This was interesting. Had a 5 minute chat with the outsider from the dishonored series. Just a one sentence prompt and its phrasing was at least 60% there, but less cold and nicer in a sense than the video game counterpart. Still an interesting experiment. But I also know that maybe 12-24 months down the line, once this is available in real time on device there will be an ungodly amount of smut coming from this.
I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.
As much as I dislike invasive tracking, I don't think the blame lies with Marketing on this one. In most cases I think you could implement all the awful surveillance you want with extremely minimal overhead, even on the web. Certainly malware developers are at the extreme of invasive + low-overhead!
Certainly there are cases where some manager says "put this script in Google Tag Manager and don't ask any questions", but rarely have I ever seen that be the bottleneck. Programmers actually just write really bad frameworks, and then other programmers use them to make even worse software, for literally no reason other than "maybe this framework design would be cool".
Then go ahead and write vanilla JS and raw HTML! No one is asking you to use any of these bad "state of affairs". If you do build a 100+ page SaaS app without any framework, let me know, I'd love to see how it works.
My clients are. I do web dev for a living and I use these frameworks day in and day out. It’s not even that I dislike the dev ex on most of them and I’ve seen a lot of good code and bad code and I don’t even wanna blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in. I think my comment was more of a dig at the world we live in than anything else.
To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.
To be fair to the conversatives in the UK who have engineered this situation, some have recently said that the £100k threshold is too low. I detest them but I have to give them this.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
So it is just the right wing neoliberal playbook then. Protect the rich and put everyone else against each other so we don’t focus on them. I want this to stop.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy.
And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often create regressive tax regimes despite knowing they aren't very good systems.
It’s easy to understand, but not easy to live under. If the worst case is I lose 25% of every “extra” dollar in some range, I have to think about it way less than if I lose the entire benefit for being 1 unit of currency over a limit.
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
First off, the following is not meant to combative but I think this confuses me. If there was no cliff there was nothing to do administratively on that front, no new checking at all. We already have progressive tax systems in many countries. Adding 1% at the top end can’t be that difficult. My health insurance (in Germany) raises prices every year and most people don’t have a choice there either. Property taxes increase all the time. If we had a wealth tax and a higher (at the top) progressive capital gains tax it seems to me that the pitch would be politically even simpler: there are 5% that will pay a little more percentage wise from now on while retaining vast amounts of wealth and 95% that will pay less or much less. Genuinely I have heard that we can’t raise taxes on rich people because they will evade them but it also sounds like a lie repeated so often that we just take it as the truth. Didn’t a lot of countries or US states have higher marginal tax rates without seeing mass exodus of millionaires? Can’t lawmakers focus on plugging the loopholes rich people use? I mean our government is currently trying to go out of its way to make sure that unemployment benefits are only paid out to people who „really deserve them“ by tightening the rules around that and the political debates I see put incredible amounts of emphasis on „fairness“ and that we „have to do something about those who just profit off the system without contributing“ when it’s about that topic. The fervour is clearly not applied symmetrically.
One thing I've become obsessed with is people trying to solve problems in the wrong domain.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah
Genuine question: How does it happen that a heart surgery costs 100k? 2 surgeons (200$/h) + 6 nurses(100$/h) for 10 hours would be 10k. Where do the other 100k come from? Is it the equipment cost? Consumables? After care? Or are the margins just ridiculous?
Lots of equipment, consumable and facility costs. Catheters with realted imaging and machines to place it, meds, anesthesia, cost of the building, specialized HVAC, liability coverage, etc. Margins can also be bad since they'll charge some people more than others.
Malpractice insurance? One insurance premium is high in order to pay for the cost of another insurance premium?
This seems… suboptimal.
I'm in Germany, I don't know what we spend money on here because I'm still integrating myself and have not mastered the German language to the level of having opinions about the Krankenversicherungsbeitragsentlastungsgesetz, but I do know we spend about 2/3rds per capita as the USA for better outcomes:
Interesting story. I want to agree with the general advice not to use it for that - especially if that is how you use it. And I want to preface this with: Don’t take this as advice, I just want to share my experience here. I tend to do it anyway and had fairly large success so far but I use the LLM differently if I have a health issue that bothers me. First I open Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT in their latest, highest thinking budget installment. Then I tell them about my symptoms I give a fairly detailed description of my person and my medical history. I prompt them specifically to ask detailed questions like a physician would and ask them to ask me to perform tests to rule out or zoom in on different hypothesis about what is might have. After going back and forth, if they all agree on a similar thing or a set of similar things I usually take this as a good sign I might be on the right track and check if I should talk to a professional or not (edging on the side of caution). If they can’t agree I would usually try to get an appointment to see a professional and try to get sooner rather than later if anything potentially dangerous popped up during the back and forth or if I feel sufficiently bad.
