Voroxpete @ Voroxpete @sh.itjust.works

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Nothing in the article backs up the headline claim. The closest it gets is their quoted expert saying that he worries about the US doing to the F-35 what they're doing to Ukraine. He's almost certainly referring to the fact that parts and software updates are produced by the US, who could choose to withhold them, just like they're withholding aid from Ukraine.

Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.

Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35. It would be more of a liability for them than it is for us. And, equally, our experts could simply patch around the killswitch on our planes. Nations like Canada and Germany are not lacking in technical expertise.

This bonkers notion seems mostly to be rooted in the broader fear that the F-35 is somehow "too advanced", an idea that largely springs from the diseased brain of Pierre Sprey (seriously, if you chase down every bad thing said about the F-35, odds are ridiculously high that Sprey said it first). Sprey also believed that the ideal design for a modern attack fighter has a machine gun, no missiles, no computers, and no radar.

I'm not joking, not even slightly. Pierre Sprey wanted the modern world to fight Russia with planes that had no radar.

There are valid concerns to be raised about the idea of adopting a craft whose supply chain is centred on the US. That's a discussion that NATO partners should be having. But this "killswitch" nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.

That's part of it, but the bigger part is that the enterprise business has completely failed to manifest.

Transformer model based AI is, at best, a fun toy or a minor convenience. For example, as a coding assistant, it functions as a fairly effective and speedy search engine, so long as you have the skill to check the output. But it also shortcuts the research process for you in a way that makes you more likely to overlook any potential downsides in the solution it offers, or perhaps miss a better solution you might have found if you did the research yourself. It's handy for stuff that's low stakes, but not reliable enough for anything that really matters.

And as a replacement for a coder, it just sucks, producing bug riddled, insecure code that it lacks the ability to debug effectively, meaning you still have to employ coders to fix its output.

This is the story with every potential entreprise application; it can't be trusted enough to replace the expensive humans it's supposed to replace, and it doesn't actually make the expensive humans substantially more productive when it assists them (this has been studied; while a lot of people will anecdotally claim AI makes their job easier, in practice the numbers show that it mostly either slows people down or makes no difference).

As a customer service agent, it's a dangerous liability, with a habit of outright hallucinating answers, and vulnerable to prompt injections that could allow for all sorts of dangerous shenanigans if you give it the ability to actually start making decisions about refunds and rebates.

Replacing troublesome, expensive humans was always the real sales pitch. Every other feature these charlatans advertised was just part of a scam to keep us troublesome, expensive humans from complaining too loudly about getting replaced. When Sam Altman tells us that AI is going to cure cancer and solve global warming, he knows it's a lie. But he also knows that "I want to take all your jobs" isn't exactly great PR, so he has to invent reasons why this is actually a good thing.

But the real sales pitch hasn't come through, and it's increasingly apparent that it won't. You don't invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to sell a slightly "better" search engine, or an app that shows you a short video of you kissing your crush. Those are not products that are going to give that kind of return on investment.

I'm not saying that transformer model AI will never have any practical uses. But the big practical use, the one that was driving a truly unprecedented wave of tech investment; that isn't happening. AI is not going to come and take all our jobs. Or, at least, this version of it isn't. Microsoft have made the smart play by jumping off the runaway train before it reaches the bridge. They're going to get fucked by this, but not nearly so hard as the people who don't know when to fold.

Sure, this defacto would make Tesla the standard electric car for the US. But I'll note that the rest of the car world is already adopting the Tesla plug as their physical standard, so a future government (assuming you guys have any) could just pass a law that says Tesla cannot restrict the use of their charging stations, or add any extra fees for non-Tesla vehicles.

And either way, the mass conversion of the US to electric vehicles is still a good consolation prize, even if it locks in a regional monopoly for Tesla. Sometimes you take the wins where you can get them.

Always has been. Cyberpunk (the genre) was a warning. We didn't listen.

Trump: "I'll tariff your aluminum."

Quebec: "Harder daddy!"

(no seriously, this is a brilliant move from Quebec. They hold all the cards here, they produce 75% of all the aluminum in North America, and importing from anywhere else is far more expensive because it has to go over an ocean, and shipping metal is fucking expensive. They know they'll get all this business back the moment the tariffs are lifted, so they can afford to just crank up the heat and wait for Trump to collapse.)

Microsoft hasn't signed because unlike the others they're scaling back their datacenter plans... Massively. As in, they've cancelled 1GW of future builds, which is equivalent to the entire compute power of London, AKA the datacenter capital of Europe.

MS has seen the writing on the wall; AI is a nothingburger. And keep in mind, MS basically owns OpenAI, the apparent leaders in the field, and has access to all their tech and IP. If Microsoft are calling bullshit, it's not for a lack of information. They know exactly what Sam Altman is cooking up in secret, and it's clear from their reaction that they know its just a new coat of paint on the same busted crap.

