dualmindblade

The very first paragraph of the final report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a PDF that took 3 years and presumably millions of dollars to create

Americans are already familiar with how the Chinese government conducts economic warfare with crucial technologies such as semiconductors: corner the supply chain, then choke it to weaken the United States. But this is not the last time Beijing will run this play, and it is not even the most dangerous version of it.

Imagine a not-so-distant future where researchers in Shanghai develop a breakthrough drug that can eliminate malignant cells, effectively ending cancer as we know it. But when tensions over Taiwan reach a breaking point, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the strategic apparatus of the Chinese government, hoards the treatment under the guise of national security, cutting off supply to the United States. After years of access, this lifesaving drug is immediately in shortage, requiring doctors to ration it while American biotechnology companies scramble to reconstitute production in the United States. The streets and social media overflow with people demanding that the United States abandon Taiwan. The Administration faces an agonizing choice between geopolitical priorities and public health.

This scenario is fiction. But something like it could soon become reality as biotechnology takes center stage in the unfolding strategic competition between the United States and People’s Republic of China (China).

Since bowling pins are made from maple I assume the milk is just maple syrup

Divorce yourself from the self.

Yes, it is then and only then that one comes to realize what a toxic piece of shit they really are.

(sorry it's good advice actually, I can't help it)

Indeed, but if I could somehow revert to infant level neuroplasticity while retaining all my current knowledge it would be super useful

Agree. Some smaller also good ones:

Thomas Kern Really good at making some advanced/less mainstream topics accessible, careful to build up lots of necessary background and thoroughly explain details, so a bit like 3B1B except 0 fancy animations and slightly more rigorous. Covers a variety of topics but with a focus on automata and theory of computation.

Sheafification of G The opposite of Thomas Kern, designed for people with extreme ADHD. No slowing down, very little explanation, borderline silliness, you learn by osmosis. Half of the videos are him trying to incept category theory into your head. I still haven't learned category theory, but I'm old and my brain is starting to calcify, I did learn some stuff though and it's always entertaining.

I have been boycotting them since about 2021 since they tricked me and a bunch of vegetarians into eating their fries, which are fried in vegetable oil but contain "beef extract". I don't miss the fries but I do sometimes miss the hash browns. How else are you going to consume 1100 calories and like 3g salt in 20 seconds?

I kinda like these types of essays, though I get the frustration. I recall his video on receiving an autism diagnosis and I don't think by the end he did much more than gesture towards an opinion, and I get the feeling that this is because he was still mulling it over or at least genuinely didn't feel secure enough about it to dedicate a whole video to supporting a position. It's more like he was presenting a framework in which useful opinions can be pursued and analyzed.

Oh my, you're really in for it, sorry

Well like, an SQL statement "insert into ... select ..." can be arbitrarily complex. Even "insert into ... values ..." could be difficult if it contains subqueries or preparation of the static values. How simple are we talking here?

Unironically want this. I always bring my vape with, tuck it into my running belt with my car key because the other two pockets are occupied. And then I never pull it out because of PTSD from that time I lost my car key on a run, which wasn't even vape related.

Alright, changing my "taller than the average man in Napoleonic times" talking point to this one which seems way more relevant

This is pure speculation but I'm 90% sure that the NVidia drop had nothing to do with Deepseek R1 and was actually insider trading on the "news" that Trump was considering a tariff on Taiwanese chips.

First, R1 was released on the 20th, 5 days before the stock dropped. It wasn't at all a secret, basically it was the talk of the town that whole week and their capabilities claims were shown to be solid very early on by many many people running independent benchmarks. But the market didn't react.

Second, the big AI companies want all the compute they can get, they aren't satisfied with training 10 or 100 or 1000 times more quickly, this is why they're talking about trillion dollar data centers with nuclear reactors. Also of note, R1 was trained on Nvidia TPUs with the same amount of vram as the H100s. You couldn't cheaply train such a model on any other brand of hardware, demand for Nvidia products isn't going anywhere.

Third, if anything it's the AI software companies that would take a big drop, they're the ones who are supposedly spooked and scrambling to replicate R1 internally. The major software only players took only a small hit but recovered quickly, that would be Microsoft and Meta. Google is also a hardware company, they're trying to move some of their chip fabs to TMSC but their TPUs are made by Samsung. They took a small hit and have not yet recovered. AMD is a hardware company, they have fabs all over including sourcing from TMSC, same story. Intel, a similar company, no change whatsoever, they don't use TMSC at all. Nvidia took the big one, and they get ALL of their chips from... TMSC. All the action happened about simultaneously in after hours weekend trading.

Fourth, when the tariff news dropped the market seemed to be unaffected almost as if it had already been priced in over weekend trading.