Now, I live in Germany where in the last 20 years our healthcare system has fallen victim to neoliberal capitalism and since I am publicly insured by choice I often have to wait for weeks to see a specialist so more often than not LLMs have helped me stay calm and help myself as best as I can. However I still view the output less as a the output or a medical professional and try to stay skeptic along the way. I feel like the augment my guesswork and judgement, but not replace it.
I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning?
For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
My strong suspicion is that children just have no responsibilities and are socially allowed to not be able to talk while everyone will speak at their level with a great deal of patience.
speaking to a child at their level is the best way to keep them from speaking well. I never did it with my son and it didn't hold him back one bit. Everyone remarks his incredible vocabulary and language skills for his age. IMHO holding back with kids is an anti-pattern.
My aunt used baby talk with my cousin so much she accidentally invented a new language with him, and he ended up needing a bit of speech therapy to get back to a "standard" level of English for his age.
Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.
Yes. Also, they don't need much vocabulary, no grammar concerns, no reading/writing.
We much overestimate how well kids learn, and how "easy" is for them.
Many kids have language difficulties, and they usually know, and they don't feel too great about it.
I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.
The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.
> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.
It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.
But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.
It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.
A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.
But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.
Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".
It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.
I looked into this once and couldn't find anything -- after all, vanishingly few people practice total, 100% immersion in their new language, where you must either speak or not get what you want.
Naive question: Are the current (from what I have heard not very effective) export restrictions of HPC GPUs to china truly productive in the long run if the goal is to retain an edge? As in, to me it seems that it just fuels an expansion of domestic capabilities and in the car and solar sector my impression is that china had already proven that it can absolutely perform on par or even better in many different metrics compared to western countries, given time and pressure. So while these chips are not on par with current or even last gen GPUs, I would not be surprised if china would catch up and even have a much higher incentive to do so, now that other countries try to control their access to key technologies.
I am not saying whether retaining an edge is good or bad or that I have a different answer if one thought it was good. Just curious what you guys think.
I would not be surprised if most of us are running Chinese silicon a decade or two from now, unless China invades Taiwan, and I also think recent events have certainly spurned CCP tech strategy and accelerated this timeline.
There's a few hurdles for China to overcome first, most notably catching up on high-end manufacturing processes, but it's naive to assume that won't happen eventually.
For consumer and prosumer gear that they can get it done is already obvious, cf. people generally having no problem with buying DJI, BambuLabs or Anker.
China will 100% invade Taiwan. This is why both parties in the US are spending so much to get domestic chip production running.
I would be astonished if the backroom deal wasn't "If you take Taiwan now, we'll have to stop you, if you wait until we're self sufficient, we won't interfere."
The demographic situation in Taiwan is collapsing. Taiwan is basically fully dependent on trade with China and so on. The Chinese are masters of long term strategy and patience and would rather use deception than a sword if possible.
Stop looking at China through a Western lens. No one knows what China will do, so this statement is false. Considering their history and culture, they will first use all other tactics to take over the island. They said they want to do it by 2049, and they could succeed without firing a single bullet, as the commenter below noted.
> I would be astonished if the backroom deal wasn't "If you take Taiwan now, we'll have to stop you, if you wait until we're self sufficient, we won't interfere."
None of the cutting edge nodes are, or will be, produced in the US by TSMC. They are all produced in Asia, and the fabs in US will be X years behind.
> None of the cutting edge nodes are, or will be, produced in the US by TSMC. They are all produced in Asia, and the fabs in US will be X years behind.
I don't doubt you, and I think you'll be right for some time.
I also think it's foolish to count out Intel. They're down, but so was AMD. More pointedly, this is not Intel's first time playing "This works or we go under"
Stop looking at China through a Western lens. No one knows what China will do, so this statement is false.
No, it is not. Do you know why?
It's an opinion, clearly. Clearly, as few claim to be prescient. Dismissing my opinion, because I am not psychic and prescient is a very, very strange thing to say and do. You may say "that won't happen, your opinion will turn out to be wrong", but you cannot say my opinion as a statement is false, unless you are claiming I am lying about my own opinion?
And really, it is exceptionally silly to say "No one knows what $x will do", because of course not it's the future. We're all employing prediction trees, when we offer opinions on future events. Saying "no one knows the future" is just plain silly in this case. What are you even trying to assert? That we should all just never use our life experiences, knowledge, to attempt to provide some idea of what may come? Absolutely absurd! All of what I've just said is also understood as part of normal discussions of the future, so please try to keep this in mind.
