Given that the comparison is with a Small Modular Reactor, this isn't really relevant. If we end up with GW data centers then the comparison result may change, since it will be comparing a full-sized reactor against much larger renewable plants. I doubt the results will be much different, but they might be.

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

Providing 1.3 million round trip airfares between Houston and Washington DC for Texans who want to see the shuttle.

Or ... issue the citation to the passenger who called the ride, and let him negotiation reimbursement for the fine and insurance costs with Waymo. I guarantee Waymo would fix the bug or perhaps even *ask* to be regulated rather than rely on this loophole.

Why burden the taxpayer with finding a solution to the consequences of early adopting a new technology? If you *choose* to summon a robotaxi, then you're responsble for the consequences of that choice. If you don't like it, then demand the company sort those out before you use them.

This is so unnecessary, I wonder whether this is some kind of social engineering operation being sold as a "service" to landlords.

Supercars this fast have tires that last less than fifteen minutes, perhaps eighty miles traveled on the track of you're lucky. And since the wear isn't linear, if you go just a little bit faster, you might only get a minute or two at the speeds this car goes before you have to change all the tires, which will set you back $40,000.

The point of such a thing is the same as one of those suborbital tourist space flights. The point is to *have had* the experience, which is too brief to be practically useful.

Wait ... isn't selling consumers on features that will be available real-soon-now-trust-us-on-that the way American electric car companies sell *their* vehicles?

Once again, Chinese companies are stealing American (ish) ideas.

From the summary:

it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy

Renewables plus a gas plant are just as reliable as a nuclear plant. This analysis appears to have taken reliability as a pre-requisite, then with that addressed they compared costs.

They really aren't. Their drive is for status and a feeling of accomplishment, not money. Money is just the way they keep score. It's relevant and important to understand that the numbers aren't even real money. It's not cash in the bank, it's the value of their share of the company they oversee. The goal is to increase the value of those operations... and it should be noted that because those companies provide value to consumers and jobs for employees, it's really easy for CEOs to convince themselves that making the number go up increases their own status score and makes humanity better off, which isn't entirely true but also isn't entirely false.

Reducing this complex set of motivations to money misses the mark, badly.

I agree they are not socialist, in any kind of a strict sense. But any attempts to learn from those countries is inevitably branded as "socialism". If that's how we're using the word now, then we have to call them something silly like "market socialist".

If you give any tool to any large group of people, some of them will use it in harmful ways. The knife slips and cuts the user, the chainsaw kicks back, the LLM hallucinates superficially credible gibberish.

Once people get over the shock of how impressive LLMs are, they'll see how far we still are from AGI. Because we don't have an artificial *general* intelligence yet, we can't *generally* replace humans. But we can replace them in many labor intensive tasks that don't require common sense, experience with the real world, and advanced thinking skills.

Take copy editing -- a common and labor intensive task in any kind of publishing, public affairs, content management, and corporate communications. Today you can hand a terrible mess of prose to an LLM and it will tidy it up, correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes like subject verb agreement and confusing homophones like "they're" and "their' and "there". The output will be superficially perfect, but you still need a human to judge whether it does the job needed; someone with actual experience and understanding of the human audience.

I think this will be the story of AI between now and the day that we finally achieve AGI, if we ever do: the need for humans with advanced cognitive skills will actually increase as the jobs for people with fundamental cognitive skills like copy editing will decline. Those two things happening together is a big problem. If we don't do something about education in advanced cognitive skills, we will find ourselves in a pickle, because basic cognitive labor is the pipeline that produces people who can perform advanced cognitive tasks.

Weirdly, there's some skill involved in crafting prompts that give you what you want. The things are trained on all the code that's ever been posted anywhere on the Internet, and unless you can prompt them in a way that eliminates that bad code, that van be a bad thing.

Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.

It has not, though keep in mind that you don't actually kiss their cheeks, you kiss the air next to their cheeks. What touches their cheek is your cheek, if anything (often there is no actual contact).