It’s an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression of the income range.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

I was skeptical, but the New York Times agrees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/world/asia/china-fight-club-ending.html

Now I’m kind of wondering how many anti-authoritarian movies out there have altered Chinese versions.

You could always just do reverse search on the open dataset to see if it’s an exact copy (or over a threshold).

True, but “exact copy” almost certainly isn’t going to be what gets produced – and you can have a derivative work that isn’t an exact copy of the original, just generate something that looks a lot like part of the original. Like, you’d want to have a pretty good chance of finding a derivative work.

And that would mean that anyone who generates a model to would need to provide access their training corpus, which is gonna be huge – the models, which themselves are large, are a tiny fraction the size of the training set – and I’m sure that some people generating models aren’t gonna want to provide all of their training corpus.

I mean…I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I’d use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip… but not everyone is going to own both. It’s hardly reasonable to say “well, people who own EVs just can’t travel long distances”.

Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.

EDIT:

Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.

https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html

Aluminum has 61 percent of the conductivity of copper, but has only 30 percent of the weight of copper. That means that a bare wire of aluminum weighs half as much as a bare wire of copper that has the same electrical resistance. Aluminum is generally more inexpensive when compared to copper conductors.

Resistance is a function of the material’s conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That’s a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.

So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.

In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it’s probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.

EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:

https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/

Tesla’s Mountain View Supercharger has always been a little different from the rest.  Not only is it located at the world-famous Computer History Museum – where Tesla sometimes holds events, but until recently, it was also running an experiment utilizing propylene-glycol-cooled supercharging cables…

These cables are thinner and more flexible than the standard Supercharger cables which are about as thick as gas station hoses and sometimes more unwieldy, especially in cold weather when they become less flexible.

We’ve gotten word today that Tesla has switched out the experimental cables in Mountain View for the standard thicker cables, thus ending the public experiment.  Officially Tesla told us “We changed the cables to unify service procedures and parts across all current Supercharger sites.”

That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That’s another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there’s some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it’d make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.

So, I agree with the EFF that we should not introduce some kind of new legal right to prohibit training on something just because it’s copyrighted. There’s nothing that keeps a human from training themselves on content, so neither should an AI be prohibited.

However.

It is possible for a human to make a work that will infringe existing copyright rights, by producing a derivative work. Not every work inspired by something else will meet the legal bar for being derived, but some can. And just as a human can do that, so too can AIs.

I have no problem with, say, an AI being able to emulate a style. But it’s possible for AIs today to produce works that do meet the bar for being derivative works. As things stand, I believe that that’d make the user of the AI liable. And yet, there’s not really a very good way for them to avoid that. That’s a legit point of complaint, I think, because it leads to people making derivative works.

The existing generative AI systems don’t have a very good way of trying to hint to a user of the model whether a work is derivative.

However, I’d think that what we could do is operate something like a federal registry of images. For published, copyrighted works, we already have mandatory deposit with the Library of Congress.

If something akin to Tineye were funded by the government, it would be possible to maintain an archive of registered, copyrighted work. It would then be practical for someone who had just generated an image to check whether there was a pre-existing image.

I don’t know whether Tineye works like this, but for it to work, we’d probably have to have a way to recognize an image under a bunch of transformations: scale, rotation, color, etc. I don’t know what Tineye does today, but I’d assume some kind of feature recognition – maybe does line-detection, vectorizes it, breaks an image up into a bunch of chuns, performs some operation to canonicalize the rotation based on the content of the chunk, and then performs some kind of fuzzy hash on the lines.

Then one could place an expectation that if one is to distribute an LLM-generated work, it be fed into such a system, and if not so verified and distributed and the work is derivative of a registered work, the presumption being that the infringement was intentional (which IIRC entitles a rights holder to treble damages under US law). We don’t have a mathematical model today to determine whether one work is “derivative” of another, but we could make one or at least give an approximation and warning.

