If their new platform reduces inference token cost by 10x, does that play well or not well with the recently updated GPU deprecation schedules companies have been playing with to reduce projected cost outlays?
For context, my understanding is that companies have recently moved to mark their expected GPU deprecation cycles from 3 years to as high as 6 which has huge impacts on projected expenditures.
I wonder what the step was for the Blackwell platform from the previous. Is this slower which might indicate that the slower deprecation cycle is warranted, or faster?
No way you throw away Blackwell GPUs after just 3 years. Google runs 8 year old TPUs still at 100% utilization. Why would you depreciate them in just 3 years?
The conversation around GPU lifecycles seems to be conflating the various shear rates within the data center. My layman understanding is that the old 3 year replacement cycle had more to do with some component, not necessarily the memory or the processor, going wrong for half of their units by 3 years, at which point GPUs were cheap enough and advancing faster enough that it was more cost effective to upgrade than to fix. However, that calculus changes completely when the GPU and the HBM are orders of magnitude more expensive than the rest of the system. I suspect that we will see repairs being done on on the various brittle bits of the system and the actual core expensive components will continue to operate much longer than 3 years.
Seems reasonable to me, a very anti Trump individual. Now deliver.
And which of his buddies does this benefit?
I'm trying to think if there will be ramifications to this...
- Obviously forced divestment of all Wall St owned single family homes could impact housing prices which is both the point, but of course... also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth
- I guess that crash could potentially have people paying lots of money for homes that aren't worth that much anymore, which sounds pretty negative
- Of course... wow, would it be nice to be able to afford something in the city I love (which I doubt will be impacted by this)
Of course, no clear plan here. Just Trump saying something, why wasn't the "Trump says" part kept in the headline here?
> also hurts many families borrowing power and net worth
This is part of the crux, isn't it? It's a backbone of families' wealth and positioned as an investment. So there seems to be no winning: either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old
See also: Bitcoin and the like (wild value fluctuations are the hallmark of a good currency)
> either choke off the young trying to buy or crack the nest egg of the old
The simple fact is, housing can either be affordable xor an investment[0].
Affordable means the prices are flat relative to inflation, which makes it a terrible investment. If it's a good investment, that means the price is going up faster than inflation, which quickly makes it unaffordable.
[0] I want to be clear that I'm referring to housing as an investment to mean buying a house purely for profit purposes, ie, to flip or to rent out. Buying a house to live in, rather than renting the house you live in, can be considered an "investment", but I mean to explicitly exclude that usage of "investment" in this comment.
A house bought for the purpose of renting out is a house that could have gone to someone who wanted to buy it. It creates upward pressure on housing prices.
I mean, I get it. There are some people that truly do want to rent a house because they know the living situation is temporary.
But we have a generation that was able to buy houses during an economic boom where you could buy a house with an entry-level job, and once that house was paid off, they started buying up houses with their extra money to rent out, and it was so lucrative that prices have skyrocketed and now people in their 20s can't buy houses without a decently lucrative job.
Obviously, there are many factors at work here, but buying or building houses with the intent to rent them out is certainly a contributor.
I just think about the fact that I bought my house in 2015 for about $340K, and it's now worth about $600K, an 80% climb in just 10 years, and I think that's absurd, not to mention a bad thing for society overall.
If what this article describes really does come to pass, it may still help.
Often, mom-and-pop landlords are happy to be making more than the mortgage rather than MBAs trying to extract every possible marginal cent. It's less of a faceless spreadsheet relationship.
I guess time will tell if it's anything more than blowing smoke.
It's mostly a made-up issue to begin with - so this would be a popular policy, easy to pass because there won't be much opposition, and it'll be easy to point to and say "We fixed that problem."
The R party has changed so radically that it's hardly recognizable any more. As a result, "not republican" is no longer a very meaningful description.
I think the most likely explanation is pretty simple. Whenever people are unhappy with their economic situation, at the ballot box they take it out on whoever is currently in power, logic be damned. Politicians know this.
