cyd

Deepseek trained their v3 model for $6M. That's the AI equivalent of building it in a cave with a pile of scraps. There's no longer any reasonable way to stop China from developing frontier models.

Must be humiliating for the Mexicans to be condescended to like this. Agree to a trade deal with the Americans, stick to the terms of the deal, but now the Americans still aren't happy. They also want to micromanage what companies can do business in your own country, with your own workers.

The trouble with all these schemes is that it's totally contrary to poweful real world trends. The surface of the Earth has an overwhelming abundance of rural land that is incredibly hospitable to life. And these places are depopulating because people prefer living in cities. How are you gonna get people to move to the bottom of the sea, or Mars, if they don't even want to move to West Virginia?

LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection,

Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It's still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that's quite easily adjustable.

One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don't need fine literature, just a "good enough" quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.

Fair enough. I think the "Taliban are moderating" narrative was also helped by the fact that the Taliban were being compared against fricking ISIS.

Not really analogous, I think? The Taliban are and continue to be wackos, and the US-supported government in between the Taliban regimes was always obviously made up of incompetent crooks and grifters.

Fears about persistent deflation in China are relatively recent. It's come up now because of the live question of whether the government should engage in a big fiscal stimulus (the same debate the US went through in 2009).

Weirdly enough, the Islamist formerly-labelled-as-terrorist militant leader is making quite a lot of sensible moves and well thought out public statements. Maybe it's illogical, but I'm getting somewhat hopeful about Syria's future.

I mean, it's a fair question for a political leader to ask his economic advisors, no? Pretty sure Obama would have asked his advisors the same question back in 2009.

The issue, by the way, is a lot less settled than a lot of people think. Macroeconomics still seems to do a surprisingly bad job at understanding the links between inflation, interest rates, and economic activity, beyond giving some rough guidelines.

Mavuika's character being Generic Woman really isn't helping. It's pretty strange to see the Genshin writing team stumbling so badly with her, since they've done a pretty decent job at making the other archons compelling and distinctive.