Canada needs to redirect most of its defence spending to asymmetric warfare. You know, the same advice US consultants give to Taiwan to make a PRC occupation more expensive to contemplate. Forget about big ticket items meant to support the US in its overseas wars; start investing in mines, guerilla equipment, etc.

It’s strongly dependent on how you use it. Personally, I started out as a skeptic but by now I’m quite won over by LLM-aided search. For example, I was recently looking for an academic that had published some result I could describe in rough terms, but whose name and affiliation I was drawing a blank on. Several regular web searches yielded nothing, but Deepseek’s web search gave the result first try.

(Though, Google’s own AI search is strangely bad compared to others, so I don’t use that.)

The flip side is that for a lot of routine info that I previously used Google to find, like getting a quick and basic recipe for apple pie crust, the normal search results are now enshittified by ad-optimized slop. So in many cases I find it better to use a non-web-search LLM instead. If it matters, I always have the option of verifying the LLM’s output with a manual search.

Maybe, maybe not – but I’m discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they’re trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.

Pretty much inevitable. Nowadays there are so many robot vacuum cleaners from different brands, and everyone has more or less figured out the tech so they all work pretty well. (I have a Roborock, and have nothing to say about it other than it keeps the floors clean and doesn’t cause me any grief.) There’s no moat, so consumer market success is purely a matter of manufacturing and cost efficiency, and iRobot obviously would have a huge upfill fight against Samsung, Xiaomi, and a thousand other light consumer goods makers.

I mean, I don’t demand an open source washing machine or dryer either.

They have to put on a brave face, of course, but I’m not sure US intelligence is so easy to replace. The Europeans have let their systems atrophy by simply using the US offerings, especially in realtime targeting data and signals intelligence. The US has in the past encouraged this dependence, e.g. by strong-arming Europe not to develop a military grade GPS alternative.

Pokemon battle, 3v3

Google search results are so terrible that at this point it’s a mercy.

Alternative take: Li Ka Shing took advantage of the Trump bullshit to sell off two port operations at the top of the market, right before a global recession. CK Hutchinson’s share price went up by a fifth when this deal got announced; Blackrock is down.

It was like an episode of Veep except more obnoxious.

What plausible stick could the UK (with or without EU) wield against the US? Pull out of NATO or the Five Eyes? That would hurt them way more than it would hurt the US, and Trump knows they’re too rational to let it happen.

I honestly don’t know how to read the situation. Ukraine’s fought terrifically, but their status seems far less sustainable even if you discount the Trump stuff. I don’t put a lot of stock in these claims that Russia is on the verge of imploding due to the stress of the war, any day now. It is possible, but mostly seems like wishful thinking.

External aid changes the situation a bit, but not ultimately that much because no Western power seems willing to directly intervene with troops. Barring that, the overall situation between the two countries feels a bit like what Shelby Foote said about the US Civil War: “the North fought that war with one hand behind its back… If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back.”

I don’t see it happening. Increased military spending, sure, but individual member states will not give up their authority on war and geopolitical matters. Will France or Germany abolish their ministries and delegate it all to von der Leyen? So the structural problem remains.

“European leaders” operate under a permanent disadvantage because they have to agree among themselves to do anything. This leaves them unable to take the initiative geopolitically, and prone to taking whatever’s the path of least resistance lying before them. The US and Russia have concluded that Europe will roll over and accept whatever they are presented with, after some angsty wailing, and unfortunately they are probably right. Not inviting Europe to talks is just a dominance move showing that they know the Europeans can’t do anything about it.

Unfortunately for Europe, this is just the logical end point of their institutional arrangements. In a domain like geopolitics, where there are intelligent players looking for advantage, it is suicidal to turn off your ability to make decisions.

Dylan’s just being deliberately obtuse. Deepseek developed a way to increase training efficiency and backed it up by quoting the training cost in terms of the market price of the GPU time. They didn’t include the cost of the rest of their datacenter, researcher salaries, etc., because why would you include those numbers when evaluating model training efficiency???

The training efficiency improvement passes the sniff test based on the theory in their paper, and people have done back of the envelope calculations that also agree with the outcome. There’s little reason to doubt it. In fact people have made the opposite criticism, that none of Deepseek’s optimizations are individually groundbreaking and all they did is “merely engineering” in terms of putting a dozen or so known optimization ideas together.

Aside from national pride or security, one issue is that there’s a Taiwan law requiring TSMC to keep latest gen fabs in Taiwan. So if TSMC takes over Intel fabs, Intel’s US operations will never be able to reach latest gen (not that Intel is currently in good shape to achieve this, of course).

Slightly off topic, but the writing on this article is horrible. Optimizing for Google engagement, it seems. Ironically, an AI would probably have produced something vastly more readable.

Aww come on. There’s plenty to be mad at Zuckerberg about, but releasing Llama under a semi-permissive license was a massive gift to the world. It gave independent researchers access to a working LLM for the first time. For example, Deepseek got their start messing around with Llama derivatives back in the day (though, to be clear, their MIT-licensed V3 and R1 models are not Llama derivatives).

As for open training data, its a good ideal but I don’t think it’s a realistic possibility for any organization that wants to build a workable LLM. These things use trillions of documents in training, and no matter how hard you try to clean the data, there’s definitely going to be something lawyers can find to sue you over. No organization is going to open themselves up to the liability. And if you gimp your data set, you get a dumb AI that nobody wants to use.

It’s definitely a trend. More and more top Chinese students are also opting to stay in China for university, rather than going to the US or Europe to study. It’s in part due to a good thing, i.e. the improving quality of China’s universities and top companies. But I think it’s a troubling development for China overall. One of China’s strengths over the past few decades has been their people’s eagerness to engage with the outside world, and turning inward will not be beneficial for them in the long run.

Chinese or not, it’s MIT licensed. A world where any company can spend ~$10k to locally deploy a frontier reasoning model is very different from one where you can only get AI via API access to a handful of US tech giants.