The US grows a LOT of corn across most of the nation. HVDC links can transport a lot of power very efficiently over long distances. These systems are in use for this exact purpose in China, Canada, and Sweden where generation is far from the consumption site. It wouldn’t work across continents, but going from the Midwest to California or something wouldn’t be a problem.

Agrisolar exists. If the US converted just a few % of the acreage legally mandated for growing corn for ethanol to solar, the energy crisis essentially solves itself.

They already have started these layoffs. My cousin got hit yesterday.

Yes. Canadian Federal politics are largely dominated by “haves” vs. “have nots”. Alberta has historically been a “have” province with a decent amount of money flowing in from oil and gas industries. They resent having to pay federal taxes to “have nots” like their agricultural neighbors with larger First Nations populations. The narrative goes that Alberta (and western Canada) is paying taxes to Ottawa and Ottawa is “too far east” to understand/care about Alberta.

It’s all BS, they have equal ability to elect MPs, but because oil and gas is on the way out they throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way.

Spinning media is slower than solid state NAND storage

Horseshoe theory strikes again

Generalizable or not, the issue is that as statistical machines LLMs are really only capable of producing likely output. To some degree this firmly limits the output to being unremarkable.

No one can help tell you that, unfortunately. The hype squad will insist we’re at the inflection point of exponential growth and point to Anthropic using Claude to come up with novel optimizations for training Claude. The haters will insist that a statistical word model will never be useful because it’ll never be accurate, and they’ll never find a way to make inference cheap enough to be viable.

Turns out if your job is selling 95% correct words (generic business people, mediocre writers, etc), then a word guessing machine that does a 95% good enough job may be sufficient to have value. But if your proposition is in being actually good at something, then you’ll continue to outcompete the machines. It’ll never be able to displace classics, but I can’t imagine a world where it doesn’t displace human-slop erotica, murder mystery, etc. where the quality was less important than volume.

As to whether it’ll plateau, I’m not sure. It’ll obviously never be anything other than a word guessing machine, but it turns out there’s a lot of interactions with the world that can be described with words. About 3-6 months ago people generally noticed a big change in how well things like Claude code worked, and it had nothing to do with model improvements. Maybe the same model + new secret sauce can yield yet another improvement.

Anthropic and OpenAI will never recoup their burned CapEx but that doesn’t strictly mean that inference will never be cheap enough to be viable. If the big model shops explode from bad economics, it’ll still leave behind open source models that could be “good enough” that could run on your local machine. Is that going to be sufficiently “good enough” for the 95% correct use cases? I dunno. No one knows.

So… I dunno. For you, all this means is we’re gonna have a big economic reckoning at some point and if you’re good but not great at your job, your job involves selling words, and your job doesn’t require 100% precision, I’d reckon there’s a chance LLMs stick in your world, to some degree.

And before I get banned for this take, please note I’m not justifying the massive ecological and economic damage the process has and will do on the way to whatever end it reaches. Reactivating coal plants for power to feed an economic bubble that also itself destroys the environment is almost certainly too high a price to pay to replace human slop with AI slop.

Worse, they proactively passed legislation authorizing the invasion of The Hague in case a US official was ever brought there for war crimes. Thank dubya and the 2002 congress.

Uh, vaguely, yes. They’re essentially pinned to 0% because they need to get their inflation up, but that’s not really caused by their national debt. They’re definitely not in an enviable position overall, but their 260%+ debt:gdp ratio isn’t really why.

Because so far the fed has remained independent, and national debt matters far less than most people think it does. Take a look at Japan - theoretically in debt WAY over their head, but the Bank of Japan is actually trillions of yen in the black and mostly invested in the Japanese economy, getting yields of 6-7% on their holdings far above their debt service. Their pension fund is a majority stakeholder in basically all internal infrastructure, and despite stagnant “growth”, Japan’s real wage growth is like 4-5% YOY.

As with anything economics, a single metric usually tells a bad story. Whether we like it or not, the US economy is pretty robust and even a moron like Trump can’t really kill it totally in 4 years without messing with the currency directly. The downfall will be long and drawn out.

It literally cannot. It prints the currency they owe debt in. Worst case is they print a shitload of money and devalue the USD heavily and lose its status as global reserve currency, but at this rate they’re heading that way anyways…

Yeah I mean Canada overall just doesn’t have good launch spots… still, having a smaller sovereign site for small sats, cubesats and stuff like that is probably worthwhile. I would imagine this launch site will be limited to relatively small payloads.

Plus, lots of that $200 mill is gonna go directly to Magellan and other Canadian jobs.

Because their voters want them to. People love to act like 40% of Americans wouldn’t vote for Trump right now if asked to, but they would. He could rape a baby live on TV and the evangelicals would tell their congregations that at least he’s not a Democrat. The system isn’t broken, it’s giving the American population what they want. They just want stupid shit and more dead brown people.

Everyone’s acting like Trump is a fluke but he’s not. Republican voters would never primary their candidates to be less MAGA nor will they ever vote D. The best we can hope for is them going silent and not voting.

? The articles HEADLINE says “warheads” and the body says “guided missiles”, and then cites a source saying “guided missiles” and “artillery”. I’m not just disambiguating minutiae, there’s a huge difference between buying a flashbang and a fucking guided missile system.

Misinformation is cool as long as it’s “our guys” making shit up?

We have so many real things to go after the gestapo for, INLCUDING spending $72 mill on guns and shit, but you’re right, we should say they bought tanks and F35s as well. It’ll really get this ball rolling.

I wasn’t even accusing you of doing anything, but hey, attack me personally to make your point. Makes you look really smart and reliable. No wonder your country is fucked.

The only source cited is a blog which cites a blog + raw acquisition numbers from government data, none of which contain ANY reference to “guided missiles” or “artillery” as the original substack claims.

As best I can tell, this claim was just kind of made up, then referenced by a blog, and now by the daily beast. We’re like 3 days out from NYT writing this and referencing this daily beast article.

Fuck this administration for all the illegal and inhuman shit they’re doing, but I’m almost certain this is just made up. They definitely have spent a shitload of money on weapons and equipment (bad) but theres no proof they’ve bought explosives and chemical weapons (beyond pepper spray)

I’m currently rabidly anti-American (haven’t intentionally bought an American product since the trade war began, accidentally bought some plums that were mislabeled a couple of months ago :( ) but Costco gets a pass from me. They pay their Canadian employees far better than a Canadian store does, they haven’t backed off their diversity policies, and their prices on basically everything is much better than Canadian monopolies. I don’t buy American products there at all but I will continue to shop there until something changes probably. They’re the last American company I really do business with.