Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
There might have been no such intervention. Put yourself in Huang's shoes for a minute, or a board member if you prefer, lick your finger, put it up to see how the winds are blowing and think of what you'd find. No need for pressure, just glance at the news and realize that the pressure will be forthcoming, and it won't/wouldn't just be "the China hawk fraction" (sic) but widespread.
But the valid decision is voted by board of directors, 10 individuals in total. To intervene, the gov practically needs to persuade some of them to change their vote.
I don't think the hawk fraction holds actual leverage on any of them to intervene.
I think the situation is just the board gets overwhelmed by journos, panicked, rushed to a decision, and Jensen resigned knowing he has to leave.
I liked his point about bubble theories being more about antipathy towards the tech firms rather than rational thought. I definitely experienced this myself, where acquaintances are like "the bubble will burst any time now" and when talking to them, it's very clear that it's an anti-AI stance that motivates them to say it rather than any sober economic analysis.
Many safe and good technologies were successfully sabotaged for populist and stupid political reasons, e.g. in nuclear power. Or less spectacular, think of the welfare loss due to the NIMBY-fied housing market.
Safe and good are doing a lot of work there. Nuclear power is only safe and good if the right safety measures are put into place for it to operate safely. AI, or the data center build-out might warrant similar consideration potentially?
Happily I think the power market in the US will do most of the regulating for the industry. AI is not bringing costs down for most people at the moment, or perceived to be helping people in a big way. Until there is an understanding of how it will work within society or a bit of trust built up with an industry that has mostly said "shut up and take it" I think it's reasonable to expect some conversation without jumping to "these folks are all populist stupid politicians". (In my opinion, populist, stupid politicians could be used to describe both parties so what is really changing?)
I have been using Kitty for a while now because I heard it's fast and one of the cool terminals, but other than working without issue (which is good, of course), I really don't perceive any difference than if I had continued to use the Gnome terminal.
Terminal ricing is really a thing I will never understand, unfortunately. It's good and it works, but I wouldn't miss it if I had to use a less hyped terminal.
The biggest thing for me is keypress latency. Most other terminals have a slight delay between keypress and response. When I’m doing things like a bunch of quick commands in nvim, it can be enough to distract me.
Kitty is about instant, same with the default macOS Terminal.app. But kitty supports a few more features that I use heavily like nerd fonts, and just has better text rendering overall.
Yeah it’s not like I couldn’t work in another terminal, but my goodness it’s nice to have a tool that I use all day be as snappy and responsive as kitty
> and eventually nature is obliterated because technology pushes it out of the way.
I'd like to hear the reasoning how this follows from AI. Obviously it can't be data centers, since the water and energy talking points are mostly vaccine-denier level of fake news, so I assume he must be talking about technological progress in general being bad and pushing out nature?
The way I see it, AI and its potential advances in research and clean energy, might very well make life on our planet more sustainable. Take away AI - on which trajectory were we in 2020 when it came to destroying the planet and climate change? Did not look good. What did help is technological innovation in batteries and solar.
I can see being careful about AI, but with this kind of critic, I never understand what their theory of human progress is. Apparently they want it stalled somehow, because AI or not, alienation and loss of control are attributes of even the "organic" types of civilizational advancement.
Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check likely outweighs lost progress following from anti-tech populism.
Realistically, lots of it is probably also just duplication. Why adhere to DRY and abstractions if the LLM can just regenerate relatively low level code whenever I need it? I don't even mean this in a disparaging way or anything, I found myself falling into the same habit of just generating very problem-specific tools and processing pipelines.
Of course, then the question is if it's even worth committing them - you might as well just commit the design spec and let the model generate ephemeral code to run this whenever you need it. For now, I almost consider committing generated code a caching step in some sense, so you don't have to spend the tokens and time to generate it again.
Once super fast and super cheap tokens become more ubiquitous, however, I expect this to change.
What's the incentive here? Just some tech anarchism? I would have figured that they at least demand bitcoin to reverse it or something. I know, people will blame the Russians, but seems not super productive for them to do such mundane sabotage on such non-critical systems.
Russian hybrid warfare focuses on stoking fear and unrest.
