> "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope." -- General Smedley D. Butler

Equipping both sides is totally normal. The US does this all the time. So do other nations. It has been going on in the mid-east for ages.

If you have not heard the Bob Dylan song "Masters of War" in a while, you should listen to it again.

I wish MS just with Win 2K and incrementally upgraded. Made it solidly 64-bit, increased the file system capacity, and so on. By now, it would be awesome.

Do you for Microsoft?

MS forces you to spend time, money, and effort, on "upgrades" you don't want.

The solution? Spend more time, money and effort, to fix the crappy useless "upgrades."

Just stay with Win 10, or switch to Linux.

Lots of people use phones as their "desktop."

Technically, phones and tablets are not desktops, or laptops, but lots of people use phones, or tablets, as their primary, or only, computer device.

China has been acting very aggressively lately. They act like a bully. I believe China is committed to bringing down the USA. I am not sure I want to buy pharmaceuticals from them.

I have never used Jellyfin. Put I am not fond on the new Plex UI.

This is a PR "thought leadership" BS article by Benjamin Riley, Cognitive Resonance, who "provides direct consulting support to organizations to improve understanding of how generative AI works."

This doesn't mean they're wrong but it's probably nothing terribly original (there is a reason why it's not on openreview.net as a submission into one of the relevant AI conferences).

A big nation like China can have HSR. A tiny nation like Java can have HSR. France, Switzerland, everywhere else can have HSR. But it will not work in the USA.

How is the USA so different than every other nation on earth?

I felt the same. I am glad people are trying Linux, but I see nothing special about Zorin.
I suppose it looks like windows, and it was marketed well.
IMO: MX Linux looks more promising.

It may be hard for California, but not for anywhere else. High speed rail is all over the world. Even the tiny nation of Java has high speed rail.

As I understand it, China may have as much high speed rail as the rest of the world combined. Practically all of it built within the last 15 years.
No fatalities.

I think HBO was one of the first, or the first, cable channel.
HBO did not have ads in the 1980s.

I have heard the suit used to be green. But Coca-Cola made it red, and that stuck.

What I don't get is this: let's say they believe that to get to "genuinely useful AI" (generating value in business, automating science) they need 1024x the compute they have now; which I think is ballpark with their spending.

But Moore's law says that number of transistors doubles every 2 years, so if we believe we can keep this going then in 4 years time they'll only need 256x the data centres and in 8 years it's only going to be 64.

So all the chips they put in will be next to worthless in 8 years and they'll only need a fraction of the other infrastructure. So all this massive spend is to be first because? Because whoever is first will be able to use their "genuinely useful AI" to out-innovate everyone to singularity?

The whole thing is a one-way bet on the empirical LLM scaling laws (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F2001.08361) scaling to something useful, which I don't buy.

There are dozens of visas. If one is effectively ended, they will use another. The L-1 can be used in many cases.

The L-1 visa is a nonimmigrant visa for tech workers who are transferring from a foreign, affiliated office to a U.S. office of the same company.

So some guy is hired by an Indian staffing firm over in India, the transferred over to the US where he is contracted to work at Microsoft by the same staffing firm. I think MS partners with, at least, one of these firms.

That is just one loophole, there are many others.

If Trump was serious, he would charge a 20% additional fee on the salaries of all visa workers.