I think that that’s practical for most cases for for holders of copyrighted images and LLM users. It permits people to use LLMs to generate images for non-distributed use. It doesn’t create a legal minefield for an LLM user. It places no restrictions on model creators. It’s doable using something like existing technology. It permits a viewer of a generated image to verify that the image is not derivative.

You can get these folding keyboards that will fit in a pocket, often have a roughly-cell-phone-sized case.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard

Still another item to carry, but it might fit the niche you’re looking for better if you’re not happy with hauling a regular 60% keyboard. Larger than those Blackberry-style thumbboards.

Inflation from the period during COVID-19 did go down. That does not mean that prices will return to a pre-COVID-19 point. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices, not prices. The government will actively aim to avoid deflation via adjusting interest rates, because deflation creates problems. What you saw during COVID-19 was the rate of price increases being higher than the rate of wage increases for several years, and what you saw subsequent to that was the rate of wage increases being higher than the rate of price increases.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

capitalism will use every manufactured crisis to price gouge the fuck out of everyone

The situation here is that the government is imposing a tax and that it’s getting passed on to consumers. I’m not sure why you’re complaining about “capitalism”. If Acer were part of the government, they’d be charging more too.

You can’t impose a tax and then just have the revenue materialize out of thin air.

But otherwise Acer couldn’t have raised their prices!

Acer can set their prices wherever they feel like. They can double them tomorrow, regardless of whether tariffs show up. What limits their prices is competition, and the fact that consumers will buy from competitors if they do so, not a lack of some event to act as an “excuse to raise prices”.

I’ve used Epson and Brother printers without issue, though I suppose things could change on a per-model basis or over time.

That’s a broad brush to paint with. Pretty sure that there are people out there entering the workforce who know what an edge case is.

and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.

I’m not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modified files, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn’t need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don’t do that, your next best bet on Linux – and this way would be filesystem-agnostic – is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.

looks at btrfs-send(1) man page

Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn’t say what time it runs in, but I assume that it’s better than linear in file count on the filesystem.

You’re correct and probably the person you’re responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.

However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don’t know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.

Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.

I bet some of 'em live in the 2.4 GHz range to use unregulated spectrum.

https://d-fendsolutions.com/blog/issues-with-jamming-drone-frequencies/

Commercial drones operate on four frequency bands: 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz, 433MHz and 915MHz.

You probably have something like a 2000 watt 2.4 GHz cavity magnetron transmitter. It’s just normally got shielding around it – your microwave oven.

Dunno if they hit a wide enough spectrum to blot out drones, though.

kagis

https://www.uavjammer123.com/introduction-to-drone-frequency-bands/

1. 2.4 GHz ISM Band

Frequency Range: 2.400 – 2.4835 GHz

Usage: This band is widely used for remote control and data transmission, including consumer drones.

https://www.sfu.ca/phys/346/121/resources/physics_of_microwave_ovens.pdf

The magnetrons in domestic microwave ovens emit microwaves at 2.45 GHz (repeatable, each time the magnetron is switched on, to ±10 MHz) with bandwidths of only a few MHz [6]

So, looks like not, if the frequency range is ~83 MHz wide and the magnetron in use only has bandwidth of a few MHz.

[continued from parent]

And the article makes the same prediction that I made above, that if the Trump administration truly wants to restrict international trade on a serious and continued basis, rather than conduct political theater to score domestic points, that’s going to make life a lot harder for competing with China:

Under these conditions, the U.S. will need to accelerate domestic and allied mining efforts while tightening enforcement on chip exports through global cooperation. This will be a challenging task given mounting international resistance to the Trump administration’s potential trade policies

As the United States and China careen toward intensified economic decoupling and geopolitical rivalry, trends in the semiconductor and minerals sectors will define their strategic competition. Both great powers aim to consolidate competitive advantages by hampering the other’s technological development and hammering their trading partners. Both are doing so using increasingly damaging measures—but from opposite ends of tech supply chains. The American position remains strongest in advanced technologies, an edge that the Joe Biden administration sought to preserve and extend through an unprecedented series of export controls. China, meanwhile, is just beginning to implement a parallel export control regime that leverages its dominant market share in critical minerals as well as niche but strategic industries.