Well, there's no explanation for how this will affect any currently owned properties. So maybe it won't do much of anything. And something important to understand about private equity owning homes, is that they tend to descend on specific geos where the supply allows buying in scale. If they are forced to divest, it very well could crash a few cities or towns. And given that the aforementioned supply was heavily bent towards distressed areas, the crash could be brutal.
It will likely have close to zero impact on high-demand areas.
I've heard an uptick in derogatory terms being thrown around recently and while unsurprising, it sure is sad.
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
> I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
> It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
Language police are extremely uncool; going around telling people which words they are allowed to use mostly just hurts your own cause. It has the exact same effect that an old Christian woman scolding kids not to use swear words has. Eventually people realize that your magic words give them power and it becomes cool and useful to start using them in the exact opposite way you want them to.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
If you want to make fun of bartender who is strict their, a prude calling them a homosexual is just a non sequitur not an insult. Its not policing language its someone calling you out and saying your a fuckwit for being unable to inteligentlly insult someone or describe a sitution. That's way I don't like insulting people by calling them gay its just not saying what i want to convey maybe thats the "don't say gay kid" but i think its just indicitive that the people who say that didn't get the point of what was being said to begin with. Aka up your insult game there are ton of insults that are way weightier than calling someone a homosexual.
I’m sorry we’re not allowed to tell people they’re a stupid piece of shit or even that you disagree with their hateful rhetoric. Only the people saying the worst things should be protected and have free speech, we should limit our speech out of respect for theirs
I'm not telling anyone they can't clutch their pearls and tell other people what to do. All I'm saying is that you will never win the cultural battle that way. Building a culture that does things like getting people fired from their jobs for using magic words, even if there is obviously no intentional malice in those words, is a great way to lose elections.
OP is not looking to get people fired for using particular words. OP doesn't appear to be fighting any sort of political battle. OP is telling people to be nice, and that's as much his right as it is yours to use the wrong words.
And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.
That's only true of people who overreact or use offense as an excuse to let off some righteous anger. Most people don't react that way, even if that is what you'll most often see surfaced on social media because it's the most exciting and engaging sort of reaction. Most people will just tell you it's not a good thing to say and let you quietly reflect on it, or just exit the conversation.
tbh politely saying it bothers you is totally fine. That's not my argument.
All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.
We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.
The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.
Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.
If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.
You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.
Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?
Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.
I've only realized this somewhat recently, and it happens passively, but the way people use some of these magic words helps me to categorize the person who said it.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
I tend to agree, the words someone chooses tell you about the kind of person they are. Context is usually obvious, you can tell if someone is trying to be edgy, if someone normally uses the word in their vocabulary with their friends, or if they are genuinely using it in a hateful way.
The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.
Genuinely hateful usage is of course important to stop but let's not pretend that hearing negative things called something you are all day isn't damaging to people.
The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.
It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.
What, as opposed to the people on painkillers, xanax, caffeine, nicotine, and of course the actual worst... too little sleep, too much alcohol, and their phones.
The conclusion seems to be that if you _only_ smoke marijuana you're actually less likely to be involved in a crash than a sober driver, but if you combine marijuana with alcohol you're _more_ likely to crash (which, duh).
Obviously not totally conclusive, but interesting none the less. Anecdotally, coming from a high school where folk smoke and drove all the time because they couldn't smoke in their houses or on the street where they'd face police harassment, it was always the alcohol that got them nabbed for DUIs. It's anecdotal, but my anecdotes are many and I'm not sure I've heard of any one I've ever known crashing while just smoking weed.
So... maybe everyone should toke a little before they drive, sounds like they'd leave more distance between the cars in front of them, and go at a more relaxed pace, and not try to do any crazy passes of the people in front of them. Road rage is a very real thing in America, and the stereotype isn't of your typical stoner.
There's a really interesting story I read somewhere about some application which used neural nets to optimize for a goal (this was a while ago, it could have been merkel trees or something, who knows, not super important)
And everything worked really well until they switched chip set.
