articles for internal use? What the heck?

If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.

Funny thing is, those Chinese drones are being heavily used by Ukraine, because they're more reliable than US-made drones. In 2023, Ukraine bought about 60% of the global supply of DJI's Mavic quadcopters.

Can't Spotify make their own in-app white noise (generated locally rather than streamed), and push it to the top of their own search results for "white noise"?

All of Sony only contains 6000 files? I always thought they were a giant multinational, who knew Sony was just two guys running the operation out of their apartment?

Liability. Imagine an AI girlfriend who slowly earns your affection, then at some point manipulates you into sending bitcoins to a prespecified wallet set up by the model maker. Because models are black boxes, there is no way to verify by direct inspection that an AI hasn't been trained with an ulterior agenda (the "execute order 66" problem).

That's not such a big deal. Their objective is to get people hooked on the system. After that, they'll jack up the price. Microsoft can easily afford to lose money for several years in pursuit of that target.

(One way this plan could fall through is if LLM tech progresses to the extent that free and open source copilots, run locally, can give result that are just as good.)

Look, you are allowed as a defendant in a criminal case or a civil case," he continued. "You're allowed to criticize the prosecutor, you're allowed to criticize the other party. You're allowed to criticize the judge."

Are you allowed to criticize the judge like this, though? My understanding is that judges can nail people for contempt for far less. I know Trump is trying to score a political point here and a contempt of court ruling would play into that... but I wish one of these judges would go "idgaf" and bring down the hammer.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don't think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it's not just a matter of Google being assholes, what's the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

China is using subsidies to accelerate the green transition, exactly like the US is doing with the "Inflation Reduction Act" and other initiatives.

At least having those GPUs training neural networks is vastly preferable to having them mining Bitcoin.

Clickbait title makes it sound like Smith is maneuvering just to block Trump and Cannon. In reality, the documents case is being filed in Florida, and the 1/6 case in DC, because that's where the purported crimes took place.

Whelp... Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey's Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor's decision not to retire during Biden's term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We're going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump's, they're going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

All it takes is for Biden to develop a sudden health problem, as old people sometimes do; then it's Trump vs Kamala Harris and we're fucked.

The US is currently cosying up to Saudi Arabia, and doing its darnedest to forget about Jamal Khashoggi --- a US resident at the time of his assassination. They're not going to do anything for Canada on this score. At the end of the day, the individual lives of little people don't matter in the game of geopolitics.

I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.

1. Have an accomplice feeding the game into a computer to figure out the best move to make next.

2. Send the information to the chess player using Morse code butt vibrations.

If you think LLMs hallucinate too much, wait till you check out code literally written during hallucinations.

The Chinese super apps didn't really have government institutions on board, aside from the chat censorship aspect which was the main thing the government was originally paying attention to. In other aspects, the Chinese government and its regulators didn't initially get involved, and the rapid dominance of Alibaba and Tencent took them by surprise.

The super apps benefitted from a mix of rapid smartphone adoption, first mover advantages, weak consumer protections, and fierce competition with each other. It's probably that combination of circumstances that's hard to replicate, not the authoritarian country bit (there are lots of authoritarian countries that haven't fostered super apps).

The Chinese government was not entirely happy about the result; for example, the dominance of WeChat Pay and AliPay poses a threat to the state-owned banks, which are a major channel of government control over the economy. That is why the Chinese government has spent the last few years cracking down on the super app companies in various ways.

You can tell this is written by an American because it keeps bringing up the war for no reason.

He's going to give it his all, but also he's going to make sure that he gets enough sleep and avoid scheduling events past 8 pm.

Funny thing is, Chinese EVs are at the place where Japanese cars were back in the 1970s. Widely mocked as cheap crap, but consumers like them well enough, and the quality keeps improving. The US reacts by shutting them out of its market, but they're doing awfully well everywhere else in the world...

It's not open source, though.

The Economist had an article a few months ago talking about how modern satellite fleets were so bright, they were threatening to make earth based astronomy impossible. Its title: "Goodbye, darkness, my old friend".

Why can't an independent researcher just go over to the lab of the original authors with a magnet and some equipment, to verify the measurements on their sample? Why are we forced to squint at blurry Bilibili videos?

Obviously, there's a more disturbing background at play here, but churches shouldn't be untaxed in the first instance. The dude literally said to render unto Caesar, etc. etc.

Many countries, including those in the developing world, have had instant payments systems for years. They're very convenient, especially those that provide an "overlay" service (usually coming with a standardized app) that allows sending money to registered phone numbers, without dealing with bank account numbers.

Characteristically, the US version of instant payments seems half-assed. It's initially supported by only 35 banks (not including Citi and Bank of America). And it apparently does not provide a standardized overlay service. Many big financial stakeholders, including the credit card companies, no doubt view it as a threat and would be very happy if it does not catch on.

This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven't been able to find applications.

We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they're not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.

On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don't really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).

So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I'm sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.

Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.

To avoid this, Gazan civilians who are out in public should wear black clothing and masks, and move tactically between points of cover.

The timeline doesn't add up. Chinese EV makers, including BYD, were building crazy momentum long before Musk set up shop in Shanghai (which was in 2018). It's only come to the attention of the outside world in the last couple of years when their EVs started to get exported at scale, but before they've been brewing this industry for a long time. BYD shipped its first compact EV domestically in 2009.