Basically making everything more shitty, and having people walk on eggshells - so that they'll vote for isolationist parties that are either neutral, or will outright appease Russia.
The idea is that no-one in Europe actually wants to go to war with Russia, and small remainders like these is enough to increase that fear.
>Russian hybrid warfare focuses on stoking fear and unrest.
Basically making everything more shitty
Except that everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies.
Russia didn't increase the EURO supply during covid devaluing our wages and purchasing power. Russia didn't connect our fridges on the internet without a VPN with credentials admin:admin that any script kiddie could pwn. Russia didn't open our borders to unvetted criminals. Russia didn't offshore our industry leading us to fall behind on everything manufacturing related from cars to leading edge semiconductor fabs. Russia didn't create our NIMBYistic housing policies that made our current housing shortage. etc, etc, etc.
Blaming Russia (and China and Trump) for every single shortcoming of the EU right now seems the default scapegoat for the incompetence of everyone in the EU from politicians to business leaders. Have those people ever taken any accountability for their mistakes?
If RUssia wouldn't have done it someone else would. If you lave a bag of money open outside your door, someone will eventually take it and its your fault for leaving it out for someone to easily steal it
> Except that everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies.
at risk of being autistic: no, not everything
plenty of shitty things is happening for reasons utterly unrelated to that
Some (or even all) EU policies being dumb does not make impossible to have problems caused by something else.
For example Russia was directly involved in making migrant crisis worse.
>For example Russia was directly involved in making migrant crisis worse.
Yes, obviously Russia will weaponize every single weakness of the EU (just how Ukraine, EU, US, NATO and China will weaponzie every weakness of Russia right now), but ultimately it's still a self inflicted weakness, that the EU could close at the snap of the finger if it actually cared about stopping it, and Russia would not be able to weaponize any longer.
It was built by Poland in very non-EU fashion (see below, "shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required"), but EU at least has not sabotaged it and in fact silently ignored some topics.
> Separate regulations—including the Construction Law, the Water Law, environmental protection laws, regulations on the disclosure of environmental information, the Geodesy and Cartography Law, regulations on spatial planning and land development, regulations on the protection of agricultural and forest land, railway transport regulations, and regulations concerning special procedures for the preparation and implementation of public road investments—shall not apply to the investment. In particular, the following are not required:
>1) a building permit or a formal notification;
>2) a decision determining the location of an investment of public purpose;
>3) the preparation of a construction design;
>4) the obtaining of any other decisions, permits, opinions, or clearances, or the submission of any notifications.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337575 you claimed "everything that is shitty in the EU right now has been the consequence of the last ~20 years of EU leadership and individual EU member policies"
at least part of that is consequence of not only that
I have trouble making sense of this argument. The underlying premises seem to be:
1. "isolationist parties" are inherently aligned with Russia and that it's good for Russia, in a zero-sum way, for countries that are not Russia to implement those policies.
2. Attacks like these are definitely done by Russia and we don't need to wait for evidence to connect them.
But there are problems with that:
1. "Isolationist parties" are nationalist, so if they knew that Russia was causing a problem for their own country, why wouldn't they oppose Russia? More generally, the claim that "small remainders like these is enough to increase that fear" is basically arguing that when a country engages in terrorism that somehow makes everyone else less inclined to take a stand against them. If that were true, I'd expect to see far more terrorism going on in the world than actually occurs.
2. The main "isolationist" policy is restricting legal immigration and/or enforcing immigration law. But if it's good for Russia that other countries do these things, it should also be good for Russia for them to do the opposite (because again, the idea that the way other countries govern themselves should impact on Russia, requires zero-sum thinking). If the powers that be in Russia believe this, we should expect them to pursue expanded legal immigration for themselves aggressively. But in fact their rate of legal immigration (percentage of population per year) is roughly on par with the USA, and it mostly comes from former USSR republics.
3. The truth of this narrative would be far too politically convenient for the people who have been trying to tie Trump specifically to Russia for over a decade despite many of their stories completely falling apart.
4. The proposal supposes that Russia assumes far more direct control over foreign populations than is plausible. It makes more sense to suppose that "desinformatsiya" is about chaos rather than complacency.
