In international football, players use their feet to control the ball, hence the name “football”.
This is in contrast to quaint local games like rugby or gridiron, which are incorrectly called “football”, where players use their hands instead of their feet.
Of course, when soccer players use their heads for headers, the game is temporarily renamed headball
after securing more than $10 billion in AI infrastructure orders from new customer, without naming it
No other idiots to dump real money for the chatbots of sammy altman that one can imagine.
Consider that current Broadcom AI chip revenue is around $12 billion annually, with recent quarters hitting around $6 billion. So, $10 billion from one company would be a lot. That would likely be a bigger order than for Google's TPUs. That's a huge gamble on OpenAI's part, that its first generation chip will be useful enough to deploy that widely. Remember that Google is on the 6th generation for TPUs after 10 years. OpenAI is hoping to do that immediately.
And in other news, if consumed responsibly, neither Cannabis nor Alcohol is a problem.
Smoking weed is like smoking cigarettes in terms of second-hand smoke. There are some health effects from second smoke, but for some people like me, I get triggered on the smell. I hate the cigarette smell and I hate the weed smell even more. It may not harm me directly, but like BO from a person who never bathes, it harms me psychologically. I would bail out of events if I have to smell weed. I had a friend who pulled out of a house buying contract due to smelling weed from the neighbor. I would have done the same.
Meanwhile china sells vehicles at a reasonable price that people can afford.
"In Germany, it’s already listed on BMW’s website with prices starting at €68,900 ($81,000).
I'm not sure why the US price is so much lower. Is the US version downgraded somehow? Also, is that $60k before or after tariffs? In any case, $60k for a BMW with those specs will be competitive.
Playing the devil's advocate:
ICEs (specially with a manual transmission as found often here around in Europe) also have ways to slow down without using the brakes, but instead having the wheels drag the motor:
motorbraking.
A long time ago when I asked my auto mechanic friend about the relative merits of downshifting instead of using brakes, he gave me a weird look and then asked me if I would rather change my brakes or my clutch. I stopped downshifting after that.
Indeed. Air pollution is the main reason i got an EV.
How often do you change your tires now that you have an EV? Ever wonder where all the little tire bits end up? Into the air as PM 2.5 pollution.
With my first EV, I accelerated fast a lot and had to change my tires after 20k miles. With my next two EVs, I drove like I did with gas cars, and the tires lasted just as long. Now, looking at brake dust, all my EVs had significantly less brake wear.
another inadequate fine, 1% of revenue. What do they care? Just a cost of doing buisness.
Viewed from the perspective of impact on corporate financial health or future business decisions, 1% is noise. Viewed from the perspective of corporate executives who are primarily interested in stock price appreciation, it's huge. Nvidia saw a huge stock price fall when they recently missed data center revenue expectations by 0.5%. The stock market is often not rational in the short term, but these swings are far more important to executive compensation than the corporate top or bottom lines.
People thought computers would crush the working class because only rich people would have access to them. People are still making that argument to this day.
Rich people have disproportionately derived the benefits, haven't you been paying attention to the widely reported shrinkage of the middle class for the last 45-50 years?
My guess is that massive income inequality comes from personal greed and is independent of computers or AI. Unfortunately for the ultrarich, the US economy is overwhelmingly consumer driven, so eventually those tens of billions will become merely billions as the economy contracts with fewer consumers and consumer dollars. If fewer people can afford to buy iPhones, Apple will get crushed. If general consumer spending plummets and sends online ad revenue decreasing, Google and Meta will get crushed.
The finding that little time is saved with AI summaries of emails and meetings should be further analyzed.
Meetings take a huge number of hours every week for almost everyone. A lot of my meetings are online zoom-like meetings where information is disseminated and where I seldom need to say anything. Many of these meetings are effectively seminars. Having AI summarize these meetings so that I can do something else that is more productive would be immensely useful and would significantly improve efficiency and productivity.
For my daily work emails, AI probably wouldn't save too much work because I don't have to much fluff email that I can ignore and the remaining emails require me to sit and think. However, returning after a vacation often finds hundreds of emails that would take hours to process. Much of that email pile is mundane and doesn't require much thought. I think AI would help with identifying the mundane part so that I can solely focus on the minority of emails that require thought.
Indeed. Their ability to build more smaller and less advanced ships is indeed greater.
I sincerely doubt this is stressing anyone out except in the instance of going to war, and in which case- we'll do as we did last time. We'll build them, and we'll out-build the fuck of our adversary.
Perhaps the amazing WWII manufacturing ramp-up by the US will be repeated. However, it's not a certainty. The existing manufacturing base has changed. Much of the core factories and supply chain is now missing and would have to be recreated and not just ramped up. Furthermore, the US had the luxury of more than two years of ramp-up time without directly participating in wartime hostilities. That would likely not be true again.
In the meantime, we've got a dozen aircraft carriers and enough missile cruisers with ballistic interception capability to stop an alien invasion.
China has- an old piece of shit they purchased from Russia. A copy of that they made domestically. And a very big "modern" one that is about 64 years behind the US state of the art.
My fear is that aircraft carriers and much of the strategic US weaponry represents the new Maginot Line. Aircraft carriers were game changers in the absence of missiles and drones. With massive arsenals of long-range missiles, mobile fleets of bombers aren't so critical.
