Hot take: if they can get it to work, good! I welcome AI users who are smarter, better informed, and have better taste than the rest of us mouth breathing meatbags.

Fair enough. I think the “Taliban are moderating” narrative was also helped by the fact that the Taliban were being compared against fricking ISIS.

Not really analogous, I think? The Taliban are and continue to be wackos, and the US-supported government in between the Taliban regimes was always obviously made up of incompetent crooks and grifters.

Fears about persistent deflation in China are relatively recent. It’s come up now because of the live question of whether the government should engage in a big fiscal stimulus (the same debate the US went through in 2009).

Weirdly enough, the Islamist formerly-labelled-as-terrorist militant leader is making quite a lot of sensible moves and well thought out public statements. Maybe it’s illogical, but I’m getting somewhat hopeful about Syria’s future.

I mean, it’s a fair question for a political leader to ask his economic advisors, no? Pretty sure Obama would have asked his advisors the same question back in 2009.

The issue, by the way, is a lot less settled than a lot of people think. Macroeconomics still seems to do a surprisingly bad job at understanding the links between inflation, interest rates, and economic activity, beyond giving some rough guidelines.

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It would be foolish of them to lie considering their model is open source and uploaded to a public repository. The hardware specs for running it are pretty steep, but third parties are already doing it.

The moat is probably mostly inertia. Microsoft or whoever will offer a code assistant that directs to OpenAI’s model, and users will just use that. Most software moats are like that, rather than being based on intrinsic technological superiority.

Kudos to Deepseek for continuing to releasing the code and model under a permissive license. Would be nicer if the weights were under an MIT license rather than a custom license, but I guess they’re afraid of liability. Strange situation we’re now in, where the future of open AI (as opposed to “open but actually closed” AI) now almost entirely depends on Chinese companies.

In practice, though, I wonder how many people would actually self host and tinker with this, since the model is way too large to run on any desktop. It would be very interesting to find downstream use-cases and modifications, which is supposed to be a strength of the open source model. Deepseek themselves don’t seem to be much concerned about applications; from my understanding, they are basically funded by a sugar daddy and are happy to just do R&D (funnily enough, that is kinda what OpenAI was originally supposed to be before they sold out to Microsoft).

Alright, since Trump is so keen on territory expansion, let’s make Western Ukraine the 51st US state. Eastern half goes to Russia. There will be plenty of living room for everyone.

Interesting how Latin American leaders are pushing back firmly against Trump’s trash talk, whereas Canada and Europe have been almost totally spineless.

Thanks. It would be really interesting to know what’s going on behind the scenes. My understanding is that once a live service game makes it to the big leagues, like D2, resources aren’t a problem if they get reinvested into development. For example, Genshin gets an annual budget of around $200m (basically one AAA a year), and pushes updates on a 6 week cycle. These big income earning projects all ought to be capable of doing crazy stuff that other studios can’t match.

What sometimes happens is that the company milks the game to fund other stuff, so not enough is reinvested (like FFXIV). But it’s so strange to see it happening to Bungie, because the whole point of the Sony acquisition was to have a healthy ongoing live service game.

Thanks. That sounds remarkably like the same slump FFXIV is currently in, actually. You’d think professional writers would be able to see this problem coming a long way away, and find a way to pivot smoothly to the next storyline. Especially with so much $$ at stake in a live service game.

Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn’t the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

Leafing through the latest issue, here’s a random article:

The Biden administration pursued a mistaken policy on LNG exports.

This is not a leader, but in the news section. In the contents:

Despite her reassuring tone, this was a sharp-elbowed effort to place an obstacle in the way of the incoming Trump administration… Mr Biden bowed to election-year pressure from the subset of environmentalists hostile to LNG… As for the claim that increasing American lng would help China, it is politically clever, playing as it does on anti-China sentiment in Washington, dc, but energetically dumb…

Look, again, I’m not castigating The Economist here. They have a particular way to present news, and their readership knows it. But they definitely do not try to be “neutral” in the way other outlets do.

The Economist mixes snarky comments and snippets of opinion into their coverage to a much greater extent than other media outlets. Their “opinion” pieces (leaders) are sometimes just a truncated version of the longer “news” article later in the issue.

Not saying it’s a bad thing; they’re pretty open about it and that’s how they’ve always been.

The Economist isn’t neutral. Quite the opposite: they pride themselves on being opinionated. They might seem neutral only because those opinions regularly cross the traditional US left/right divide (e.g., they were one of the mainstream news outlets talking about Biden’s diminishing faculties long before his meltdown).

The original quote is: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” – Henry Kissinger

Not much analysis in this poll, but I would not be surprised if the US support for recent Israel actions is a huge part of the story. Not only does it directly sow animosity to the US among the Malay Muslim population, but it also raises doubts about the US-led narrative on Muslim Uighurs in China. Kind of hard to sustain the “China is doing genocide in Xinjiang” narrative when you’re doing everything you can to deny genocide in Gaza.