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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • No. I have zero interest in your apologies. Not you, not any American whose first instinct is to tell us how sorry they are. I’m sure you’re all wonderful people, but we’re well past the point where that matters.

    I never, ever, want to hear the word “Sorry” from any of your lips while I’m living with the reality that people I love might die to American bombs and bullets. I am not obligated to assuage your fucking conscience by dignifying your apologies while you all sit around hanging your heads in worthless shame.

    We do not want or need your apologies. We want your rage. Get angry. Get out in the streets. Fucking do something.

    And when Trump is gone and every last fascist has been hunted down and your government is run like an actual democracy, and your voters have learned how to value and respect friendships with countries outside of your own… Then you can come to us and say sorry.






  • I want to note on the “mineral deal” thing that access to rare earth minerals has nothing to do with China’s ability to constrain their supply to the US, because getting rare earth minerals is actually relatively easy. They’re found all over the Earth, although some areas do have better naturally occurring concentrations than others. Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of finding a nice large swathe of land that you can easily strip-mine.

    The problem is refining them. Digging up a bunch of soil and rock is easy, getting the trace amounts of rare (hence why they’re called that) earth minerals out of the soil and rock is really hard. While it’s true that China does dominate in rare earth extraction, it really wouldn’t be all that hard for other countries to catch up to them on that score if they wanted to. But the reason China controls the worlds rare earth supply is because they also dominate in refining, which is extremely difficult, technically complex, and not easy to replicate due to the highly specialised nature of rare earth refineries.

    Trump can get access to all the unprocessed rare earth minerals he likes, but it won’t solve his current problems. First off, even if Ukraine were at peace tomorrow it would take most of a decade to prospect those mineral deposits and begin extracting them at scale. But even then, it doesn’t solve the refining problem. You’d just be selling the raw deposits to China so that they can refine them and sell the refined product back to you at a huge profit.






  • Yeah, I contemplated this idea, but you’d need a network of dealerships all within no more than about 450km of each other. Actually, a lot less than that if you want to deliver something like a cybertruck this way. And Tesla just doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure, especially in the Midwest and South. And that means there’s no good way to get a car from Fremont or Austin to anywhere on the East Coast either. At best you could maybe make this work in California.

    But also consider the scale of what you’re talking about. Generally you’re looking at selling thousands of cars per day for a successful production model. Can their dealerships handle charging thousands of cars per day?


  • This is such obvious BS. Putting aside that Tesla are always making claims about self driving that they can’t deliver on, let’s just consider the basic logistics of doing this for any customer who lives more than about 300km from a Tesla factory (of which there are two IIRC, and one of those is in Austin and the other is in Fremont)…

    How the fuck is the car going to recharge?

    It’s not like it’s going to plug itself in, and there are no staff at Tesla supercharger stations as far as I’m aware. With the range on a typical Model S even getting to LA might be tough if it gets stuck in traffic. Fremont to LA is just under 600km if you’re lucky.



  • this new gadget makes it easy to take Windows system events, and feed them into Copilot, looking for potentially malicious activity. And while it’s not perfect, it did manage to detect about 40% of the malicious tests that Windows Defender missed. It seems like LLMs are going to stick around, and this might be one of the places they actually make sense.

    Yes, the pattern recognition engine is good at pattern recognition.

    In all seriousness, it really would be great if we’d focused development of transformer models on stuff like this instead of everyone getting caught up in the fact that they can kinda sorta pass the Turing test and deciding that the singularity had arrived and they could be the ones to sell tickets to it.





  • Not even remotely. LLMs have failed to find any viable market fit.

    The problem continues to be hallucinations and limited utility. This is compounded by the fact that LLMs are very expensive to run. The latter problem wouldn’t really be a problem if LLMs were truly capable of replacing a human employee, but they’re not. They’re just too unreliable for any serious enterprise grade application, and they’re too expensive for any low severity application.

    For example, as a coding assistant, a lot of people quite like them. But as a replacement for a human coder, they’re a disaster. That means you still have to employ the expensive human, and you also have to pay an exorbitant monthly fee for what amounts to a very cool search engine.

    There are tonnes of frivolous applications where they work really well. The AI girlfriend stuff, for example. A chatbot that sexts you is a very sellable product, regardless of how icky it might seem to some people. But no one is going to pay over $200 / month for it (as an example, ChatGPT still doesn’t make a profit at their $200/month tier).

    LLMs are too unreliable to make anything better than toys, but too expensive to sell as toys.