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msabalau commented on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock   wsj.com/opinion/uncle-sam... · Posted by u/aspenmayer
Larrikin · a day ago
Given with how poorly Ukraine has been treated, why would Taiwan ever think they could easily get an emergency supply of chips for drones and planes exported from the US and past a Chinese blockade?

If Trump or someone similar is in the office I'd expect that there would be demands that the chips stay in the US to protect the country from Chinese aggression unless there is some kind of bribe.

msabalau · a day ago
Taiwan benefits from the US having access to some additional chip manufacturing to support a war effort and reduce the economic cost of intervening. At the end of the day, Taiwan can resist, slow down China, and make them pay an absurdly heavy price for trying to invade, but US participation is needed to break a blockade and end the conflict.

None of this was ever being done because there an expectation that chips were going to be exported to Taiwan in the middle of a conflict.

Yes, like every other security partner, Trump's immature and inconsistence isolationism makes things worse and unstable. But it was hardly the case that intervention would have be 100% assured under any other President, and it's not the case that that its at 0% under Trump. Improving the odds of intervention, slightly, regardless of who is in office, benefits Taiwan.

Moreover, Putin didn't attack US forces when he invaded Ukraine. There is a significant chance that the PRC would launch a Pearl Harbor style attack on the US and Japan at the outset of a campaign against Taiwan. That dramatically increases the odds of the US being involved in the conflict over the long term. Sure, it's also likely (probably more likely) that the PRC might try more limited form of coercion instead, but one ought to be prepare for the range of possible options.

It is worth observing that one of the major reasons why US conservative China hawks give for not wanting to support Ukraine is because it's not a vital US interest, and they want to focus on preparing for war with China and hopefully deterring it.

It is really unclear you should say why that the Ukraine is being treated "poorly", it is being treated how you'd expect an more isolationist administration who thinks it is a strategic distraction would treat it. The current US administration may well be wrong about this--there's definitely a case to be made that further increasing the cost to Putin for aggression increases deterrence in Asia. But the current administration was very clear in the election about how they felt about Ukraine, and they won.

The argument that unless Trump treats Ukraine "not poorly" no one, anywhere, ever, ought to anything to bend the curve to increase the odds the the US intervening on their behalf seems rather sentimental and unpragmatic.

It seems likely that Taiwan leaders have a better grasp than you do of the strategic choices they are making, and that random feelings about how "poorly Ukraine has been treated" don't enter into it.

If you just hate Trump, it would be easier and more direct to say that, rather than seeming to claim that other people in the world are acting irrationally.

msabalau commented on The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning   blog.charliemeyer.co/the-... · Posted by u/csmeyer
dentemple · 18 days ago
Yeah, I agree with the OP here. After all this time, being able to change the chat colors at this point has some real We-reached-the-bottom-of-the-backlog energy, and they're just now implementing the ideas that weren't considered important enough before by the PMs to consider.

It hardly feels like a next generation release.

As a related anecdote (not saying that this is industry standard, just pointing out my own experience), the startup I work for launched their app four years ago, and, for all four of those years, we've had "Implement a Dark Mode design" sitting at the bottom of our own backlog. Higher priority feature requests are always pre-empting it.

msabalau · 18 days ago
The core product failure here is overhyping incremental improvement, eroding trust.

PMs operating at this level ought to be bringing in some low cost UX improvements alongside major features. That simply isn't a sign that they've run ought of backlog. (That said, it is rather pathetic to paywall this)

A moment's consideration ought to show that Open AI has plenty of significant work they they can be doing, even if the core model never gets any better than this.

msabalau commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief   notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam
oezi · 21 days ago
When all your military spending can't help you win against a third-world country (USA in Afghanistan) or a single country 1/3 your size (Russia in Ukraine), it really makes you wonder if all that spending is justified to uphold one big bluff.
msabalau · 21 days ago
The Bush administration was looking to "win" in the Afghanistan by doing nation building, which was never going to work, and certainly wasn't going to be accomplished by military means. Obama and Trump both chose to kick the can the road, to not pay the political cost for "losing", Biden ended the conflict, and paid the political price.

But if the US had a different objectives, every human settlement in Afghanistan could have have been radioactive ash by September 12, 2001. Or, more realistically, the US could have gone in, killed all (for some value of all) the local elites as a warning to leaders elsewhere about the costs of harboring terrorists, and then immediately left the country in the same sort of chaos that they eventually did a couple of decades later. Kabul delenda est was always accomplishable.