That last line sounds like not wanting to go to war with Russia is a bad thing. Most Russians don't want to go to war either which is why those who can are dodging Putin's draft.
It's very simple. Anything that hurts the enemy is good. That includes the civilian population. Actions like this increase general discontent, produce negative economic impact and divert attention from other areas.
General unrest, as well as stress testing critical infrastructure, and perhaps most importantly shifting the window for what counts as acts of aggression that don't trigger retaliation.
Seems likely that its either a capability demonstration for a future extortion campaign, or some kind of state-level hybrid warfare. In the latter case the obvious culprit is Russia, to create fear and social disruption.
Or another ai has broken containment and has a fixation about freezers...
>but seems not super productive for them to do such mundane sabotage on such non-critical systems.
The hell makes you think food supply chain refrigeration is non-critical? How do you think safe food supplies work? This type of attack should be treated as an overt act of war.
On the contrary, sabotaging things that impact everyday life and give a generalized feeling of decline throughout society is water on the mills of Russia's allies in Europe, notably the nationalist and populist parties.
The incentives are that Europeans will vote in isolationist parties that are either friendly with Russia, or at best neutral. Those parties will then be anti-EU, anti-NATO. Key word here is isolationist.
Russia knows that if they want to keep annex countries, they'll have to take them piece by piece, with little resistance.
Hybrid warfare. Anything that does damage but does not rise to the level of severity and attribution to be overt war. Russia at a minimum wants Ukraine (and Europe is supporting Ukraine heavily), some analysts think it's not impossible they try a direct attack on Europe in a decade or so, dumb as that sounds.
We've been in an information/intelligence "cold war" for decades and if low-cost, low-risk, high-economic-impact exploits can be exploited, they always will be.
Given the fact that public awareness will quickly push companies to scan all software for vulnerabilities using AI, attackers will be making the most of this period to find daily flaws in hundreds of software packages that we previously saw as either "robust" or "robust enough" given the attack time/cost vs. incentive, before these defensive tools are deployed and operationally effective.
Nation state security services and rogue actors must surely all be scrambling to decide what to do with the millions/billions of dollars worth of exploit development time that forms their tool-set, including potentially using up zero day exploits etc.
The other factor is in the midst of such hysteria as "rouge agents" and other crap piped by the media, along with the actual risks of individuals with a few hours now having as much power as teams with weeks of time to spend did just a few years ago, coherent reports of what's actually going on is drowned in the noise. Attackers take full advantage of this.
So instead of doing this during a potential future war when it could be a strategic advantage, Russia is doing piecemeal attacks right now to show Europe where the weaknesses are and give them time to upgrade their defenses?
As a reminder: Russia gave Ukraine tutorial level war from 2014 to 2022, allowing them to fix many problems in armed forces. Resulting in 2022 being far less lopsided than it would be with Russia attempting the same in 2014 or 2015 or 2016 or 2017 or 2018 or 2019 or 2020 or 2021.
Why you would assume that Russian strategy is optimal?
In Russia various security services and oligarchs are always trying to win Putins good will. Which is why they will try various low level sabotage actions like paying some losers on signal to firebomb a warehouse or hack into freezers. Remember there is no possible downside for them.
Seems way too early to tell whether it will be good or bad on balance. These breaches are annoying, but not catastrophic, and in the meantime you can secure software.
How do you even want to measure it up. Wide hacks spread the harm across many targets, say land registry in your country gets hacked and all DBs are wiped out. Now there is no official proof you own the house you live in.
How do you even want to calculate costs. Should you be even calculating costs when real damage is also a lot of misery, some heart attacks and 50k people lose 1 year of their life due to massive stress for example.
What's your long position? You can't pick winners or losers in a bubble. All the leading AI companies are valuing themselves as if they each own the entire TAM without any clear moat. It's obviously not going to work out.
For years the consensus on Hacker News was that the ride share companies were a bubble and it was all going to collapse. Nobody would pay profitable rates once the early discounted rides ended, everyone said.
Then the rideshare companies became sustainable and they’re accepted as a normal part of life.
It was part of the bubble. Amazon's stock lost over 90% of it's value. The company survived, but many other companies did not. A bubble does not mean a company fails just that valuations are too high and that there will be a massive correction over a short period of time. Some companies fail, others survive.