Recent tit-for-tat actions mark a troubling new level of severity in this escalating struggle for technological advantage. On December 3, 2024, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) imposed its first outright ban on the export of certain “dual-use” critical minerals to the United States. This export control went into force for germanium, gallium, superhard minerals like synthetic diamonds, and imposed additional licensing restrictions on graphite exports. In adopting this ambitious new measure, China was retaliating against U.S. semiconductor chip and manufacturing equipment export controls unveiled only the day prior. On February 4, 2025, in response to new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, MOFCOM announced restrictions on additional minerals including tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and products that include molybdenum. In initiating these outright bans, Beijing has aimed to mirror U.S. long-arm jurisdiction by, likewise, seeking to enforce its export controls extraterritorially in third countries, which could re-export the restricted goods to America.

Juxtaposing “chips” and “rocks” reveals a basic asymmetry between each party’s points of strategic leverage. Beijing is building a dam upstream, threatening to choke off the flow of raw materials and intermediate goods required to produce certain advanced technologies—including semiconductor chips, high-capacity batteries, and a range of defense and aerospace products. Washington’s fortress is further downstream and depends heavily on guarding the intellectual property of American and allied firms employing the technical capabilities of a network of allies and industrial partners. This position has enabled U.S. government efforts to restrict Chinese entities’ access to the latest semiconductors and delay, but not halt, their development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

My understanding from past reading is that China’s strength mostly isn’t in access to raw materials, but rather in processing of those raw materials. That is, China is not especially unique in terms of what’s in the ground, but rather in that it has large-scale industry to refine those materials, so withholding access to these processed materials permits for leverage. My guess based on past reading as to why processing has gone to China and without looking into individually-processed substances, is that their advantages lie in (1) low labor costs, (2) restricted environmental regulations, and perhaps (3) scale of domestic market and possibly (4) government subsidies.

The first item, high labor costs, is inevitably going to be a US weak point, but we can find a poor-but-friendly country to trade with, probably one poorer than China is in 2025. It’s also possible to possibly partly make use of automation to partially mitigate that; I doubt that this will wholly offset this, though, or manufacturers would have done so.

The second item, restricted environmental regulations, are also probably going to be hard. Maybe some US ones are going to be unnecessary, could be removed, but there are also probably going to be countries that would rather have the economic activity than reduced pollution, so, again, trade is an answer.

The third item, scale of domestic market, is going to be hard to overcome in the longer term. China has a population over four times larger than the US, and even around 2100, after which point the US is projected to have grown and China will have dropped in size, is expected to be about double. China will tend to develop, converge on a per-capita wealth basis with the US. That’s probably going to involve international trade, and not just with one or two countries.

The fourth item, government subsidies, are doable if the US wants to do it, though doing so will weaken other industries. Probably somewhat-easier for the US than China; the US has a larger GDP in 2025.

It’s also important to note that one critical US advantage regarding chip manufacture is in extreme ultraviolet lithography. I understand that this is not something that the US commercialized or presently control, but rather the Dutch, in the form of ASML – the US government paid to develop the basic technology and a prototype, but the Dutch then finished the work to bring it to market. Something that the Trump administration might keep in mind insofar as it is concerned principally with competition with China and not so much with things that Europe cares about, like Russia; actively antagonizing the Netherlands probably isn’t a good idea.

Rare earth elements (REE) have been a focal point in China’s evolving critical minerals policy. As early as 1992, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, declared, “the Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.

