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.

"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.

At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.

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...

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.

Deepseek put out a highly detailed paper explaining how they optimized their model training, released the model itself, released their reinforcement learning code, put permissive open source licenses on everything... and people wonder if they got there by stealing stuff, because Chinese. Sheesh.

I imagine Russia is like the Star Wars setting, lots of crazy steep drops and they never install railings.

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"?

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).

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?

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.)