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More specifically, the Hong Kong protests were about the possiblity of HKers being sent to the mainland. Here and now we have multiple actual renditions of US residents to El Salvador and elsewhere (including one of the protesters!)...

I gotta say, Hong Kongers put up way more of a fight than Americans seem to be. Hong Kong Polytechnic University went through a full blown siege in 2019. Six years later, in the land of the free, student leaders get picked off and any protests that manage to get going are easily crushed by the police.

The "cheap Chinese labor and lax laws" thing is not exactly the issue, at least not these days. The thing is that Chinese industry has spent decades working out how to refine these minerals, and they're the only ones who are now able to do it at scale. So other countries that extract and process rare earths (which as noted aren't actually that rare) often ship semi-processed ore to China for final processing.

Sure, other countries can replicate these capabilities if they're willing to put in the effort. It's like China's challenge with EUV lithography, but in reverse. It will take significant time. Also, building up a rare earths processing industry probably involves not just spending capital, but also major environmental risks while you're doing your trials.

This headline has the structure of the famous Simpsons joke.

Cyan (Myst, Riven)

Homer: that's good.

to lay off

Homer: that's bad.

12 people

Homer: that's good.

"roughly half of team"

Homer: ??

Narrator: that's bad.

The Afghans and Vietnamese had nothing to lose. Americans, no matter how much they complain online, have everything to lose.

That article is overblown. People need to configure their websites to be more robust against traffic spikes, news at 11.

Disrespecting robots.txt is bad netiquette, but honestly this sort of gentleman's agreement is always prone to cheating. At the end of the day, when you put something on the net for people to access, you have to assume anyone (or anything) can try to access it.

It's seldom the same companies, though; there are two camps fighting each other, like Gozilla vs Mothra.

It's possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.

Though I don't think it's a good use of money personally, because the requirements are dropping all the time. We're starting to see some very promising small models that use a fraction of those resources.

So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don't think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they're free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.

Power usage probably won't be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought (our estimates had been based on well-funded Western companies that didn't have to bother with optimization).

AI spam is an annoyance, but it's not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn't something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.

Unfortunately, this is not going to receive much condemnation from the West given current conditions. The US doesn't give a crap about this kind of this anymore. The EU needs Turkiye onside geopolitically... not to mention any objections from them are too easily brushed off as hypocrisy given the Romanian situation + efforts to disqualify Le Pen. It's probably why Erdogan chose to act now after tolerating Imamoglu's presence for the past few years.

"But... the future refused to change" -- game over screen, Chrono Trigger