> but the risk can be made so high that most people won’t try it.
Possibly I've been mislead about how easy it is to access illegal drugs. I get the impression most people have actually tried them; or at least have easy access if they feel like it. Although I haven't bothered to look up the stats so maybe that is mistaken.
Hypothetically... say I rent out some server space in Russia, host GLM 5.2 and charge/pay for everything with crypto (one of the privacy coins). How exactly would the US government shut that little operation down? Or make it more risky for any participant than marijuana or torrenting? Even detecting it is an interesting technical challenge. It seems like it'd be low-skill and low-risk, and take insane resources on the part of the US to stamp out for something so harmless. The hydra would be growing heads faster than they could cut them off.
This isn't bars of gold, they can search my house all they like and there isn't going to be a lot in it. They would probably struggle to figure out who I am to do a targeted raid, let alone all the other small fry who could pull of a similar scheme.
Are you sure you haven't gotten your catastrophes crossed? Ozone depletion was a different crisis and people did enact change, the ozone hole has been closing fairly steadily. Wikipedia [0] thinks the prospects for the ozone layer are pretty good.
Some climate models expect permafrost decay and/or mere GHG rise to erode the ozone layer. It’s not 1:1 proven, but there’s indication that in a post-4C world (with feedback loops), we might slowly lose our protection against the sun’s radiation.
I don’t recommend getting into the literature, it’s… depressing.
(Your point about the global, concerted effort to limit the “holes” in the ozone layer reminds me that we can, when pressed, come together to tackle serious issues.)
I think it was more that the change required was relatively simple, and the industry was sort of already phasing out CFCs anyway. Banning them in fridges and aerosols was mostly frictionless and a win for everyone.
Turning the entire planet carbon neutral is so much harder a problem.
Also the fossil fuel industries have been trying to bury research on global warming since long before social media existed
It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.
Also, the evidence isn't that China is doing anything magic - it seems AI is just energy + compute as opposed to any special research edge. There is reason to think that anyone would be capable of building these models. They're generic and every country will eventually catch up at a speed depending on how economically capable they are at buildign data centres.
I'm upbreat about China because they seem to be the biggest player here, but even if they don't come through I expect other countries will be able to put out decent free models.
I would argue that there is somewhat a research edge - there's no reason to think Chinese labs aren't incredibly capable in research though, look at all the recent papers from them on things like efficiency.
Are we calling 40s old now? There are 2 countries where the median age is above 50 [0] and the US is 38.9. I suppose under 18s aren't in the voting pool but if a country has a median age of 50 they probably don't have that many under-18s running around. And old people don't vote as a totally unified a block, it'd be like saying countries are run for women because the median voter is a woman.
I'd suggest the main issue is that the world is so complicated that the younger voters just don't know what to organise and vote for. In the US in particular, they seem to basically be running an experiment every single election to try and figure out who they need to vote for to get some sane economic policy and stop getting involved in stupid wars. No success so far but you have to admire the process. The only people not getting the message are the people paid off to ignore it.
Older people as a bloc vote at reliably high rate compared to middle aged or young cohort and are vocal about their interests - politicians see this and react/plan accordingly. That's why SS is called the third rail of politics.
> When a good's supply is constrained, it becomes a store of value. See: gold.
That doesn't make sense as stated, because every physical commodity is supply-constrained to some extent, even and especially the ones that are extremely bad stores of value. Picking on Fermium (it has a nice atomic number) - Fermium is supply constrained and it makes a horrible store of value because it rapidly morphs into something else.
Gold is a well-liked store of value because it is absurdly stable (about as close as we can practically get to indestructible) and roughly the easiest to physically store out of all the durable candidates.
While houses depreciate, both they and the ground they are built on tend to have a very low chance of experiencing spontaneous transmutation, so I'm not sure how good of an example fermium is.
What if we added some kind of artificial spontaneous transmutation to housing? Maybe (this is really dumb but bear with me) every year 200 randomly chosen houses become the property of whoever is living in them at a random moment. What would happen?
> - Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well
If the margins are so razor thin that people the shops can't afford to pay well, what is the point of having the shops? Have the people go do something that pays well. There seem to be alternatives if people don't feel pressured to enter the industry in the first place.
If Sweden has picked a policy mix where it can't profitably run an industry then it'll either have to give up some material comfort to do it uneconomically or give up the industry. You don't make it sound like there is a hard conversation being had around intentionally lowering living standards to support machining shops. So let them go.
> Eventually the world is going to run out of countries having demographic booms, then society will have a massive lack of people to maintain existing infrastructure and corporations.
Under such circumstances, margins will have to rise to the point where machine shops will be able to hire some snot-nosed apprentices. Economics is pretty brutal about that sort of thing.
It is not a problem of Sweden specifically, I imagine this kind of problem will hit China hard in 20-40 years too. Companies in China behave just the same way as in Sweden, they have huge youth unemployment problems there too.
He's the only employee in a 2 man company. How exactly do your think the relationship here is likely to be play out? IMO it is likely that he has a pretty good and probably rather personable relationship with the company owner. And quite likely has rather good bargaining power already given that he can double his employer's workload by walking out the door and it'd in all likelihood be a big headache to replace him.
If he can't leverage his power when he already represents 100% of the company's employees a union is unlikely to help.
I get the vague impression that this was written in a sarcastic way, but it has a straightforwardly true literal read because yes, this is what the free market is about and Anthropic will have to compete with the Chinese if they want a big share of the market. Chinese models are cheap and good; even without reselling Anthropic's services they're competitive. Which reading did you intend?
And, gotta say, the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious. There might be an economic study here somewhere about just how anti-consumer and anti-progress their IP laws turned out to be. We've got an entire postindustrial revolution centred around who can ignore the most stupid laws.
Given the current US government's tightening of export control restrictions and the introduction of a bipartisan bill to block use of Chinese AI in federal agencies, I'd say the two countries' positions are not far apart.
That is ALSO happening, but that's beside the point.
Chinese AI apps like DeepSeek are freely available for ordinary Americans to download and use. There's no federal law banning private citizens from using them.
So to claim that Chinese companies are better at selling American companies' work than the American companies can do themselves when they are prohibited from operating in that market, is the wrong deduction to make.
> I understand a big gap is that any LLM based ai agent isn't aware of the consequences of its actions because it barely understands the future state its actions will have, hence this model that can.
These are probably equivalent. Ie, awareness of consequences is the same as understanding the future state. And the present state for that matter, I don't see how someone could be said to understand something if they can't predict the consequences of interacting with it. It is forcing the model to develop a more complex internal world model.
Possibly I've been mislead about how easy it is to access illegal drugs. I get the impression most people have actually tried them; or at least have easy access if they feel like it. Although I haven't bothered to look up the stats so maybe that is mistaken.
Hypothetically... say I rent out some server space in Russia, host GLM 5.2 and charge/pay for everything with crypto (one of the privacy coins). How exactly would the US government shut that little operation down? Or make it more risky for any participant than marijuana or torrenting? Even detecting it is an interesting technical challenge. It seems like it'd be low-skill and low-risk, and take insane resources on the part of the US to stamp out for something so harmless. The hydra would be growing heads faster than they could cut them off.
This isn't bars of gold, they can search my house all they like and there isn't going to be a lot in it. They would probably struggle to figure out who I am to do a targeted raid, let alone all the other small fry who could pull of a similar scheme.
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