At which point the same model failed entirely. Upon inspection it turned out the AI model had learned that overloading particular registers would cause such an electrical charge buildup that transistors on other pathways would be flipped.
And it was doing this in a coordinated manner in order to get the results it wanted lol.
I can't find any references in my very cursory searches, but your comment reminded me of the story
It's very weird. I've come into codebases at my current big co where 15 tables that all looked and acted exactly as terribly as one another (no sorting, no discernible sort, no filtering, limited page sizes, no search beyond CMD/CTRL-F)
And they were all built out one by one, every time.
What a mess, why! I consolidated everything down and am now bringing up both an App URL Param library other folks can use, a generic resource engine other folks can use, and a table engine which combines the two to give you most table functionality with a simple config and passing in the resources (We're internal tooling for small record sets so a lot can be handled on the front end since resource baseline can be assumed and customer count is low).
Even when you build things modularly people will give you grief. It's over engineered. Well, you say that, except it's testable at the unit level, easy to slide in to other use cases (which the test cases help ensure resiliancy for old and new), small, not nested, discoverable, flat, easy to read, and easy to maintain.
So sure, took a couple of extra hours of legwork up front compared to just dropping everything into a single React function as is the standard round these parts, but the benefits are clear.
The democrats lost it on immigration enforcement (or lack thereof) and not knowing when to step aside for a new face.
All they had to do was two things after trump’s first term debacle:
- keep to trump’s remain in Mexico policy
- have a fair primary (or stick to the person picked in the fair primary)
Democrats lost, in part, by giving in to the republican narrative around immigration. They gave up on arguing that immigration can be good, and started accepting the republican framing of it as a problem to be solved. This strategy is doomed from the start, since republicans will always be willing to go harder on anti-immigration rhetoric and action than the democrats will.
According to Gallup [1], only 47% of US Americans thought that immigration should decrease in 2020. That number had held more or less steady since at least 2000. But it grew steadily over Biden's term, reaching 88% in 2024. This, I believe, is a reflection of how the democrats shifted their rhetoric to be "tough on immigration". And it handed Trump a populace that was primed to be more susceptible than ever to his much more aggressive immigration rhetoric.
Of course, this is just a small part of a much bigger picture, but I don't exactly think it helped.
Lack of immigration enforcement is nonsense. Enforcement ramped up under Obama and hasn't gone down since. We americans are just very dumb and buy into obviously bullshit stories about brown people stealing and eating cats.
The border controls were removed under Biden leading to a lot of illegal immigrants. Obama enforced but never stopped the flow. Trump had stopped the flow with remain in Mexico.
Domestic enforcement is 1/2 the problem. Controlling your border is the other half.
I’m baffled that you can look at the Democrats’ decades of running to the right on immigration and still blame their losses on not doing that enough. This is a perfect example of why ceding any ground to right-wing talking points is a mistake. Obama deported more people than any president before him and it never mattered because reality was never the point.
We have a gestapo kidnapping members of our community in the streets and the xenophobic propaganda still has you believing the most vulnerable and underpaid people in our society were ever a serious problem.
Im baffled that you can look at the polling numbers about the migrant fiascos in dem cities and come to any conclusion other than that it was one of the biggest political fuck ups this century. Republicans played urban dems like a fiddle calling their bluff on sanctuary city talk. The bussing programs made republicans look like problem solvers and dems look like the classic progressive trope of all bark no answers. Dems didnt need to close the borders or even slow down immigration, but they did need a real answer that isnt "this isnt a real problem" and they came up with nothing.
The migrants were a serious problem for democrats and youre still denying that.
1. Theyre racist and xenophobic so they dont like migrants
2. They feel discriminated against by urban people so they dont like them either
3. Combine those two and its easy to see how they can revel in the suffering caused by the situation. Politics is about narratives and this one spread like wildfire because dems had no counter narrative. End of the day cities are dominated by democratic politics so its easy for republican narrative makers to point at cities that are failing to deal with a crisis and turn that into a reason to not vote for dems.
