Sci-fi is at its best when it recontextualizes an idea in a way that makes us consider it from a different perspective.
Battlestar Galactica did an awesome job of turning the issues around entirely. Famously, it essentially turned the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan on their heads in Season 3, and you had the good guys building IEDs and employing suicide bombers to kill collaborators.
But my favorite one was when they came up with a situation in which outlawing abortion was necessary, and the political opposition used it as an opportunity to manufacture outrage and steal an election even though they didn't actually care about the issue at all.
The entire post is about Microsoft investigating whether DeepSeek faked its results using OpenAI data, driving the freefall in tech stocks and endangering future investment in the technologies used to create the models.
You not liking the tech has fuck-all to do with the topic.
That's your opinion/agenda, not a legitimate argument in the conversation about AI efficiency. The discussion is on how best to achieve a goal, and you're saying that it shouldn't be achieved. Even if you're right, you're still going off on a separate tangent.
You're the vegan who butts in on the conversation about how best to sear a steak and says meat is murder. You're welcome to your opinion on meat and you may even be right, but it is of absolutely no value or interest to the people talking about methods for cooking meat.
So what happens when OpenTuna runs out of fish to steal and there are no more boats?
Information doesn't stop being created. AI models need to be constantly trained and updated with new information. One of the biggest issues with GPT3 was the 2021 knowledge cutoff.
Let's pretend you're building a legal analysis AI tool that scrapes the web for information on local, state, and federal law in the US. If your model was from January 2008 and was never updated, then gay marriage wouldn't be legal in the US, the ACA wouldn't exist, Super PACs would be illegal, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wouldn't exist, zoning ordinances in pretty much every city would be out of date, and openly carrying a handgun in Texas would get you jailtime.
It would essentially be a useless tool, and copying that old training data wouldn't make a better product no matter how cheap it was to do.
Yes, but that doesn't mean it is more efficient, which is what the whole thing is about.
Let's pretend we're not talking about AI, but tuna fishing. OpenTuna is sending hundreds of ships to the ocean to go fishing. It's extremely expensive, but it gets results.
If another fish distributor shows up out of nowhere selling tuna for 1/10 the price, it would be amazing. But if you found out that they could sell them cheap because they were stealing the fish from OpenTuna warehouses, you wouldn't argue that the secret to catching fish going forward is theft and stop building boats.
But we've already had some small judicial pushback, and from Republican judges.
We need to throw wrenches into every gear we can for 2 years, and it's going to suck, but we can get there.
Though what's neat politically (and horrible socially), is the stuff he can do is the sort of thing that will result in severe economic consequences. That's the number 1 indicator of how the next election will turn out. Trump and the GOP are lighting fire to their own rope right now.
There's enough GOP senatorial seats up for re-election in 2026 that if he fucks up bad enough he and Vance could be removed from office in January 2027, giving the Dems the White House and the ability to pack the Court before his term is even half-finished.
I don't think the GOP will give him enough rope to do that to their party.
The ruling is that he can't be prosecuted for official acts. Not that he can do them.
He can order the moon to reverse its orbit without getting in trouble, but the moon doesn't have to obey.
The biggest power he has is over the administrative state. Lots of executive agencies create regulations because of power granted to those agencies by Congress. Things like the FAA, EPA, FTC, SEC, ATFE, etc. A President can fuck up all those regulations.
But what Trump is already running into is the fact that his power doesn't extend to overturning items passed by the legislature. His birthright citizenship order didn't last a day. A judge has already thrown out the freeze because Congress pases budgets, not the executive.
He couldn't overturn the ACA last time around because it was a law passed by the legislature. Even though he controls the ATF and can control some of their interpretations, he can't declare machine guns and silencers legal because the NFA is a law passed by Congress.
And even his power over the administrative state is in some danger because over the overturn of Chevron deference last year that allows judges to ignore the opinions of administrative agency holdings.
The question isn't whether they've used the same information. It's whether they've faked the process to achieve that 20x efficiency.
Look at it like a dictionary. Writing one from scratch is a huge task, no matter how many other books exist. How do you even go about finding all of the words?
But if other people have already written dictionaries, you can just use their word lists and go from there.
It's more efficient, but only because it's a completely different task.
It's also publicly editable and used to generate a bunch of other maps - even for government use. It would be a damned shame if people created burner accounts and started renaming things owned by Trump and Musk...
The point of the second amendment isn't to go toe-to-toe with the military and never has been. It's to make every citizen a potential threat to those in power, and to allow for guerilla warfare.
A pistol can't beat a tank, but it can kill a politician or general if it's weilded by the right random person at the right time and location.
And without the fake frame bullshit they're using to pad their numbers, its capabilities scale linearly with the 4090. The 5090 just has more cores, Ram, and power.
If the 4000-series had had cards with the memory and core count of the 5090, they'd be just as good as the 50-series.
We got the meteoric rise of Obama, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street from the democratization of information.
It was devastating to the old guard. But then they realized they could use the same tools we'd used to spread information to spread disinformation. Then when people called them on their bullshit, the regular propaganda stopped being the goal.
No longer was the purpose to make us believe what they had to say. It was too make us not believe anything at all. They flooded the world with so much bullshit that nothing seems true anymore, and in the confusion they're openly enacting fascist policies while pretending the news is fake.
Potato canons and go karts were the slightly dangerous things we needed as kids.
I recently read a book called "The anxious generation" that goes into depth talking about the developmental changes in young people over the last 30 years, and it attribute a lot of it to the douboe-whammy combination of 90s and 2000s helicopter parenting paired with the rise of the smartphone.
We need to unsupervised, slightly dangerous playtime and mischief to learn how to deal with problems on our own or with peers, and we need human interaction to learn to socialize. Removing both of those leads to an increased number of people unprepared to handle social situations and stress.
The book definitely had a feeling of bias for argument to match preconceived conclusion that social media is bad, but I think there may have been something to it.
Sci-fi is at its best when it recontextualizes an idea in a way that makes us consider it from a different perspective.
Battlestar Galactica did an awesome job of turning the issues around entirely. Famously, it essentially turned the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan on their heads in Season 3, and you had the good guys building IEDs and employing suicide bombers to kill collaborators.
But my favorite one was when they came up with a situation in which outlawing abortion was necessary, and the political opposition used it as an opportunity to manufacture outrage and steal an election even though they didn't actually care about the issue at all.