mullen

> Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.

Personally, I came to this conclusion early this year. To acquire the data that AI Companies are using to train their models is low cost and once they have it, they can refine and store it. Creating the LLM takes a bit of money but it is not a serious blocker. Clearly, the Chinese companies can make AI so they will drive down costs. There is a need for good AI (Not just Great AI) and it is not cost prohibitive to make good AI (The same with specialized AI).

My prediction is that AI will spilt into two categories, Great AI (High Cost) and Good Enough AI (Low Cost). Which for the long run of AI and companies that use AI, this is good.

I can't believe there is even a discussion. The better you look, the better people treat you and being better looking also means being of a normal weight.

I literally have a weight number where if I am north of the number, I can tell people treat me differently and not as nice and if I am south of that number, people treat me a lot nicer (gasp, Women even hit on me). People are fooling themselves if they think their weight does not matter to the world around them.

Non-sense. In China, you obey. There is no way to challenge the orders in courts or even with your local party official. It's written into law and companies that disobey are shutdown or taken over by a party loyalist and the management is disappeared.

> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere

You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.

This is what I did after struggling to get llama.cpp working at a decent speed on my M1 Macbook. The secret is to very specific with your needs and targeted in what you are using llama.cpp for. Mine setup is just about strictly for qwen3-coder and now, I get a fairly decent speed out of it. I also installed Cursor to check Claude and it all worked out well.

The Toy Museum of Munich is pretty cool and it is near a major tourist site in Munich, Germany. My wife and I went in to kill an hour while we waited for others and it was really nice. Covers 4 centuries of toys and toy evolution.

https://www.spielzeugmuseummuenchen.de/en

The plumbing systems in commercial buildings are not big enough to handle residents usage. Residents use more water and the outbound sewage systems need to be larger.

An RV is just a nicer tent, it is not a house. If people won't transition to housing, then they need to leave SF. If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.

No way. You need an immigration system that has a "try before you buy" aspect to it. Not all educated immigrates are going to like the US and are not going to be a fit for the US. It's not just about keeping out bad education, it's making sure that those who think they want to want to immigrate to the US want to be part of the US.

No, they have to pay it. Everyone has to pay payroll tax on all employees.

It's too expensive and too crowded. DMZ is such a better deal.

Replacing a Tesla with a Chinese EV is like replacing a person who wants to commit genocide with a person who actually commits genocide.

Chinese EV's do not have any moral superiority over Tesla and I would not be caught driving either.

> Is a big problem for passenger trains in the US, freight has priority.

This simply not true. Federal Laws says that Passenger trains have priority but the law is never enforced. Freight traffic is suppose to take by-passes to let passenger traffic through and freight traffic is never suppose to block the line. However, again, the laws and rail rules are never enforced. Think about it, why would cargo have a higher priority than human traffic? Is cargo getting there an few hours later or earlier going to impact anything? With humans, it will totally impact their schedule and how often trains are used.

If the Department of Transportation wanted people to start taking trains again, they would come down hard of rail companies that slow down passenger traffic.

> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.

Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.

A lot of these medicines that require patients to inject themselves come in a self administrating auto-injector. There are really simple to use, I mean literally anyone can inject themselves, then throw the one-use auto-injector out.

Two things I took away from visiting Pompeii that I did not know from reading books and watch History Channel videos. Like you said, Pompeii was pretty large and it was covered with a lot of pumice and ash. There are a couple of places where the pumice and ash is 30 - 40 feet above the houses and all of that fell within a couple of days.

This is a well known tactic to do to Chinese scammers or any person you don't want to talk to that is in China or has to go back to China.

If someone in China starts harassing you or threatening you, just start sending messages that the two of you are conspiring to overthrow the Chinese government and the messages will stop real quick. These Chinese mafia types talk tough until you start sending anti-Chinese government copy-pasta to them and they shut up real quick.

> There's a reason we cast secret ballots in elections,

You get one vote and the other people get one vote. With Dark Money, one side gets access to control a million votes and you get one vote. That's wrong.

> and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.

NonProfits and Social causes are about fixing issues directly. Giving money to a shelter that supports Runaway Gay Teens or a Pets or the Homeless is not the same. A single person giving millions of dollars to a single organization that is designed to influence the vote and lives of millions of people is not the same thing.

Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.

> Well, now we know. Sam Altman matters to the rank and file, and this was a blunder by OpenAI.

Not just the Rank and File, but he was really was the face of AI in general. My wife, who is not in the tech field at all, knows who Sam Altman is and has seen interviews of him on YouTube (Which I was playing and she found interesting).

I have not heavily followed the Altman Dismissal Drama but this strikes me as a Board Power Play gone wrong. Some group wanted control, thought Altman was not reporting to them enough and took it as an opportunity to dismiss him and take over. However, somewhere in their calculation, they did not figure out Sam is the face of modern AI.

My prediction is that he will be back and everything will go back to what it was before. The board can't be dismissed and neither can Sam Altman. Status quo is the goal at this point.

There are no legal GPS jammers in the USA. In fact, the one of two things that will get the FCC on you really bad is to mess with GPS or Cell Phone signals.

For Example, US Prisons want to jam Cell Phones but the FCC says no way.

This article is from 2019 and second, I don't think anyone questions the validity of the results of Big Pharma, just the price, transparency and lack of willingness to allow the US Federal government to collectively price bargain.

But not as bad as Korea or Japan.

What a simplistic view of the world. The Chinese government will use their control of TikTok to allow them to have as much control and influence as possible and they won't subscribe to the view of "do what you want as long as it does not affect anyone else". Their view will be "do what we tell you or else".

> As an example: The Boring Company.

Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.

The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.

Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.

There are an insane amount of rice varieties everywhere.

$49 a year is pretty damn cheap in IMHO. Also, when the new version comes out, you don't have to put another lump of cash up front to get it, you just upgrade your subscription and get the new version. Something better comes along? Just cancel the subscription and switch to the new software. The fear of "being too invested in a software package" basically goes away. I think this is a good move on Apples part and the customers part on several levels.

> Do you let them continue to deteriorate under their own agency to the point where they become violent? That's not humane to their (inevitable) victims. Do you commit them involuntarily? That's not humane to the patient themselves.

The Law should take care of this person. If someone is violent, then they should have caught the attention of law enforcement and thrown in prison or put into a mental institution because they are violent. The problem is that The Law is not acting on the violent people who are homeless.

- Requiring companies to provide child-care benefits Oh no, Communism! Or allowing parents to stay in the workforce without stressing about child care.

The other items are clearly just politics and the Republicans are trying to score points. They could provide their own solutions but that means they would have such things a thought.

> Housing is a tough problem in the same way the medical care is a tough problem. There are economics at play and individuals finances. I don't have a good solution but have trouble accepting blanket statements that sort of hand wavily ignore real market demand for things.

These are not hard nor tough problems. Every industrial nation and many developing nations have the medical care issue solved. The US ignores solutions to the medical care issue due to our corrupt political system. Remove Legal Bribery from the political system and the US would implement a number of solutions that would solve about 80% of the medical care issues.

The thing that drives me crazy about Teams is that I can't figure out how to start a quick meeting. Just a single button that is easy to find that when I click it, it just makes a meeting for me. Does not matter the team or organization, just make a meeting and let me copy the details to send to people.