4. Everyone loves a good told you so. The problem for democrats with this one was that it was so incredibly visible. Made for very good TV on fox news
We can blame democrats but there's also some real dysfunction in the US in terms of lack of education/critical thinking and relic ideas (guns, religion, white supremacism) that still lingers on. Trump did win the popular vote.
Guns are a part of the constitution. Those aren’t going anywhere. Unless someone wants to work towards an amendment - which means you need the president, 2/3 of Congress and senate and 2/3 of the states to agree.
> Guns are a part of the constitution. Those aren’t going anywhere.
So is due process, but that went out the window last year. It turns out that the constitution doesn't mean shit if the executive doesn't want to follow it.
Lina Khan is probably my favourite American official of all time. Everything I've seen of her is just focus and directly pushing forward rights for all Americans, and she wasn't afraid to square up against $tn companies.
The very idea of executive orders is antithetical to democracy, only necessary because Congress - in particular the Republicans - has abandoned the foundational idea in the American political system that the two large parties are able and willing to engage in bipartisan work and compromises.
Every US president starting with Washington has issued executive orders except for William Harrison. Harrison would have issued executive orders but he died 31 days into his term before he had time to.
Define foundational? The concept was heavily discouraged and only came about from personal feuds between Hamilton and Jefferson. They were never included in any official founding documents and Washington was right about them leading to "frightful despotism".
Biden was nice. It turned out his screw up in his debate was that he came back from a foreign trip and was under some medication. He was tired on stage. Full blame goes to this team who did not call the debate off when they should have. (yes i judge in my arm chair)
This is where a dogged loyalty to the two-party system gets you. Desperately trying to engender sympathy for someone who went against every better instinct regarding politics and optics.
lol. I’m a Trump voter. It is not loyalty. It is sympathy, plus honesty. His failure was he was momentarily handicapped, tired. Not disabled. And he was a nice guy even though I didn’t agree with his politics.
I'm having a hard time even comprehending this. Most of the MSM propped him up and ignored his clear cognitive decline. That doesn't seem like he was up against every media company in the nation or eaten alive?
How about we accept both Biden and Trump were and are in cognitive and physical decline, simply due to their age?
Biden was 78 when he assumed office, and so was Trump in his second term. Neither of them should have been in any position of power, not at that age - the average American has a life expectancy of ~75 years for males.
The position of the American President is inarguably the position with the most power, responsibility and stress in the world. Personally, I'd say if there is a floor cap of 35 years of age... there should be a ceiling cap as well. Pension age, or even lower.
I believe we should judge folk based on their actions not their gaffes personally.
Under Biden the US reduced inflation faster than any other peer country, reduced student loan debt by billions, secured 1 trillion in mostly green infrastructure investment, secured 500 billion in semiconductor manufacturing, had a low 4% unemployment rate, helped with the NATO expansion, supported Ukraine, fought for consumer protections, expanded transgender rights and visibility, and so much more.
Literally the most successful president in my lifetime, and all I hear is people tell me about how he couldn't do his job.
It just, doesn't mesh with reality. What it does mesh with is the messaging that's been pounded pounded pounded through everyone's heads for the last four years though.
Of course anyone trying to refute 15 lies in 60 seconds while actually performing the duties of his job (instead of say... tweeting, golfing, and calling women derogatory names while fostering hate, and rewarding sycophants with insider trades and contracts) and then also make their own point is going to fail.
Lots more people than Biden, who're a lot more physically fit would fail at debating serial liars and thugs like Trump.
> Under Biden the US reduced inflation faster than any other peer country, reduced student loan debt by billions, secured 1 trillion in mostly green infrastructure investment, secured 500 billion in semiconductor manufacturing, had a low 4% unemployment rate, helped with the NATO expansion, supported Ukraine, fought for consumer protections, expanded transgender rights and visibility, and so much more.