If OpenAI really were quietly working away on AGI, or some magical new version of ChatGPT that solves all its problems, MS would be in the best position to get out ahead and profit from that. They'd be building capacity and power generation like crazy.

This whole bubble is primed to burst.

I'm always torn between this version and the Johnny Cash one.

Do you want Night City? Because this is quite literally how you get Night City.

I find the idea of Elon trying to pitch his cars to Trump's cult so fucking funny, because these are the exact same people who roll coal in their pickups and intentionally block electric chargers just to stick it to anyone who likes having a habitable planet. They've made hating electric cars part of their identity.

Which means there's two possible outcomes here, and both are amazing:

1. This whole sales pitch falls dead flat against the wall of anti-environment propaganda these assholes have willingly swallowed whole. Elon continues to piss off the only people who were ever going to buy his products in order to pander to the only people who were never going to buy his products and Tesla collapses completely, taking most of Musk's fortune with it.
2. The MAGA cult download the software update en masse and suddenly decide they love electric cars now, resulting in a massive expansion in electric vehicle use, huge amounts of additional electric vehicle infrastructure, and a withering away of traditional gas vehicle infrastructure in a change that will ultimately become very hard to reverse even after Musk inevitably falls out of Trump's favour.

There's also option 2b, which is that MAGA refuses to go electric, so Trump is forced to switch out every government car to a Tesla, which results in government departments installing huge amounts of supporting equipment to manage this new electric car fleet, to the point where switching back would become a ridiculous notion. The whole US government now uses electric cars.

I want to see Elon face plant so bad, but even if he doesn't, the mass electric car-ification of America is a pretty fucking cool alternative.

If you're looking for a good Nextcloud replacement I recommend Seafile. Been using it for years, very solid.

Are you suggesting that convicted felon Donald Trump lacks respect for the law?

Ah yes; increase tariffs on the industries that will recover the easiest, because you can't just up and move where you mine resources. They're, notably, in the ground. You can't just relocate a steel mine south of the border.

And no other major producer of those materials will ever be able to compete with Canada in the US long term because we don't have to ship our stuff over one of the world's two largest oceans to get it to market.

Either way we win.

Option 1: Tesla sales continue to tank.

Option 2: The MAGA cult all go completely electric.

This isn't even market manipulation. It's one sale. That makes functionally zero difference to Musk's bottom line.

In fact, if you're dumping Tesla stock because the brand image has been utterly destroyed by Musk's actions, this is just more reason to sell. Trump openly associating himself with the car is just making that problem worse.

The only good outcome for Musk here is if Trump's cult all decide to follow suit, and that ends up being a win for the rest of us anyway since now all the "Fuck the environment" guys are suddenly driving electric cars.

Just to expand on this (entirely correct statement) for anyone curious about it, what specifically happened with the Twin Towers was this:

Each floor was made of a layer of concrete, resting on a steel frame. The frame was comprised of horizontal I-beams which were pinned to the outer walls at each end with L-brackets.

When the fire heated the beams, they softened ever so slightly. Just enough to make them sag a little under the weight. This, in turn, changed the angle at which the beams met the L-brackets, so now instead of all the force going straight down, some of the force was pulling the bracket away from the wall. The brackets, and the bolts that held them, weren't designed for this kind of stress, so they failed. As soon as I've bracket failed, that increased the proportion of the load being carried by the brackets around it, so they failed too (this is called a cascade failure). Once this happened on one floor, all that concrete fell down, smashing through the floor below it, and so on, in an even more extreme example of cascade failure.

So yeah, jet fuel can't melt steel beams, but it can expose design flaws.

No one does well with picking individual stocks, any more than someone does well at playing the lottery. Even the people who win just got lucky.

Professional stock traders frequently lose to random chance engines like a hamster in a ball or an octopus touching coloured tiles.

The only way to reliably succeed at owning individual stocks is to be wealthy enough that you can massively diversify your portfolio. The rest of us should just buy VGRO.

You're absolutely correct, and it's important to point this out because people need to understand that Trump is not behaving in ways that are unusual for Republicans. He's just an extreme manifestation of the mindset they all share.

The "cinema-sins-ification" of media criticism has been a fucking disaster for our collective media literacy.

If your story is good enough, no one gives a fuck about plot holes.

The thrusters thing is subverted in Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse, and Babylon 5. The first two also do an excellent job with sound in space.

I hate to break it to you, but Americans are the only ones who can save America.

Nothing we do will make the slightest bit of difference if your people don't come together and save yourselves.

The rapture is not coming. There's no Superman waiting to swoop down from on high. You have to stand up and do the hard work of fixing your problems. Stop waiting for someone else to do it for you.