Because trying to invalidate opinion by saying "you can't tell the future" makes no sense
And beyond that, after you discount my opinion because you claim people cannot tell the future (eg, no one knows what China will do), you immediately provide your own rendition of "what China will do".
What?!
So presumably, what you really mean in your first paragraph is that only you may predict the future outcome of events? I suggest, and I mean this honestly, that you drop this weird tactic from future debates. You cannot invalidate opinion in this way.
Moving on, it is strange to claim I am using a "Western lens". Are you trying to claim that China is somehow a land of pure people, free of all aggression and expansionist drive? And which will engage in no warlike actions? Which will not use force when it suits them? Such a rendition of any grouping of people is truly bizarre, and it is the only possible way your statement may be read. It is also very strange for you to throw this in.
You seem to be using trigger words, and pre-packaged conceptualized methods in an attempt to invalidate things people assert or say. Throwing 'Western lens" around is an attempt at impinging my worldview, it is logical fallacy, an ad hominem attack.
Please drop these sorts of tactics. If you want to realistically refute something I am saying, just refute the specific thing. Don't use ad hominem attacks. Don't refute a method (opinions of future actions), then employ them yourself.
Back to the meat of it. Surprisingly, for China, you and I seem to agree here, for you claim that China will try to use other tactics. Not will, but try as in "first use all other tactics". No kidding, ya think? Everyone tries other tactics first. Look at how many years Russia spent trying to subvert the Ukraine, before invading.
So you're not disagreeing with me. Not one bit. Because when I say China will invade Taiwan, I know all of this. Pretty much everyone you talk to knows that China has spent decades trying to subvert and take over Taiwan via sneaky, tricky subversion of Taiwan's political system. This isn't news to anyone, they've been trying for decades and endlessly failed. They've already tried those other tactics. Forever. They've failed. Over and over again.
And no, they aren't closer than ever before. Not much has changed in this regard.
So my assertion is that all of that will fail, as it has failed for decades. And that, as I said:
"China will 100% invade Taiwan."
Back to TSMC. There is more to the world than TSMC. There are other FABs coming online. There will be more money spent. And that's the whole crux of my comment.
Because the US does not want a war with China, any more than China with the US. Yet the US absolutely, positively, will not give control of Taiwan to China ever, under any circumstances, as long as the very prosperity of the US depends upon it.
Not going to happen. Not via political means. Not via a direct attack. Not via invasion. Never, never, never.
China will never ever be allowed control of Taiwan, until the US no longer needs it.
And so yes, there is an understanding between the US and China. You and I and everyone very much should want there to be an understanding. We should all want the US to have all the fabs it needs.
Because the alternative is a lot of death and destruction.
The closest parallel is, if a country cannot feed itself, and its stomach is filled by the bread of another land? And you invade that land? You will immediately be at war.
Instantly
This is entirely the same. So you should very much hope I am correct.
I think it will be effective. This stuff is hard. There used to be many competitors capable of the best process technology: TI, GlobalFoundries, Intel, IBM, Samsung, TSMC.
Canon, Nikon, ASML all used to have competitive lithography machines.
Now it’s just TSMC and Samsung at the edge, and only ASML supplies the latest lithography machines.
China will probably catch up quickly but the pace will be nonlinear and illusory. They will hit diminishing returns just like everyone else has.
They’ve probably stolen every bit of semiconductor IP they can through economic coercion or espionage.
All they can do now is out-innovate everyone else and that will take a long time. But who knows, their pace of advancement since Mao died has been impressive.
One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.
The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.
I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.
China is racing full speed ahead to win in all these tech domains regardless of export controls.
They will surpass us on chips just like they surpassed us on EVs. The leading edge of chip design is very complex so it will just take more time than EVs. But it is inevitable.
Even if China could get their hands on all the NVIDIA GPUs they wanted they would still try to make their own as fast as possible.
Sure, designing modern integrated circuits isn't easy. However it still is way easier than what you need to manufacture them. Design of digital integrated circuits is commonly more understood with information being readily available.
In theory you could gain the knowledge to design an early 1990s CPU at the logic gate level by reading some books and doing a bit of research, on the other hand actually manufacturing such IC would take considerably more effort.
CPU design has come a long way since the 1990s. Superscalar designs, high speed memory interfaces, multi-level caches, out-of-order execution, machine level translation, JIT optimization, the list goes on. Just one feature of frontier high performance chip design is far more complex than an entire MPU from decades ago. And many of these techniques are IP protected. Which is of no concern to China. But here in the US it's a big reason why there hasn't been as much competition in this space, aside from the ISA cross-licensing agreements of course.