Indeed! But in politics, especially in the two-party systems that are the US and the UK, it is (almost) never about actual actions, policy and even campaign promises to a degree (because no one believes them any more). Individual voters often lack knowledge, context or empathy with others to recognize when stuff happens and if it is important.
In contrast, a politician's public image aka his "story" is much much more important. Even in a country like Germany which one might think focuses more on policy. We had incumbent Chancellor Schröder neck-deep in issues in 2002, then a historic flood disaster happened - and Schröder showed up in rubber boots while his competitor Stoiber was off vacationing. In the 2021 election, Armin Laschet didn't realize Steinmeier was talking on camera, someone cracked a joke or whatnot, he laughed - and got caught by said camera [2], which damaged his campaign so hard that he lost to Scholz.
Biden's age was already under discussion in his first term, and the critics were very vocal. There would have been the chance to set up Harris in the second half of his first term as a successor, prop her up into the spotlight and promise the voters continuation, the DNC didn't do that - and lost.
> Lots more people than Biden, who're a lot more physically fit would fail at debating serial liars and thugs like Trump.
Of course, of course. But still, I wish y'all had less gerontocrats in place.
Really? Talk about denial, or abject lack of paying attention.
The idea Trump is not in cognitive decline is easily rent asunder by watching any clips of his recent speeches and comparing them to clips from 2016 and 2020.
He's falling asleep in meetings, confusing words, hearkening back to old time shit like flag burning, stumbling, can't walk in a straight line, tweeting rambling word salads filled with falsehoods all night long.
Compare how Biden was covered whenever he made a gaffe to how the current president is covered when he gaffes constantly and you'll see what I mean.
For instance, Trump has said "oranges" instead of "origins", said that Hannibal Lector was a late and great person, praised pedophiles...
And where's the wall to wall coverage of that like there was when Biden screwed up that debate? Where's the weeks on end coverage of those stumbles? How come ABC doesn't even show the public when Trump calls _their own_ reporters piggy and tells them they're incompetent?
Not detached from reality, but thanks for the lame, no effort comment.
Similarly! Where were the weeks of coverage for the IRA which expanded energy production in this country (which most of my friends don't even know what the acronym stands for)
Where was the coverage for the semiconductor act which added 500bn in semiconductor manufacturing.
Biden wanted to do a land on the moon type quest to cure cancer, how much cooler would that have been for our nation than ICE raids on farm workers.
The man was incredibly successful, and barely anyone realizes that, and that's what I'm talking about.
I guess the broader impact is cause the people on here actually do have assets and can donate, vote, call, and influence.
So if the upper middle and lower upper classes are being hollowed out...
Well... what's that leave? Just the super rich, and the rest...
And considering the way the super rich are acting, I suppose they're just fine with that. The morally bankrupt sacks of shit that most of them seem to be, or become...
I'm not sure how your math stacks out... but 2/3rds of 330 million people is not 75 million votes.
The fact is, the American electoral system is heavily stacked against the actual population due to...
- Citizens United allows individuals with sums of wealth which are nearly incomprehensible to literally drop hundreds of millions of dollars on a single election and not even have a dent in net worth
- The electoral college which may have made sense in 1796 or whenever they were deciding it means presidential elections focus on approximately 7 of our 50 states
- Many places like Puerto Rico, DC, the US Virgin Islands, and other territories just flat out don't have federal representation
- In the Senate small state citizens can sometimes wield up to 60 times as much representation as large state citizens (Hey guess which states those billionaires drop money to buy representation in... I'll give you a hint, it's not the populous ones)
- The House of Reps is capped in size which again hurts large states
It may be time to start talking about structural change here in the United States.
That being said... The United States and (most of) Europe have been allies for 8 decades, it's not like Europe hasn't had it's fair share of bullshit and far right parties.
The fact everyone in this thread is saying our relationship is done cause America's going through a rough patch is ridiculous. Especially given that a year ago our President was helping the expansion of NATO, and we're still sending arms to Ukraine (although the terms are differing), and we just took out Russian ally Maduro.
