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The strangest twist to this is that Deepseek itself seems to be the only company not trying to cash in on the Deepseek frenzy:

Liang [Deepseek's founder] has shown little intention to capitalise on DeepSeek’s sudden fame to further commercialise its technology in the near term. The company is instead focusing the majority of its resources on model development...

These people added the independently wealthy founder has also declined to entertain interest from China’s tech giants as well as venture and state-backed funds to invest in the group for the time being. Many have found it difficult to even arrange a meeting with the secluded founder.

“We pulled top-level government connections and only got to sit down with someone from their finance department, who said ‘sorry we are not raising’,” said one investor at a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech fund.

Funny thing is, the price of lidar is dropping like a stone; they are projected to be sub-$200 per unit soon. The technical consensus seems to be settling in on 2 or 3 lidars per car plus optical sensors, and Chinese EV brands are starting to provide self driving in baseline models, with lidars as part of the standard package.

Canada needs to redirect most of its defence spending to asymmetric warfare. You know, the same advice US consultants give to Taiwan to make a PRC occupation more expensive to contemplate. Forget about big ticket items meant to support the US in its overseas wars; start investing in mines, guerilla equipment, etc.

It's strongly dependent on how you use it. Personally, I started out as a skeptic but by now I'm quite won over by LLM-aided search. For example, I was recently looking for an academic that had published some result I could describe in rough terms, but whose name and affiliation I was drawing a blank on. Several regular web searches yielded nothing, but Deepseek's web search gave the result first try.

(Though, Google's own AI search is strangely bad compared to others, so I don't use that.)

The flip side is that for a lot of routine info that I previously used Google to find, like getting a quick and basic recipe for apple pie crust, the normal search results are now enshittified by ad-optimized slop. So in many cases I find it better to use a non-web-search LLM instead. If it matters, I always have the option of verifying the LLM's output with a manual search.

Hot take: this is not necessarily a bad idea, and worth experimenting with. After all, Disneyland is an existing example of such a setup, and it's arguably better governed than other jurisdictions within Florida. And when Ron DeSantis flexed the state government power to transfer decision making from Disney back to the politicians, it was not an improvement.

Maybe, maybe not -- but I'm discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they're trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.

Pretty much inevitable. Nowadays there are so many robot vacuum cleaners from different brands, and everyone has more or less figured out the tech so they all work pretty well. (I have a Roborock, and have nothing to say about it other than it keeps the floors clean and doesn't cause me any grief.) There's no moat, so consumer market success is purely a matter of manufacturing and cost efficiency, and iRobot obviously would have a huge upfill fight against Samsung, Xiaomi, and a thousand other light consumer goods makers.

I mean, I don't demand an open source washing machine or dryer either.

The idea isn't necessarily tied to oligarchy or fascism or anything like that. It originates in the early ideals of the Internet where people hoped its anarchic energy could be a force for freedom. Things have not really shaken out like that, e.g. the net ended up being dominated by tech giants rather than a profileration of small websites, and China's Great Firewall showed how states can put swathes of the internet under their thumb after all. But some of us still buy into some of that spirit (though the Network State idea itself is unrealistic). Heck, Lemmy and the Fediverse are a part of that.

They have to put on a brave face, of course, but I'm not sure US intelligence is so easy to replace. The Europeans have let their systems atrophy by simply using the US offerings, especially in realtime targeting data and signals intelligence. The US has in the past encouraged this dependence, e.g. by strong-arming Europe not to develop a military grade GPS alternative.

Pokemon battle, 3v3

Google search results are so terrible that at this point it's a mercy.