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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The key detail is that, like with rear brake lights, they extinguish when the foot is removed from the brake pedal. So it’s not so much the presence of the brake light, but the presence of an inactive brake light that would, serve as a warning that a car is about to start moving. This would be very helpful to drivers on a road when other drivers are pulling out too early from a side road or driveway. That little bit of extra warning is, in many situations, enough for you to pump the brakes, hit the horn, or both.



  • TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that’s not showy and doesn’t require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing.

    Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

    Amazon isn’t the big surprise, they’ve always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they’re scaling back, but they’ve also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more.

    As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they’re pulling back. That’s how you know how they really feel.



  • This has been building for a while. We’ve seen Trump slowly start to criticise Putin more and more. And the reason is simple; Putin is making him look bad.

    Ending the war in Ukraine was a key promise of Trump’s campaign. He cast the Dems as ignorant bloodthirsty warmongers who only knew how to shovel money into the death machine, while he was the savvy deal maker who would end the war in a day.

    One of Trump’s biggest problems is that he buys his own hype. I think he really did believe that Ukraine was only an ongoing issue because no one had really tried to sit down and hash out a deal with Russia. And of course, with his cozy relationship with Putin, he was just the guy to do it.

    But there is no deal to be made. The things Ukraine wants and the things Russia wants are fundamentally incompatible. There’s no middle ground between “I want to exist” and “I want for you not to exist.” And Putin’s claims of wanting to come to the table have only ever been a smoke screen.

    So now Trump looks like a fucking moron because the “easy” deal he claimed he’d get isn’t happening, and Putin keeps on thumbing his nose at the US by flagrantly violating every agreement he makes.

    For Putin, pissing off Trump doesn’t matter. He’s already got what he needs out of him. Trump was only ever a Russian asset in the sense that they knew that getting him into power would accelerate the USA’s decline. They’re not calling up and sending him orders every day. They don’t need to. As another commenter here brilliantly put it, “Trump is a fire-and-forget idiot.”

    But there’s at least some hope that this break with Putin might see him turn to supporting Ukraine purely out of spite. He’s done pettier things for less reason.





  • Remember, this is all about OpenAI convincing investors to shovel more money into their furnace.

    They are not profitable. They have no realistic path to being profitable. Their only hope for survival is to South Seas Company their through round after round of investor funding. And to do that they have to create the appearance of near unlimited demand for their services, and therefore for additional capacity to run those services.

    The writing is on the wall. Microsoft and Amazon, two of the biggest players in the compute space, both of which also run their own AI projects, have both massively scaled back their plans for future compute expansion. If anyone should be building out like crazy it’s them. If anyone has a clear idea of what the actual demand is, it’s them. If Amazon and Microsoft are out, this thing is fucked.

    OpenAI is fucked. Sam Altman knows it. But if he can keep the illusion going, the money train doesn’t have to stop. Yet.


  • Because of course he wouldn’t pay up. The man could literally afford to take more money than any one person could ever spend in their life, put it in a pile and set it on fire, and not be any more than a fraction of a percent poorer, but he’s still such an unfathomably awful cunt that he just has to stiff people anyway.






  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.workstoNews@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    An invasion of Greenland, or Canada, wouldn’t necessarily be unlawful.

    Remember 9/11? Remember George Bush asking Congress to approve his use of military force to hunt down the suspects?

    Well that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, unlike any prior which had clearly defined limitations, was simply against “terror” and set to expire “never.”

    One member of Congress refused to vote for this, precisely because she understood that Congress was effectively forever giving up its ability to determine when and how the President was allowed to deploy the military. She got death threats. She was right.

    All Trump has to do is “find” a terrorist threat in a country, and he’s allowed to send US troops there. Remember how he recently decided that fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction? Yeah.


  • This theory that it’s all Putin’s master plan is giving Trump too much credit.

    There’s no conspiracy here. He really is that much of an idiot all on his own. He’s been going on about trade imbalances and the need for massive tariffs hits entire adult life. It’s a personal obsession for him. It didn’t just come out of nowhere.

    The reason it seems incredibly stupid and self defeating is because it’s incredibly stupid and self defeating. People who are born rich never have to learn how much of an idiot they are, so Trump genuinely believes this is a good idea.