And I for one am happy that the outcome from this absolutely awful human being is increased European self reliance.
I'm hoping it shakes out that the US rebukes this awful party, and president (which many many people were duped into voting for cause most people are not paying as much attention as say... me and combine hundreds of millions from Musk, and misinformation flowing in through social media, and the stacked systems laid out above)
And when that's all said and done, and millions and millions of us are donating, and marching, and calling, and working to make that happen and there has been very real push back here, although slower than maybe some would hope
That then the US and Europe can be more equal partners than before this monster of an individual
> but 2/3rds of 330 million people is not 75 million votes
It was a remembered stat, and there were more than 75,000,000 who “either directly voted for it or sat on their elbows and let it happen”.
A quick check of official stats:
The turnout of 64.1% and 49.1%/49.3%/1.9% “of the vote” figures means:
~32% rep
~31% dem
~ 1% other
~36% did not vote
So 68% voted for it or sat on their elbows. Pretty close to my half-remembered two thirds.
> it's not like Europe hasn't had it's fair share of bullshit and far right parties.
True, and they are worryingly gaining ground in a number of places (here in the UK for one), but the whole EU (or Europe, or the EEA, depending on the exact set of countries we want to include in the pot for this discussion) has never been close to far-right in that time.
> That then the US and Europe can be more equal partners than before this monster of an individual
Eventually, hopefully. We'll see what happens in a couple of years. But the trust won't come back overnight even from where it is now, and there is plenty of time for the situation to get worse. I expect it will take a couple of terms at the very least for things to even out close to where they were before, if they ever do.
And for all the claims of “defending democracy and the free world”, the unilateral arseholery in general and active threats to other democracies (the EU overall, its individual states, and non-EU states), gives other regimes a loverly big mess to point at while asking “Do you really want democracy?”, so it might not even be possible for things to revert over that timescale because of the changes in balance elsewhere as less direct consequence.
The biggest problem here isn't the numbers, but the usual manipulative rhetoric of putting people who "voted for it" and those who "sat on their elbows" into the same bucket, to vilify them together.
I'll skip the philosophical argument for the absurdity of this view in general, because the numbers you provided speak even louder. Consider that both big parties got pretty much the same amount of votes[0] - so whether or not the 36% of population who didn't vote are seen as complicit villains, depended on how a different 0.5% of the population (or 0.15% of the voters) voted!
--
[0] - I'd argue that 0.2% difference is within margin of statistical error, but that's a whole other discussion.
> so whether or not the 36% of population who didn't vote are seen as complicit villains
Not complicit villains, it isn't as black and white as that, but those who don't engage and then complain are pretty close. After the brexit vote a number of people said things along the lines of “if I'd know it would matter, I'd have bothered”, which is something I find difficult to respond to in a polite manner.
The article claims Grok was generating nude images of Taylor Swift without being prompted and that there was no way for the user to take those images down
I don't know how common this is, or what the prompt was that inadvertently generated nudes. But it's at least an example where you might not blame the user
Yeah but “without being asked” here means the user has to confirm they are 18+, choose to enable NSFW video, select “spicy” in Grok’s video generation settings and then prompt “Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys”. The prompt seems fine but the rest of it is clearly “enable adult content generation”.
I know they said “without being prompted” here but if you click through you’ll see what the person actually selected (“spicy” is not default and is age-gated and opt-in via the nsfw wall).
Let’s not lose sight of the real issue here: Grok is a mess from top to bottom run by an unethical, fickle Musk. It is the least reliable LLM of the major players and musk’s constant fiddling with it so it doesn’t stray too far from his worldview invalidates the whole project as far as I’m concerned.
For context, my understanding is that companies have recently moved to mark their expected GPU deprecation cycles from 3 years to as high as 6 which has huge impacts on projected expenditures.
I wonder what the step was for the Blackwell platform from the previous. Is this slower which might indicate that the slower deprecation cycle is warranted, or faster?
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