With telsa it was robotaxis, and when that failed to materialize, humanoid robots (fucking LOL).

SpaceX is an even more insane example. They are eyeing an IPO at a 1.5 trillion valuation. And yet the market for satellite launches is simply not that big. (What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?). Estimates have SpaceX doing about $3B in annual earnings, which would give them a 500x earnings multiple at a 1.5T valuation (Apple: 35).

And so SpaceX/Elon had to invent the absolutely idiotic idea of "data centers in space" to sell some future vision of tens of thousands of launches per year.

He keeps upping the ante (and the ridiculousness of the vision), and so far investors keep funding it.

Me? I've realized that this madness is entirely "opt-in" and I choose to simply...not opt-in.

Let's forget orbital mechanics for a while to make this answer more fun. It would follow me around and provide a dedicated, private lifeline of communication anywhere I go, real-time aerial surveillance of my surroundings, and eventually lasers to zap anyone who pisses me off.

Ummm that information seems terribly out of date or is just uninformed- Starlink alone is estimated around $8 billion for 2024 and projected around $12 billion for 2025, with continued growth.

- How votes are cast

- How votes are counted

- How votes are custodied

In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable.

Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque.

Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them:

1. Everyone votes, on paper, in their local polling station. The polling station is manned by volunteers from the neighborhood, and all political parties have an observer at the station.

2. Once the polling station closes, votes are counted in the station, by the neighborhood volunteers, and the counts are observed by the political party observers.

3. Vote counts are then sent electronically to a central system. They are also written on paper and the paper is displayed outside the poll both for a week.

The central system does the total count, but the results from each poll station are downloadable (to verify that the net count matches), and every poll station's results are queryable (so any voter can compare the vote counts displayed on paper outside the station to the online results).

Because the counting is distributed, results are available night-of in most cases.

Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.

**

Edit: Some people are confused about what I mean by "coerced." Coerced in this case means "forced to vote in some way."

The typical way this is done is as follows:

- The "coercer" obtains a blank ballot (for example, by entering the ballot box and hiding the ballot away).

- The blank ballot is then filled out in some way outside the poll station.

- A person is given the pre-filled ballot and threatened to cast it, which they will prove by returning a blank ballot.

- Rinse and repeat.

This mode of cheating is called the "revolving door" for obvious reasons.

This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man.

The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail-in voting, for example, has been shown to increase voter turnout by making voting more convenient, but you have the question of what to do with ballots that are received late. There are pretty good arguments for counting all mail-in ballots that are postmarked before the election, and I don't think "xenophobia" is among them.

In America specifically, all decisions relating to access to voting are considered against a backdrop of our widespread and systematic attempt to restrict voting. A modern example of this is related to wide disparity in the number of polling places, and therefore the amount of time required to vote, in "urban" regions of some southern states as compared to rural regions.

I have never heard of a racism-based opposition to paper ballots. I think you just made that up.

Make voting mandatory and on public holiday. Problem solved.

Many of those tactics existed on a large scale in the South before the Voting Rights Act, and when the Supreme Court recently invalidated the Act, many have returned. For example, reducing voting locations in minority areas so people have to travel far and wait longer. Texas and possibly other states have criminalized errors in voter registration (iirc), making it dangerous to register voters. Georgia, and others, conducted a large-scale purge of voting rolls, requiring people to re-register. Requiring government-issued ID prevents many people from voting, often poor people and immigrants who lack what wealthier people are accustomed to. Florida's voters passed a ballot measure enabling ex-felons to vote; the Republicans added a law requiring full restitution to be paid (iirc) before they could vote, effectively canceling the ballot measure vote. And these days almost any Democratic victory is called fraud; remember the 2000 election, the lawsuits, riots, threats against ordinary citizens working on local election boards and on elections, etc.

Directly addressing the parent's claims: I've never heard of paper votes being called racism - could you share something with us? Calls to limit counting are often accompanied by calls to limit the voting period, invalidate votes received later (e.g., due to US mail delays), and calls to greatly restrict mail-in voting - all things that make it more difficult for people working two-three jobs.

The Democrats have their flaws; I've never seen them try to limit voting. That should be something everyone in the US - and in the world - agrees on: Do all we can to enable everyone to vote.

There are historical factors that contribute to those things you brought up. American minorities are disproportionately affected by things like limited hours, for example. You'd know that if you were an American POC.

I don't mean this as an ad hominem, but was this comment generated with AI or something?

(At the time of writing this comment there's a sibling claiming that the comment cannot possibly understand this POV because they are not "an American POC.")

Really, where? In the sibling comments (including mine) people are pointing out that those claims are specious.

Sure there is. ID checks make it impossible for people who don't have government-issued ID to vote, which is a lot of people; and furthermore ID checks don't actually improve election security. Same-day counting is impossible if you are going to count all mail-in votes that were sent before the deadline.

To be clear, I'm not saying that politicians aren't agitating for conditions that benefit them. That's there job. But I also believe in supporting access to voting and fair elections, and at least some of the politicians' arguments help achieve those ends.

It's usually very simple, too. For voting ID: ID isn't evenly distributed, and that's not an opinion, that's a fact.