The US has very little active production, last I looked, but does have inactive production, and Congress was looking at subsidies to remedy that fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine

As of 2022, work is ongoing to restore processing capabilities for domestic light rare-earth elements (LREEs) and work has been funded by the United States Department of Defense to restore processing capabilities for heavy rare-earth metals (HREEs) to alleviate supply chain risk. [4]

I also seem to vaguely recall that Canada and Australia have rare earth reserves…they just haven’t done extraction, as it hasn’t made financial sense.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/canadas-rare-earth-rush-frontier-200000822.html

As Canada rapidly develops its LNG production and export capabilities and expands its oil industry, the North American country may also be looking to boost its reputation as a rare earth elements producer. Canada has produced rare earth elements (REE) for several decades and is thought to have extensive untapped reserves. It has supported other countries in the development of their REE industries and is now looking to expand its domestic mining activities to help achieve net-zero goals and develop a regional supply chain.

Canada’s 2024 Critical Mineral Strategy Annual Report outlines plans to mine for over 30 critical minerals, with a focus on lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, and REE. The U.S. government has repeatedly stated concerns about the growing dependence on China for critical minerals and REE, as well as other energy sources and products, as it looks to develop more regional supply chains. The expansion of Canada’s mining industry could help it provide a stable domestic supply of REE as well as support the development of a North American supply chain. James Edmondson, the research director at IDTechEx, said “It is believed Canada has very large quantities of these materials, even if they have not yet begun processing them in significant quantities.”

That’s maybe a short-term issue, but probably not long-term.

Graphite, essential for lithium-ion batteries, represents a critical vulnerability for the United States, which is in the midst of a $70 billion domestic manufacturing boom in the battery sector

Graphite’s just carbon; basically, very high grade coal. Surely it’s manufactured via refinement of readily-available stuff like coal? The US has, IIRC, something like 40% of known global reserves of anthracite (the next grade down below graphite) within its borders, which is considerably ahead of China, not to mention substantial lower-grade stuff. Also, unless one needs enormous amounts, which I assume is not the case for lithium-ion batteries, any fossil fuel power plant, including crude oil or natural gas, is also going to have as an input something containing carbon, and given energy, that can be reduced to carbon. I cannot imagine that this represents any kind of a long-term constraint for the US.

kagis

This sounds like graphite is indeed obtained by processing coke.

And that is derived from coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)

Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content. It is made by heating coal or petroleum in the absence of air.

Ah, yeah, they mention the Netherlands:

For China, U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment have created a chokepoint for China’s technological ambitions—but with notable examples of innovative workarounds beginning to materialize. These restrictions, reinforced by alliances with Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea, have sought to block access to key tools like extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are required to produce high-performance graphic processing units (GPUs), leaving Chinese firms struggling to compete at advanced nodes.

[continued in child]

I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.

Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:

• Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.

• The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.

• While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.

• Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.

• Not a lot by way of meaningful, world-affecting decisions. Okay, you can also criticize Fallout 4 on these grounds, but if you were hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas…

There were some things that I did like. In particular:

• It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.

I probably wouldn’t normally have looked at a photo gallery of Manhattan signs, but this made it really interesting.

At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press.

Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”).

Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.

Pen plotters need monoline fonts.

I’ve been kind of interested in fountain pen plotters recently, things like these, as I like the look of fountain pen stuff, but would rather use a computer to do stuff (repeatedly, at scale) than train my hand. I don’t think that there’s anything “bad” about monoline fonts. They’re just designed for a specific purpose.

I mean, video games aren’t real either. I played a round of Steel Division 2 earlier today. It was fun, but it didn’t really accomplish anything. The tanks and people there weren’t real – they were just renditions of a computer-rendered world. I don’t think that most people are going to go off on video games as being simply virtual, though.

I wouldn’t personally use the term “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. They’re fancy chatbots. But I don’t think that there’s anything intrinsically problematic with them. The big issue, from my standpont, is if it causes people to not go out and have kids because the chatbot is taking the place of a partner, exploiting a useful biological imperative – that’s got broader societal effects.

It sounds like in this case, the author is a woman who is a divorcee who was mostly looking for entertainment, not a spouse. So…shrugs

I mean, if she went out and read some romance novels and fantasized, would that be preferable to a chatbot? That’d be more of a traditional route, maybe. But is one clearly worse than the other?