Design and manufacturing are both engineering problems. Throw enough people and money at the problem and it will get done eventually. What we're banking on in the West is by the time China catches up to where we are now we'll be on to the next thing. Always one step ahead. What I'm saying is, unless we refocus our society on STEM, those days are numbered.
1. Why will they master it? Because they dedicate their industrial strategy and hence resources to it like they did in the other technological domains and flood the market?
2. Is the only way out a strict decoupling from the Chinese market in these domains? Or would it be a strategy that involves protecting domestic industries with other levers?
1. Why is because making advanced chips is an engineering problem, not magic. It's about motivation, resources and time. China as all three.
2. If we don't want to rely on China for critical technology we need to focus on our own values and education, which will take generations to realize. But that's what China did, so it's not impossible. Industrial and financial policy are useless if you don't have the cultural and intellectual inclination towards self-sufficiency.
I understand that advanced chip making has been done, and is an engineering problem. By generations I assume you mean cohorts.
However, one must not forget the subsidy lever China is using to distort competitive advantage on a financial level. As long as we do not level the playing field in a strategic sense, we will loose on the market long term.
That's assuming they can keep pumping massive capital into every industry that it seeks to circumvent from bans and sanctions. But it appears they have very short runway these days. Just months after the initial tariffs/sanctions from US, Chinese government is enacting multiple tax raising schemes in September to try to stay alive. The first is the mandating that workers and employees cannot opt out of social security contributions. which is around 1500 yuan ($200) per month for one worker. for an average worker that makes 4000 ($600) yuan, it makes no sense. So many companies are deciding to layoff or close up in September. And workers are going back to countryside. The second is the landlord tax that is starting on September 15th. This is due to people not buying real estates anymore and renting instead.
The US has export restrictions on certain computing devices to certain regimes which included the Sony Playstation 2, a gaming console from the double noughts [0]. Apparently the military thought it could be used to create nasty weapons. Two decades later and nobody cares whether a PS2 is shipped to Iran. We still track FPGAs I guess, though I haven't checked what's on the ITAR/EAR list in a while.
Embargoes typically work until the embargoees(?) develop the technology to build or acquire what they need. If AI is only a strategic advantage because of hardware alone, then yes. But Deepseek kinda maybe killed that idea. China has never been the first mover. They optimize. But it looks like today, AI embargoes to China will get the US months at most.
I have to second this. I study Japanese myself and the entire way the Japanese communicate is reflected so deeply in the language. There is so so much nuance to pretty much every sentence they speak and there are certain grammar points that carry more meaning in three syllables than what can be expressed in English or German in a full sentence. And ok turn this way of communicating shapes their culture too I believe. If I were to translate a German conversation into Japanese, even if I did so idiomatically it would most likely come off as a rude exchange, because of all the unapologetic directness in the source language.
I’ve tried to learn Mandarin and failed because of lack of memory and practice. mostly i’m shocked at how ambiguous it appears to an english-trained mind - you have to fill in a lot of fine article/pronoun detail from custom and common understanding. which is why i think a lot of automatic translations are poor.
Now compared to Berlin I think Hamburg is still pretty conservative and I am not in a position to make apt comparisons to cities in the US but I do have to disagree with the statement that Hamburg is more conservative.
I was born and raised in Hamburg and lived there or in adjacent parts most of my life. I also visited Munich quite a few times due to a long distance relationship and I would disagree that Hamburg is more conservative. tThe people in Munich vote for conservative parties at a greater rate than the people in Hamburg and Munich never felt even remotely as multi-cultural as Hamburg. I distinctly remember walking around München for the first time and being surprised by people’s reactions to seeing a black guy walking down the street. Some people would literally stop walking and stare. Almost no Middle Eastern people either in comparison.
There is also a pretty strong divide between the north being much less religious. And one might argue that the people who are Christians are more often Protestant in the north which is arguably more progressive than the catholics in the south. If you look at Hamburg during may 1st, consider the Rote Flora building and the Schanzenviertel I think it’s quite clear that Hamburg has a pretty firmly established left-wing community. Granted if you go to Blankenese or the Neue Hafencity (areas for and of the wealthy) and talk to the people living there you might get a different picture. Anyways talking in averages I am not convinced your statement holds true today.
I think there is sort of a cultural rivalry where people from the north don’t want to get confused with the people from the south of Germany and vice versa. We make fun of their way they butcher the language and their festivities and traditional attire, and how they talk too much, and they make fun of us for being tight lipped humorless pricks.
