treasurebots

It's all if-then statements, like "If this video has a bird in it, then show it to people who like birds." No ML needed /s

Always cool to see new cloud GPU offerings, but isn't Lambda Labs' cloud offering roughly equivalent (in the case of V100s) or substantially cheaper (in the case of A100s)?

https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud

Unless I'm missing something?

Let's say Intel takes the deal and trades some ownership percentage for some funds to build more fabs. Suddenly the US government has a multi-billion dollar reason to provide political support for whatever is good for Intel. It's inherently favorable to incumbents who have the market share to make a favorable deal, regardless of whether or not those incumbents are best able to build world-class fabs.

The government has plenty of demand-side tools to on-shore development without hurting competition or playing favorites with large incumbents. The DoD and DoE are massive semiconductor purchasers and have a lot of leverage in the market who can adjust their procurement strategies to promote American interests. That's not entirely without the opportunity for corruption and grift either, but at least there's more accountability.

I mean, I think we basically agree that handouts to large semiconductor companies without anything in return is a bad idea.

The government has an implicit return on investment for the entire economy, through the power to levy taxes. Why should the government own stock in specific companies? The only likely outcome for that route is the government playing favorites even more so than at present

American education, health care and infrastructure industries probably shouldn't serve as a model for other industries

If there's some externality in the way that someone is using public air, like burning garbage in their backyard, then they should be expected to pay for it

Economies of scale don’t just have to be areas where unit marginal costs decrease as volume increases, they can also be areas where fixed costs dominate marginal costs, which is the case for many software firms because marginal costs are usually very small

I’m working on making robots to collect bottles and redeem the California refund value. Basically so you could bring your bottles to a big mechanical sorter, dump your bottles in, and get maybe like 2c per bottle paid to you, then 3c pays for the cost of transport. Currently based out of Mountain View. My background is in machine learning and I’m muddling through the electronics and mechanics, would definitely like to have help with that stuff or really just find other people interested in this intersection. If interested send me an email at contact@treasurerobotics.com