There was some talk on here during Covid about the feasibility of making all structures up to BSL4 standards. Seems kind of nuts, but it would certainly contain a lot of biosafety threats. With AI it now seems borderline urgent.
Agreed. It was literally the wake up call for the fact that air quality standards are as important as soap and handwashinhg are, and yet... nothing happened.
And so the question of what effects getting rid of several-yearly respiratory infections would have on our health and the development of children remains open.
Redistribution that enhances production rather than stifling it. Which provides justice rather than creating injustice. A great idea to bury under dust for centuries.
I'm sure we will. And, like with mutations, the default assumption for a random change isn't very good. In this case, the historical record points to worse-than-random outcomes.
This narrative is largely untrue. Scandinavia started to prosper only after they liberalized. Of course, there is a big difference between intelligent redistributionism which respects and leverages market forces, and the kind of socialists who implement rent control and government-run grocery stores.
AFAIK democratic socialism was only relevant for a short while in some places in Africa 100+ years ago, there are no current countries with democratic socialism.
In simpler terms, the SRAM density improved by 2.9% (according to ChatGPT). Which is better than it sounds, because SRAM had reached a wall, in terms of density gains, and, chips can be dominated by SRAM in terms of surface area, so this can mean a lot more room for logic, even though that is also getting considerably denser.
Or AMD’s putting sram on a separate chip. I’m surprised they didn’t go there yet except for extra L3 instead of all of it. At some point the costs will shift the decisions.
Given that they paused signups for their 20x Max plan, your assessment seems overoptimistic.
Their new Broadcom chips seem cool, and they had a nice model release with Astra. But, that doesn't mean they've solved the profitability question during an era of rapidfire open-weight model releases, extreme memory shortages, and intense political pushback.
I think that implies they're seeing unusual new subscription demand, yes? That's how I'd read it, not least because I worked through four resets this week on Astra, which is un unbelievable amount more inference than I've wanted from openAI really ever, and the highest ratio vs. claude since opus 4 at the very least, probably farther back.
I think there are few moats in the engineering use case, and a single new model can absolutely drive compute demand.
High demand is great, but it doesn't say anything about your margins. If anything, it is probably a weak negative signal that they are pausing signups but not raising prices. In most markets, the answer to excess demand is to raise prices. If you can't meet demand and you can't raise prices, you're a sitting duck waiting to get your lunch eaten by somebody who can absorb that demand. And this is not the kind of market where people will just wait patiently for a differentiated product to be come available.
20x plan is $200, 5x is $100. Pausing $200 plan signups is effectively doubling prices (you can subscribe to two $100 accounts for the same money and get half as much usage), and that's exactly what they did.
I agree with some of your points, but wouldn't memory shortages actually work in OpenAI's favor? Part of the reason for the shortage is them prepurchasing hardware, so higher prices for memory and other chips would make self-hosting and competing inference providers less competitive.
Seems like the next evolution for memory-safety will be in the hardware, with CHERI.
Language-level memory-safety is all fine and good, if you can afford the rewrite. But, you still have to trust the software supply chain (the compiler, build server, etc).
However, there's a third and broader category called Proof Carrying Code, which could be used to guarantee all kinds of security properties of binaries, including memory-safety in a way that requires no supply chain trust.
With both CHERI And PCC, your machine will simply never perform unsafe memory access, and it doesn't matter what language the binary was authored in.
Seems like language-level and PCC safety guarantees are the kind of thing that AI agents will make much more practical. With AI hacking, this only gets more important. They've already started trying to rewrite everything in Rust, but PCC and CHERI go further.
Redesigning the entire OS stack around zero virtual memory, and purely static allocation, seems like a direction that will need to be done. CHERI makes that much easier.
Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.
I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.
I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.
I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.
Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.
yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.
Beyond what was provided natively in ChromeOS, you could often get something like GalliumOS working on them. My old Chromebook was fairly painful to use as a Chromebook, but GalliumOS made it pretty snappy and fun. Unfortunately that project seems unmaintained now
Yeah but these MacBooks run MacOS, which is a fully fledged desktop OS compared to ChromeOS which looks and feels a lot more like Android and lacks features in some areas.
I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.
reply