Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught.
If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy.
If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.
That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.
Greatly improved privacy and security and end-user control of your phone and its data. In those areas, possibly the best option, though iPhones might be better in security (not necessarily the other two areas) - Apple has a slightly bigger budget and a few more engineers, and directly controls the hardware.
GrapheneOS exists to greatly improve the privacy and security of an existing open source OS project. Android Open Source Project has good privacy and security as a starting point.
Pixels provide strong hardware and firmware security. Pixels have made multiple significant hardware and firmware level improvements based on recommendations by GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS now has a hardware partnership with Motorola Mobility which includes working with Qualcomm. It isn't only a software project.
Regularly leaked data on the capabilities of Cellebrite show they have the least success with GrapheneOS by far despite specifically hiring for it based on their job postings.
The ability to sandbox Google Play Services (if you need it, but realistically, you probably do) and to simply not assign it more permissions than it absolutely needs is awesome. I run it with very restricted permissions, where it by default requests every single permission it can. In stock Android, it has all those, and you can't limit it. Just that is worth it for me.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.
Something like the IRA but started years ago. They invest and subsidise and tax-incentivise in their own industry but do use competition within their own market to weed out losers.
Which they might very well look to neutralise in the future - humans globally need to get much much better at addressing the externalities of their consumption.
Well, a single order of magnitude... They actually prioritized strategic industries that would be useful in the future, rather than prioritizing last-generation's industries like the US did with oil and fossil fuels, which receive massive tax subsidies.
Biden's IRA changed this massively for the US, and beyond just meeting our own needs for battery production, we were on track to being highly competitive.
Well environmental regulations prevent companies from processing rare earths at economically competitive rates in many countries. Sure they could do it, but why would anyone pay 3x as much for “clean” rare earth when you can just get the Chinese stuff?
Sure, but if anybody can truck refuse and clean sewers but only one person will actually do it, that's not really a monopoly by Kenny the toilet cleaner*, that's more like a caste system with "the unclean" over there.
I'd also point out that the US has a large land area, mapped out by the USGS (below ground structures) and is capable of creating a large shallow lake area sealed off from deeper aquifers and able to be treated with neutralising agents.
On the scale of the market for global battery production the additional costs for doing it right are not punitive and arguably fall under the "national security" umbrella that see magnitude larger shovelfuls of money going to defence and traditional fossil fuel industries.
The Chinese Communist Party was willing to invest heavily to capture the solar and battery markets early on. Obama tried to counter them, but got roundly criticized for "picking favorites" and in the end the US gave away the entire industry to China.
They were forced to invest in new energy technology because of lack of oil/gas reserves.
The US was on course to invest more as well (I guess the reason Musk saw the opportunity in Tesla), but then fracking happened and the US became energy independent with fossil.
Add the energy industry lobbying to kill clean tech and two Trump terms.
No. Beijing instructs Chinese banks what to invest in (e.g., AI, electrical generation infrastructure). The Fed has never done that. When there is an economic downturn, e.g., the Dot Com crash in 2001, the Fed makes it easier for US banks to borrow money. When there is a lot of investment, e.g., now with all the investment in AI, the Fed makes it harder for the banks to borrow money (because the money is not needed as much because the economy is being stimulated by all the spending by the recipients of the investments into AI). Beijing does that, too, no doubt, but again they also decide for the majority of the investment money, which parts of their economy get the investment.
It's still 1.4 billion people, 100 million party members, and a mostly capitalist economy where nobody stops you from starting a business. Decisions get made at all levels.
What's interesting is that, however you want to characterize their system, they're actually investing in a more diverse set of things than we are. Yes, AI is on the five-year plans but so are lots of other things. The US elite investors are pretty much only AI, all the time right now.
I don't agree with "mostly capitalist" when (again) most investment is made by regional banks that are state-owned enterprises with strong guidelines set by Beijing about what sectors to invest in.
