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France has a strong creative industry, which is why the government has always been very active in this domain.

Some other European are much less concerned about the issue.


It's also because telecom, media, and entertainment's represents a much larger component of France's economy compared to other EU states.

Spain and Italy are in a similar boat as France in that regard.


8GB is really low.

That said, perhaps there is a niche for slow LLM inference for non-interactive use.

For example, if you use LLMs to triage your emails in the background, you don't care about latency. You just need the throughput to be high enough to handle the load.


I don't really buy this argument. What counts is angular motion as seen from the camera, not absolute speed.

In terms of angular speed, unless you have a helicopter flying super low, I doubt aircraft move significantly faster than a preacher or a teacher, which are the intended use case according to the article.


Yes! So I probably over-simplified a bit in the language there... it's not just the physical motors, but the control electronics and logic on the cam itself doing the interpolation of receive VISCA commands that reduce overall responsiveness. And that lack of responsiveness not just absolute speed that causes issues. I sort of lump that all into hardware limitations since it's not something I can directly configure.

There is a real need for education of the masses. Not destroying the planet should win elections, not lose them.

I favor public education, but let's not kid ourselves, there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support. It's a weird social media echo chamber artefact that will exclusively sabotage efforts to decarbonize.

In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.

> In a sane election system, 20% gives a party a significant position in the government that influences the coalition and drives some of the future decisions. Just not in the two-party circus.

There is no consensus among political scientists that either a two-party system or a multi-party/coalition system is inherently “better.” Each design produces different trade-offs in representation, stability, accountability, and policy outcomes.


...or everyone else decides to marginalize that 20% party and allies with the far right instead (I don't want to defend the US system, but proportional representation is not a panacea either).

There's a lot to gain from just efficiency it doesn't have to be degrowth.

But forever growth also isn't sustainable. No matter how productive we are, the planet would still not survive.


> there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Sustainability politics is mainstream in Europe in a way it isn't in the US. Aside from ethical concerns, a lot of people over here see climate change as a very real economic threat (likely to cause them material economic harm within their lifetimes).

You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.


> You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.

That's arbitrary. If you went back in time before AI and crypto, which industries would you pick to constrain growth or development of?

Is it whatever the latest industry is that is driving incremental emissions? If so, I don't know that it is a compelling mental model, because that is a degrowth mindset.


> which industries would you pick to constrain growth or development of? Is it whatever the latest industry is that is driving incremental emissions?

My mental model is more about industries that are using a lot of resources without actually generating value comensurate with that use.


Intentionally reducing quality of life in the short term will never win elections, no matter how educated a populace is. The best strategy to reduce consumption that seems to be working is allowing below replacement total fertility rates.

But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.

Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).

>> But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.

> Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).

That's not accurate. The problems of population aging are not confined to a single generation. They are structural and persistent, unless the underlying institutions adapt.

Aging is a continuing demographic process, not a single event. Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it. Each cohort also lives longer. That means that today's workers support more retirees. Tomorrow's workers will support even more, unless something changes.

It can feel (but isn't) like a single generation problem if major structural changes happen like: raising retirement age in line with life expectancy, shifting pensions to funded, large-scale immigration, major productivity gains from technology, or cultural shifts to high fertility.


> Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it.

I mean, unless fertility completely collapses (to like less than 0.5) then it'll mostly be a single generation problem. Regardless of any future changes, the current generation (my kids etc) will be supporting a much larger older cohort, with problems arising from that. I am one of 4 siblings, have two kids, and as long as both of them have two kids, no more problems arise (obviously extrapolating to the population).

There's some amount of irreducible demand for kids so I'd be surprised to see TFR continue to decline on a generational basis. Mind you, I could be wrong (or alternatively, we could see a massive increase in TFR like we did post WW2).


> American doctrine here, as far as such a thing exists, is to reduce its fab yields to zero by using 2,000 lb kinetic contaminants via the B-2 bomber deposition process

What are these "kinetic contaminants"? Does anyone have more detail? I couldn't find anything.


Hi there. Register writer here, and personal friend of the author of this piece.

It is a joke. You missed the joke.

What the sentence means is "America's policy is that if China takes over Taiwan, it will bomb TSMC's chip fabs."

The phrase "kinetic contaminant" means "big bombs". That's why he specified the model of bomber.

The B2 is the American "Stealth bomber".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit

No, it is not about graphite.


Got it, thanks for the explanation! I thought he was talking about some dirty bomb delivered by he B2s

I can only imagine something like a graphite bomb[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb


No. It means bombs. It means bombing the fabs to stop them falling into Chinese hands.

Thank you!

650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder how many total users Claude Code has?

I'm referring to the ones willing to cancel, especially ones who also feel the need to make a public statement about it. And I'd guess your number is high % churn, and even still CC is much higher.

For the little Haskell I've done with llms, I can tell you they're not bad at it.

Actually, Haskell was a bit too hard for me on my own for real projects. Now with AI assistants, I think it could be a great pick.


> Modern logistics companies succeed financially while failing at the task. Stock prices go up. Service goes down. The quarterly report looks great. Your package is in a warehouse two states away marked “delivered.”

It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.


"AI" doesn't exist. There are probably hundreds of different breast cancer detection algorithms. Maybe the SOTA isn't good enough yet. That doesn't mean AI in general is fundamentally incapable of correctly detecting it.

It is a useful umbrella term for all the systems in question.

It seems this study tested a single one of them.

These reports often misrepresent scientific data, I think that's a given.

Not a word on the environmental impact. We need to be flying less, not faster.

And yes, I know flying only makes roughly 5% of world emissions. It also turns out that these are some of the most avoidable emissions. We should be cutting them first.


I spent a lot of my 20s and early 30s as an environmental activist. I'm now in my mid 40s. One of the biggest things I've learned is that the vast majority of people will never make that trade. We are going to heat up the Earth. And then we are going to deal with the consequences.

We're all of us speeding towards a cliff that ends in environmental disaster.

And if you point that out, you get downvoted to invisibility on Hacker News and elsewhere.


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