So if you require ID, then obviously you will suppress some demographics more than others. That creates a bias. Again, not opinion.

This can be solved. You will notice none of the people championing voter ID make even a thinly-veiled attempt to solve it. Instead they say stupid things like "oh wow so black people can't get ID now? Uh, buddy, I think YOU'RE the racist one!"

Why would you want that?

Surely what you want is to enable everyone to vote, and then to count all the votes?

In the UK where I have most experience of this stuff, there are many, many small polling stations, and usually you just walk right in and vote without queueing. The longest I ever had to wait to vote was about 30 minutes. Votes are counted locally and results usually declared within a handful of hours. Some take longer due to recounts etc if the tally is very close in a certain area, but the whole thing is pretty uncontroversial and pretty low-effort.

Here in Australia, voting is compulsory, it's always on a Saturday, and there's usually a charity sausage-sizzle at the polling place, it's sorta fun. And again, AFAICT (I'm not a citizen yet) the infrastructure is over-provisioned so people aren't waiting around forever.

From what I hear about the US, in some places voting can take hours, it seems like the number of polling places is deliberately limited to make it hard for people to vote, and you have those weird/horrible rules cropping up like it being illegal to hand out water to people in line, which seems purely designed to discourage electoral participation. And then you have all these calls to stop the count after a certain time etc.

It's deeply weird from an outside perspective. If counts are taking too long, if people are having trouble voting, provision more... but of course it seems clear that there are motives for underprovisioning, because one or other group thinks it will benefit them.

Why do either of these matter? If you assume paper voting in-person is secure, then there is zero reason to also limit the time spent counting or the time window for counting. Anything past that point is clearly trying to fill some sort of agenda for the sake of disenfranchising people who cannot adhere to the times you're trying to set.

1. Everyone votes on paper.

2. An electronic tallying machine tallies the vote.

3. Vote counts are sent to a central system, IDK if it's electronic or not.

4. Candidates can challenge and start a hand recount at anytime.

I think this combo is pretty close to the ideal. The actual ballots are easy to audit. Discrepancies can be challenged. And the machine doing the tallying isn't connected to the internet, it's just a counting tool that gets the job done fast.

For people with disabilities, poll workers can come in and help with the vote.

We're not willing to do that. No modern democracy has public ballots. The reason is simple: secret ballots make it effectively impossible to buy votes, as there's no way to prove how any person actually voted.

You’re making a choice between making it impossible to buy votes and impossible to verify votes. Both come with tradeoffs that can be mitigated, whether that be investigating and prosecuting attempts at bribery in one case or maintaining a strict chain of custody in the other. The decision ultimately comes down to a judgement call on regarding your priorities. I don’t think eliminating the secret ballot should be dismissed out of hand, given most voting was conducted without it prior to the late 19th century.

Good point. Let's just get rid of voting and go back to "divine right of kings", at least until they develop a cure for human gullibility.

This may be a bit tinfoil hatty of me, but I think the whole anti-woke thing is a ploy to interfere with that kind of education.

That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.

Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:

> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.

> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.

Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-0121-5

And without adaptation you get mass extinction. And the human system may be pretty fragile against the disappearance or deep change of key components of the global system.

That 40% has a very long shelf life.

Unfortunately, the energy component is almost entirely fossil fuels, so the global warming impact is pretty significant.

At this point, geoengineering is the only thing that can earn us a bit of time to figure...idk, something out, and we can only hope the oceans don't acidify too much in the meantime.

-

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Almost every component in a datacenter is upgradeable—in fact, the compute itself only has a lifespan of ~5 years—but the power requirements are basically locked-in. A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.

The fact that we use this unit really nails the fact that AI is basically refining energy.

  A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.

N2 is shaping up to be TSMC's most important node since N7.

Is it?

N2, from an energy & perf improvement seems on par with any generation node update.

          N2:N3   N3:N5  N5:N7
  Power   ~30%    ~30%    ~30%
  Perf    ~15%    ~15%    ~15%

Both AMD and NVIDIA are using N4.

Raw AC comes in, then gets stepped down, filtered, converted into DC rails, gated, timed, and pulsed. That’s already an industrial refinement process. The "crude" incoming power is shaped into the precise, stable forms that CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, and networking can actually use.

Then those stable voltages get flipped billions of times per second into ordered states, which become instructions, models, inferences, and other high-value "product."

It sure seems like series of processes for refining something.

Refining is taking a lower quality energy source and turning it into a higher quality one.

What you could argue is that it adds value to bits. But the bits themselves, their state is what matters, not the energy that transports them.

A power plant "mines" electron, which the data center then refines into words. or whatever. The point is that energy is the raw material that flows into data centers.

-- Michael Russel

A local to me ~40W datacenter used to be in really high demand, and despite having excess rack space, had no excess power. It was crazy.

But it very quickly became the best place in town for carrier interconnection. So every carrier wanted in.

Even when bigger local DC's went in, a lot of what they were doing was just landing virtual cross connects to the tiny one, because thats where everyone was.

I still have an Edison bulb that consumes more power.