Indeed, the American proletariat need not seize the means of production through local AI. Instead, full control of AI ought to be left in the benevolent hands of the billionaire capitalist class, and the benefits will trickle down, perhaps some time after after the 100th sponsored study into UBI (which very different from socialism)
This attitude of denial and stuck in the past beliefs is exactly why the USA isn't competitive. Y'all, and your politicians leading the country, just keep telling yourselves these things and then wonder why you're getting lapped by a bunch of cut-throat capitalists.
The "dark" EV plants making cars aren't using any labour, let alone cheap labour.
There's also that thing that made China what it is today - the USofA using China for cheap labour and a place to outsource all the dirty parts of high consumption.
They are most certainly using cheap labor to design, plan, operate and maintain those "dark" plants.
Very highly automated production lines (cars) have similarly moved along the labor-price gradient in Europe (~east) during the last decades, despite language barriers: You need some engineers, electricians, constructions workers, janitors, etc regardless, and those still scale with general labor costs, even if there's no human hands in the assembly line.
The US doesn't have those because we're not even trying.
China is capable of it due to the absolutely brutal grinding work culture. They're not superhuman, it's not Tony Stark building the Iron Man suit in an evening, they're smart and work extremely hard.
Because no one in their right mind will work the Chinese 996-esque schedule in the 21st century, except the Chinese?
They are actually importing Chinese workers to their Brazil factory, leading to the slave labor expose by Brazilian authorities [0]. They have the same trouble recruiting in Thailand, where workers have functioning unions and enjoy modern working rights, instead of 19th-early 20th century Industrial Revolution type stuff.
1. Factory limits basically. There's a limit to the amount of fabrication lines that can create ram. Combined with the market incentives right now to make high bandwidth memory (HBM) over server memory (DRAM)... HBM starts as DRAM dies, so it competes with normal DRAM for wafer starts / cleanroom fab capacity.
2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online.
Are more plants coming? I think I heard it won't be many of them, because it's risky.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
The entire capacity of RAM production is basically booked out, for at least the next year. All fabs have sold their allocations already, and it takes years to build a new one. As a result, no it will likely not ease up if demand continues like this, again for at least a year.
They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality.
You know how fractional reserve banking can create money out of thin air? In theory, the stock market can be used in the same way. Which is what the AI providers have been doing.
I agree to pay you within 90 days of receiving the product, which you'll send me in 6 months. You get to count this promise as income i've paid you right now. 9 months later I might or might not have the money to pay it for real.
The principle works for stable regular businesses where invoices do get paid, not for bubbles.
I'd argue the opposite: It works even better for bubbles.
Stable, regular businesses generally don't take on massive amounts of debt as a matter of accomplishing their value proposition. Maybe they take on the debt as a part of an expansion into a new geographic market or on developing a new product, but they typically have cash reserves to help fund those things. Accordingly the debts are relatively small and there's at least some collateral to secure them.
Any kind of bubble, on the other hand, is, by definition, financially massive. People taking on debts take on huge debts with the hopes of huge rewards. The problem is, the debts are so huge that neither the debtor nor creditor can allow them to go unpaid.
When you reach the scale of debt that you see for AI - literally trillions of dollars - the creditor isn't just a bank or a few investors, they're entire segments of the economy. The debtors can use that as leverage to get what they want. The Great Recession is a prime example of this. You had the US government print out or borrow $700 billion-ish dollars to absolve financial institutions of the toxic mortgage-backed securities on their balance sheets. Now, could they have simply declared bankruptcy and had the assets on their balance sheets claimed by other parties? Maybe, but that would have taken too long for most people's comfort and, moreover, would have been embarrassing for the country's monied elite. There had to be a bailout to keep a bunch of things solvent in the near-term, and they got one.
You could see this here: AI companies have everyone on the hook for their bets, and if it doesn't work, you can't simply write off the value of shares of everyone who has backed the bet.
They're too big to fail. If you owe the bank $1 million, you have a problem. If you owe the economy $1 trillion, the economy has a problem.
> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.
The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a year ago.
> The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up.
I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.
It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.
I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.