The only people who should be ashamed of the their performance in Ukraine are the Russians, and the Europeans, for failing to be able deter or respond to the Russia on their own despite having an economy five times the size.

US interests are perfectly well served by seeing the Russian military mauled for a generation at the cost of aid, much of it material that was going to be decommissioned anyway, that costs roughly what Americans spend on golf in a given year (Once you throw in the costs of drinks on the 19th hole.)

Anyway, US arms sales are up since the start of the conflict, Russian sales have cratered.

msabalau commented on Introducing Gemma 3n   developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/bundie
nsingh2 · 2 months ago
Whats are some use cases for these local small models, for individuals? Seems like for programming related work, the proprietary models are significantly better and that's all I really use LLMs for personally.

Though I can imagine a few commercial applications where something like this would be useful. Maybe in some sort of document processing pipeline.

msabalau · 2 months ago
I just like having quick access to reasonable model that runs comfortably on my phone, even if I'm in a place without connectivity.
msabalau commented on A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books   techcrunch.com/2025/06/24... · Posted by u/moose44
martin-t · 2 months ago
Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible.

The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale.

If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in?

The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine.

In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income.

---

If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.

msabalau · 2 months ago
Copyright's goal, at least under Constitution under which this court is ruling is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" not to ensure that authors get paid for anything that strikes their whim.

LLMs are models of languages, which are models of reality. If anyone deserves compensation, it's humanity as a whole, for example by nationalizing, or whatever the global equivalent is, LLMs.

Approximately none of the value of LLMs, for any user, is in recreating the text written by an author. Authors have only ever been entitled to (limited) ownership their expression, copyright has never given them ownership of facts.

msabalau commented on Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024)   spectrum.ieee.org/jpeg-im... · Posted by u/purpleko
hungryhobbit · 2 months ago
I love how the article implies there's something flawed about webp at the end ... but if you click the link the only "flaw" reported is that webp isn't ubiquitous enough yet, so some sites don't support it

Perfect logic: let's not switch to webp because it's bad. Why is it bad? Not everyone has switched to it yet.

msabalau · 2 months ago
As an enduser, I hate, hate, hate webp, because I cant' easily use the images in a wide range of ways.

Maybe it's vaguely more flexible and compresses well. I don't care. If someone uses it, I despise them.

msabalau commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students   nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y
dekhn · 3 months ago
The probability of impeachment succeeding at this time is effectively zero.
msabalau · 3 months ago
Even if impeachment is off the cards, is it impossible to imagine that there could be any sort of impact from Republican lawmakers hearing Republican voters that, or other things are not what they voted for or want?
msabalau commented on Remarks on AI from NZ   nealstephenson.substack.c... · Posted by u/zdw
hnthrow90348765 · 3 months ago
>We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down

I don't think this can realistically happen unless all of the knowledge that brought us to that point was erased. Humans are also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely that no one tries to figure out how the machines work across an entire population, even if we had to start all the way down from 'what's a bit?' or 'what's a transistor?'.

Even today, you can find youtube channels of people still interested in living a primitive life and learning those survival skills even though our modern society makes it useless for the vast majority of us. They don't do it full-time, of course, but they would have a better shot if they had to.

msabalau · 3 months ago
Stephenson is using a evocative metaphor and a bit of hyperbole to make a point. To take him as meaning that literally everyone entire population is like the Eloi is to misread.
msabalau commented on Vagus Nerve Stimulation Erases PTSD: Study   neurosciencenews.com/vagu... · Posted by u/rmason
nativeit · 4 months ago
Isn’t that fairly common for the first round of human testing for novel treatments like this? I could certainly understand wanting some small scale reassurance that a wider study won’t be throwing good money after bad.
msabalau · 4 months ago
And, as in study notes, to prioritize understanding safety with this population before worrying about efficacy.
msabalau commented on Evolving OpenAI's Structure   openai.com/index/evolving... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
jwarden · 4 months ago
Brand counts for a lot
msabalau · 4 months ago
No one has a deep emotional connection with OpenAI that would impede switching.

At best they have a bit of cheap tribalism that might prevent some incurious people who don't care much about using the best tools noticing that they aren't.

u/msabalau

KarmaCake day2264April 29, 2009View Original