What is drawing top comedians to Saudi, a place where you get killed for saying or writing things the ruling family doesn’t like?

I see a trend there but I can’t quite… Wait, could it be loads of money?

I track the location of hundreds maybe thousands of phones every day for minutes at the time. I see people using them while I commute. Where can I collect my fee from the US government for my services?

no. no, what she was trying to say is that we are 100% shooting Russian jets IF they are on the table. Unless we’re having dinner, in which case we’ll invite them at the table because hospitality is sacred if you are armed and not an immigrant.

To be fair all kings initially became kings exactly the way Trump is trying to do. No matter how they try to paint it as a God-given right or create elaborate origin myths, it all started with violence, marrying into power, betrayal, political scheming and a lot of inbreeding.

It’s kind of appropriate that a kingdom recognizes this (although that was probably not what they were trying to do).

or CEOs

I can’t imagine how sternly worded our letter to Russia is going to be! Scary stuff.

How does the madman theory work when your head honcho is an actual, bona fide madman? Don’t go anywhere, we’ll find out right after this quick commercial war!

“A grand transformation into AI is the only way out of growth declines resulting from a population shock,” the ministry said in a statement, referring to South Korea’s record low birthrate.

The funny bit is how “AI companions” are one of the most profitable uses of AI so far . See how THAT increases a country’s birthrate.

This is Analysis-Paralysis. Why should they spend all their time counting past crashes when they are busy increasing the production of new ones?

/s

Ah yes “The Porn Loophole”, was one of my favorites , I should still have it on a DVD somewhere.

LLMs can’t do protein folding. A specifically-trained Machine Learning model called AlphaFold did. Here’s the paper.

Developing, training and fine tuning that model was a research effort led by two guys who got a Nobel for it. Alphafold can’t do conversation or give you hummus recipes, it knows shit about the structure of human language but can identify patterns in the domain where it has been specifically and painstakingly trained.

It wasn’t “hey chatGPT, show me how to fold a protein” is all I’m saying and the “superhuman reasoning capabilities” of current LLMs are still falling ridiculously short of much simpler problems.

As a paid, captive squirrel, focusing on spinning my workout wheel and getting my nuts at the end of the day, I hate that AI is mostly a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem. I am being told “you must use AI, find a way to use it” but my AI successes are very few and mostly non-repeatable (my current AI use case is: “try it once for non-vital, not time-sensitive stuff, if at first you don’t succeed, just give up, if you succeed, you saved some time for more important stuff”).

If I try to think as a CEO or an entrepreneur, though, I sort of see where these people might be coming from. They see AI as the new “internet”, something that for good or bad is getting ingrained in everything we do and that will cause your company to go bankrupt for trying too hard to do things “the new way” but also to quickly fade to irrelevance if you keep doing things in the same way.

It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to say now “haha, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 Millions and now they are out of business”, but all these people who have seen it happen are seeing AI as the new disruptive technology that can spell great success or complete doom for their current businesses. All hype? Maybe. But if I was a CEO I’d be probably sweating too (and having a couple of VPs at my company wipe up the sweat with dollar bills)

So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all “the fact they didn’t have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper”.

Now the US is getting behind on “AI wars” because China has more energy for huge data centers?

How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?

I don’t know how much Musk can be separated from Starlink. Not only because Starlink, as part of SpaceX, is privately held but also because the main reason they now have a superior service to offer is that they got fucktons of money from government customers, which is also tied to Musk’s action

A big part of Musk’s involvement with politics is because everything he does, from EVs to rockets to, now, big energy-guzzling datacenters for AI, needs a lot of government backing, if not in terms of direct contracts at least in terms of regulation and incentives.

Even his direct involvement with Trump wasn’t because he suddenly became a Nazi (he’s probably always been one, according to his own family) but in order to become even more entangled with government investments, even trying to control NASA directly.

And not only US governments. I remember Musk suddenly being everywhere in Europe pitching Starlink. Meloni’s government in Italy was grilled for allegedly agreeing on a big contract with Starlink.

but not in this order, the reverse would be so much more satisfying

“Trump insider” sounds like a tapeworm

The article makes a good point that it’s less about replacing a knowledge worker completely and more industrializing what some categories of knowledge workers do.

Can one professional create a video with AI in a matter of hours instead of it taking days and needing actors, script writers and professional equipment? Apparently yes. And AI can even translate it in multiple languages without translators and voice actors.

Are they “great” videos? Probably not. Good enough and cheap enough for several uses? Probably yes.

Same for programming. The completely independent AI coder doesn’t exist and many are starting to doubt that it ever will, with the current technology. But if GenAI can speed up development, even not super-significantly but to the point that it takes maybe 8 developers to do the work of 10, that is a 20% drop in demand for developers, which puts downward pressure on salaries too.

It’s like in agriculture. It’s not like technology produced completely automated ways to plow fields or harvest crops. But one guy with a tractor can now work one field in a few hours by himself.

With AI all this is mostly hypothetical, in the sense that OpenAI and co are all still burning money and resources at a pace that looks hard to sustain (let alone grow) and it’s unclear what the cost to the consumers will be like, when the dust settles and these companies will need to make a profit.

But still, when we’re laughing at all the failed attempts to make AI truly autonomous in many domains we might be missing the point

but why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard!

thank you for raising awareness on this, I had no clue

I want to boycott Lockheed Martin but man… I was really looking forward to getting that Black Hawk helicopter for Xmas! No, but really, a few of the companies in this list are a relative surprise (Bcom, AirBnB), others are well known pieces of s*t, a few are literally in the military industry and are probably involved in every conflict in the world (or they are actively trying to)