It's not sustainable because it'll basically ruin all of the industries connected to memory. OpenAI, Anthropic etc. all need a massive amount of compute to train and serve models, and increases in memory price will all drive up their already massive costs. And then on the other end, the people they need to use their AI services cannot either afford the devices they need to access the devices, or the device costs go up so much that they cannot afford to buy the services. If for example budget phones disappear completely because of memory prices, those consumers disappear from the customer pool and then the budget phone manufacturers disappear and stop buying memory, AI companies spend even more to build models for fewer people, etc.
Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?
And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.
I wonder about that. At the moment, it feels like OpenAI and Anthropic are in the “racing to IPO” business. I’m also not sure who is going to be buying all of this AI output when nobody’s employed.
I heard a long time stock market analyst saying the semiconductor industry always has boom and bust cycles. This is a boom (for the semiconductor industry) and it will be followed by a bust as demand rapidly drops off, just like every other time.
First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop?
This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.
But you probably need >$10M to not HAVE to work and live a low-risk comfortable life in even modestly expensive parts of the US.
The funny thing about money is, it's really hard to save $1M and $10M, but once you get there, it's pretty easy to grow that substantially.
The fundamental problem in the West, IMO, is that we make it so hard to save even small amounts of money, and so easy to compound huge amounts of money (and no the EU is not much better on this front than the US).
$10M is also perhaps asking for too much to live a modest life even without working, but I hear you with rising costs and healthcare. In any case, $10M is 100x smaller than $1B.
Why do many Americans feel like they need SUVs? Or huge 3000+ sq. ft. houses? Or five-star luxury vacations to impoverished countries where they barely have to lift a finger?
My take: they don't; nobody does. But when you aren't successful and don't have a lot, and when "success" is marketed to you as "big SUV; fancy big ass house; private jet; fancy vacations", you get trained into think you need much more than you actually do to be happy.
> why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars?
The once was a time where everybody reached similar questions, like "why does our monarch deserve to own all this wealth?" and "why does this plantation owner deserve to own these people?" Today it is the myth of meritocracy, they worked harder, or were smarter, and that's why they deserve it. Its all the same moral sickness. The future is socialism or barbarism, everyone get your heads out of your asses and choose.
Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.
Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.
> But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.
That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter would cause immediate suspicion.
Here in Germany, founding a company creates a public record. There are a number of companies who then send all newly formed companies an invoice that looks like a legitimate invoice for expenses related to creating said company, but on closer inspection actually contain a dense paragraph of text that details that this is not an invoice at all, merely an offer you accept by paying. Quite possibly even a subscription
It's a well-known trick, our notary warned us that these letters would come and we should scrutinize any invoice for a while. But they manage to skirt at the edge of legality
In the USA you'll get buttloads of mail urging you to do things such as confirm your home warranty at risk of not being covered. With addresses that says "RE: (your mortgage provider)" to make it look like it's from them.
Generally those kind of scams setup an illegitimate transaction that would be reversed in a court case.
Whether they rise to a criminal matter is complicated but the vast majority of such scams hold up to scrutiny and instead rely on shell games to make retrieving your funds to expensive to be possible.
Germany follows the law extremely strictly, even more than the USA. If there's no law that says they can't do this, they can do it. Common sense rarely enters the picture in German legal battles
German law doesn't really care if your consent to a contract was informed or not. If you technically consented, then you consented. This is also how we got the recent thread about .at domains renewing automatically and the registry suing you if you don't pay.
In Ohio (or at least my county) the deed and mortgage are public record. As is a record when the mortgage is paid off. Interestly also property tax charges and payments are, too
The ownership and selling price of a parcel of property are pretty much a matter of public record throughout most (all?) of the US along with aa number of other things. Deeds are recorded with the county clerk in MA.
Some of that can be obfuscated through LLCs and trusts but some things are pretty much a matter of public record that not everyone agrees should be. More is doubtless available in some locales. I don't think property tax charges are public where I live though who knows if I asked the town clerk nicely. (Property taxes are at the town level where I live.)
I am happy to know this emblem of knowledge stream keeps coming until 2035. It is wonderful to know our innovations have flown 200 odd million miles and work for so long!
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
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