Moreover, aircraft carriers are impossible to defend against a sufficiently supplied enemy. Think about the Houthi attacks against the US fleet. Yes, the attack was completely defended, but only with a huge arsenal of very expensive weapons. Now imagine that the Houthis had Chinese-scale arsenals. There's absolutely no way that the US fleet could fend off 10 straight attacks, let alone 100. The Houthis attack considered of relatively cheap weapons. China can assemble such massive arsenals that can eventually overwhelm any defense.
I think of the Dirty Harry line about counting bullets. Naval defenses have limited defense missile capacities that are sufficient for Houthi-scale attacks but which cannot defend against Chinese-scale attacks.
One more point. Ukraine has shown that cheap drones can disable tanks and ships. Imagine that the cheap non-maneuverable torpedoes of WWII are now still cheap but are AI drones. It's not clear that an aircraft carrier can be defended against a barrage (think 1000 simultaneous torpedoes).
The US is not behind in shipbuilding.
This is a dumb way to interpret the fact that we don't make large commercial vessels anymore.
China didn't build the USS Ronald Reagan. The US did.
There's perhaps an argument that US ships have better quality, even though China has quantity. However, the number and capability of US shipyards to either build or maintain ships has significantly atrophied. This is something that even our own military has unfortunately acknowledged. If a war broke out and the US had to mount a WWII-like effort to make produce ships, high quality or otherwise, it would take a long time to ramp up that capability.
That and I think the whole thing led to people looking into military assessments. I suspect a lot of Europeans thought the US was nominally ahead but that the US, China, Russia, and Europe were within a stone's throw of each other militarily and were shocked to discover that the US compares with all of them combined BEFORE accounting for the US having a vast technological and strategic superiority. Pretty much every hypothetical US vs the entire world allied wargame goes to the US within 18 months or less.
Whatever you think of the US wanting slightly less lopsided terms on trade nobody sane wants to be on the opposing side vs the US when WW3 comes.
There are several ways of looking at this. The first is with the madness of exploding nuclear weapons. In that scenario, everyone loses, including the US. The second with without nuclear weapons. In terms of weapons and supplies counts, the US doesn't not overwhelming have more than the rest of the world. It could be argued that the quality of US weapons gives it superiority, but that is an assumption that can only be verified during wartime. The third view looks at manufacturing capabilities, one of the crowning jewels of historical US military superiority. China has overwhelmed the rest of the world in terms of military manufacturing. In certain areas, like shipbuilding, the US is far behind.
In other news, professional basketball and football teams have all stopped testing their players for running speed. Because, let's be frank, all a running test does is reward people who excel in races against time.
Do they even? That would be crazy. If you use a running speed test to admit players to your basketball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer team or whatever, you'd have a team of runners.
Pro sports leagues definitely test for speed as well as other metrics at their sports combines. Speed is not the only thing measured because speed is not the only desirable trait. Also, one-time tests for specific types of performance are essentially single samples and have different levels of accuracy. And these tests are don't replicate on-field conditions and are therefore just proxy guesses.
Drafting and signing pro athletes is very much like the hi-tech interview process in that you get a very small amount of static information mixed with a very small amount of time to talk to each candidate. From that information, each team has to guess how an athlete will perform in an environment that is very different from school. A lot of pro athlete evaluations fail, just like a lot of hi-tech interview evaluations fail.
From what I saw of the SAT I formed the impression that its sole purpose was to reward kids who happened to be good at that style of test taking. The format was frankly weird and a race against time more than a display of depth of knowledge.
It seemed to me to be a test focussed on the glory of itself
Well, there are perhaps several purposes for the SAT. First, the College Board earns over a $1 billion, and the CEO earns over $2 million a year, even though it's ostensibly a non-profit. Then, there's the SAT test preparation industry which collects tens of billions each year. Money is definitely a key purpose of the SAT, at least for some people.
The key reason for the existence of the SAT is that it's perhaps the least easy of all admissions criteria to manipulate. GPA grading scales and criteria are highly variable across different high schools, and even at the same high school. The GPA for one student is not obviously comparable to the GPA for another student, and yet, colleges make the comparison even though they know that the comparison for any two students is tenuous. The correlation between high school GPA and college success may be moderate on a population level, but the correlation between any two arbitrarily chosen high school students can range for extremely weak to extremely strong. Essays are the new GPA, but essays are far worse than GPAs, as they are extremely easy to fake and manipulate with absolutely no way for any university to discern authorship or authenticity or to institute review consistency.
This is also the underlying reason for criticisms of the SAT, that it's "unforgiving" in not allowing specific biases (for minorities, poor people, less intelligent rich people, artistic/sporty but less academic people, etc.) to be indirectly favored. Instead, specific compensation in the form of affirmative action, legacies, artistic/sports scholarships, etc. are needed, and those types of compensation are being legally or otherwise attacked.
Why wouldn't we also lower the bar on SATs?
The reason for not lowering it is because they are marketing the SATs to the wrong people.
The bar on the SATs was lowered significantly in 1995. When the SAT was started in 1926, the average scores for the math and English sections were calibrated to be 500 each, for a composite score of 1000. Over the decades, the average composite score dropped to around 900. So, in 1995, the score calculation was "recentered" to immediately bring the average score back to 1000. That's why the number of 1600 scores shot up into the hundreds per year instead of the several dozen before the recentering.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