Why is that? To do with the incoming power feed or something else?

- We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes)

- We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")

The general notion of passage of time (i.e. time arrow) is the only thing that appears to be intrinsic, but it is also intrinsic for LLMs in a sense that there are "earlier" and "later" tokens in its input.

Until we see an LLM that is capable of this, then they aren't capable of it, period

That's the difference. AI cannot be held responsible for hallucinations that cause harm, therefore it cannot be incentivized to avoid that behavior, therefore it cannot be trusted

Simple as that

First of all, if you want to use tariffs to boost domestic manufacturing, you must also tax the steel/al content of finished (or intermediate) goods. Otherwise, you put your local producers at a disadvantage, making the tariffs worse.

If you only tariff raw materials, then an american manufacturer has to pay either US steel prices or imported steel + tariff to manufacture, but a company overseas can use the cheaper foreign steel.

So if you want to tax raw materials, then you also want to tax those goods where raw materials are an important part of the cost.

The US has a catalog called the "Harmonized Tariff Schedule" (HTS) which is a catalog of basically everything under the sun [0]. When the steel & AL tariffs were announced, they also published a list of all the HTS codes where the steel/al content would also be taxed.

Last week the US published a revised list of HTS codes to which these tariffs apply, and they added about 400 items to them. For example, the aluminum content of cans is now taxed when it wasn't before.

Flexport has a very cool (and useful!) tariff simulator where you can look up any item and it will tell you if the steel/al content will be subject to these tariffs: https://tariffs.flexport.com

[0]: https://hts.usitc.gov/

Disadvantaging local producers is how tariffs work! Local producers would then turn to local suppliers who don't have any additional taxes applied. Tariffs are a very blunt instrument, and clumsily attempting to assuage 2nd order pain points will only give rise to 3rd (and higher) order effects.

The lesson here is: don't fuck around with multivariate dynamic systems that have achieved stability: there won't be any one knob you can twist to get a result you want on a single parameter. It'll be worse if you pick one knob and turn it all the way to 11.

It's a known flawless way to evolve code... Never revise, never delete, add enough so the tests pass.

But I don't think your lesson is reasonable. Fucking with multivariate dynamic systems is what governments do. And it's well settled that in the absence of the government doing that, everything goes to hell quite quickly.

I'm with you in expecting government to tweak, adjust and modify policy, but it's usually the experts advising and implementing, but we're in the "My ignorance is as valid as your experience era", and we will witness where that will take us.

But wow, are tariffs (and other micro taxes) disruptive on getting things done efficiently.

Domestic manufacturers are still disadvantaged by having to pay tariffs for materials used for the product, but not present in the final product. And foreign manufacturers still don't. If used in machines (and used up), used in mining (and used up), used in transport, used in energy production, ...

These costs are very large, especially because specific materials are often not available worldwide, or have large differences in quality due to availability of tiny amounts of additives for alloys or compounds. These things do lead to very large differences in quality, and thus in value. You can't model that as a government, it's just not going to happen.

There's no way to fully analyze an entire economic chain (especially when almost everyone involved has a financial incentive to sabotage you doing that correctly, and that includes foreign governments). You'd think this wouldn't have to be explained to either Americans or especially a supposed "defender of capitalism", but here we are.

Because they didn't use the right specificity in the announcement (used an 8 digit HTS vs 10 digit), there was some confusion for a few weeks if Beer in glass bottles was subject to it as well.

There is now an FAQ on CBP's website clarifying it is not [^2]. And they've updated to the right specificity in the new lists.

> Is HTS 2203.00.0030, Beer made from malt, In containers each holding not over 4 liters, In glass containers; subject to Section 232 duties? > No.

But yes, effective 18 August, they broadened the list a whole lot more and added things from condensed milk to deodorant to both steel and aluminum lists. An absolute nightmare for FMCG supply chain to have to figure this out.

You can agree or disagree with the current administration's trade policy but hopefully, even the staunchest proponents will admit that the execution has been sub-par. With u-turns (sometimes leaving partner countries fuming because the final published tariffs were not what were negotiated[^3]), lack of clarity and changes that land on Friday night after work hours and go into effect on Monday midnight.

[^1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-05884.pdf

[^2]: https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

[^3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/japan-tariffs-us...

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

https://www.dominioncustomsconsultants.com/cbp-updated-guida...

Don't some tariffs motivate people to do processing offshore?

If I import 1kg of copper and machine/etch/whatever it down into products, with some wastage, maybe I should just do everything offshore and only import the final articles with 500g of copper in it.

At some point, higher tariffs on input materials will overtake the higher value of finished goods and you might as well just manufacture the whole thing offshore anyway.

The capricious implementation of the tariffs is another issue. Biden raised tariffs but the implementation involved a months long comment period, then a notice months in advance, and finally implementation. It wasn't ideal in my mind (the specific tariffs) but there was a way to work through the consequences and plan accordingly. This administration does not believe in that. Maybe congress would if they took back responsibility for tariff policy but I don't see that happening right now.

In fact this should be a sales tactic for fedex or whomever "we bullshit the numbers for ya!"