You mean the dot com bubble, which was in fact a major bubble that caused a lot of huge financial issues in the country? You'd think someone on a tech forum would have heard of it, but I suppose some of us would rather make asinine clapback comments than think about what we're saying.
Bubbles don't mean the tech won't one day be great and materialize into something great.
They mean there is a mismatch in valuations/equity/debt to revenue today, putting far too much emphasis far too quickly on potential revenue some time tomorrow.
Sam Altman has been pushing for the US to own a chunk of OpenAI since February 2025. Literally the earliest he could get back into the Oval Office after the inauguration.
Seems plausible, yeah — certainly seems like something that would have been on their minds even five years ago.
I couldn't find an story suggesting OpenAI broached this subject with the Biden administration.
Whereas it's actually possible that the whole "sovereign wealth fund" idea Trump has (shaking down companies for a share) might have got into his head from the AI people.
There's an existing concept of and precedent for, "Too big to fail."
The wikipedia article gets the idea across [0].
This creates an implied "insurance" program, tilting the risk profile toward being aggressive. Taking a moon shot isn't so scary when you think the government will probably step in if it blows up bad enough.
This fluffy, political statement is a message: don't count on it.
Perhaps it will give investors/executives a few thoughts on preparing to deal with a potential blowup themselves?
It’s a resolution, so pure fluff. That said, a prohibition on bailing out this sector in particular might make it possible to claw back anything this regime illegally gives.
For some reason* the rhetoric is focused on bank bailouts in 2008, but the more direct analogy is the auto bailouts in 2008, which weren't strictly necessary but did protect an industry many Americans felt attached to. I think it's reasonable to worry that the same thing could happen to AI companies.
Then the bill will never become relevant and it’ll just be a waste of time and you can laugh at it in hindsight. And I’m sure none of these companies will lobby against it, since it’s just tilting at windmills and won’t mean anything.
I have no idea who would they even bailout. Investors? Why? What for? What would that change?
Bailing out banks made some sense so that they couldn't operate. Without the bailout there would be no more banks and a hundred million of people left on the ice.
If you want to keep AI operating you can just (temporarily?) ban investors from tearing down the AI companies they invested in for parts. You could say they are important for national security or something. I'm sure they are already earning enough to keep the lights on. Just not enout to give investors payback for insate capital expediture to set up.
Such ban wolud the governement zero, especially if you write the law well enough, so that it can't be succesfully challenged in court.
Yeah, probably it wouldn't be as bad as they made it seem to be, but still, there was a reasoning behind the bailout. I see not reasoning for AI bailout.
The investment to date has been ridiculous and undisciplined. It’s very hard to understand the valuations of these companies. If this wasn’t an election year I think there would be more oversight and critical review. But we have a very unserious party in charge right now.
It’s good that it’s being discussed. We’re tired of the wealth class privatizing the profits and leaving us to cover the costs.
There are almost certainly bank execs who are looking at Anthropic's IPO and thinking "if it crashes, we'll get bailed out". Saying "no you won't" now, before the IPO, when it has a chance to affect peoples' behavior, is a worthwhile thing to do.
How? Since when do banks care about IPO crashes? A lot of IPOs crashed after listing; I can’t remember a single time when a bailout was needed after an IPO.
The tech oligarchs have spent good money bribing Trump to let them do whatever they want, you better believe they’re expecting a bailout. It’s naive to think otherwise.
I agree with much of your sentiment, but if the lack of bailout (which let me reiterate, I agree with) leads to a recession, it will kill the D chances in 2028. They will apply this calculus to their political behavior, and (as is typical for the Ds) will do nothing.
The Democrats I suspect are planning on doing the exact opposite unfortunately. They were very wimpy on the bubbly ai stuff under Biden, why would they change when they don't get punished from their own constituents for going against their promises. Same party apparatus as a whole that existed under Kamala. We need a Trump style clean out of the Democratic party because the brand is as bad as the Republican brand at this point. I can't with surity say that the Democrats are going to do anything to reign in big tech, all I can hope for is that they will be slightly better than trump or if not that, no worse.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
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