It definitely feels like a jump in capability. I've found that the long term quality of the codebase doesn't take nosedive nearly as quickly as earlier agentic models. If anything it's about steady or maybe even increasing if you prompt it correctly and ask for "cleanup PRs"
The general playbook in the US seems to be "do something that's bad for society but makes money, and eventually the people in charge will get enough FOMO that it'll be officially sanctioned as long as they get a cut".
I think we're at the point where both phone and SMS are such insecure and easily spoofed channels that we should basically not be using them for anything related to business or money. Maybe even for communication, given how easily scammers can fake a loved ones voice and phone number.
The screenshots don't show spoofed SMS. Who is going to spoof a +212 or a +27 phone number when sending to the US. It's not that easy to get spoofed SMS to the US anymore. But it doesn't matter if sending from an international number works just fine. Same thing with email, but often worse ... DMARC makes it hard to spoof email, but most email clients only show sender name and not sender address, so it doesn't matter.
Phone call caller ID is getting harder to spoof, with stir/shaken, but I'm not sure that's fully rolled out either... and calls from a 'random' number still get answered, so spoofing isn't needed for normal scams.
Its been 3 years and its been the most talked about topic on HN. If you really don't know at this point, you are choosing to remain ignorant. I can't help you here.
If you genuinely are unaware of the issues, it's a very easy topic to research. Heck, just put "AI" into HN and half the articles will cover some part of the topic.
The end goal is to marry the lessons learned about HOW to learn in a virtual world with a high fidelity world model that's currently out of reach for this generation of AI. In a year or two once we have a world model that's realistic enough and fast enough, robots will be trained there and then (hopefully) generalize easily to the real world. This is groundwork trying to understand how to do that without having the models required to do it for real.
I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense.
For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.
It doesn't say if a million drones are going to be purchased from a defense contractor. Hopefully it goes to a commerical US drone company that makes drones for consumers, film, inspections, etc with an order of million military-harden drones from the Goverment. There would an expection they could tool up to many millions in a time of conflict.
Defense contractors already cover small batches of super-specialized drones.
San Fran historically saw a ton of investment from the Navy, not the Army. The article provided -- which has wayyyy to many underlined links, hideous article -- only goes back to the ~60's, but the USN and USMC were heavily involved in Cali developments long before.
The general point -- the DoD puts a lot of money into Silicon Valley research -- stands, however.
This misses a very important point, which is that civilian manufacturing can be pivoted easily to defense manufacturing during wartime. Absent civilian manufacturing, you have no choice but to invest in dedicated defense manufacturing, which is not useful in peacetime (beyond deterrence).
The deindustrialization that creates this reality has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. They benefit from it but they didn't create the context.
No matter how fast you run, you won't win a race where you're just going back and forth nonstop.
It really does feel like the US is completely hosed when it comes to energy (and thus, industrial relevance broadly). Every 4 years we make a bigger bet in the opposite direction of the last, and meanwhile the entire world moves on without us. At least now it feels like no matter what the US does we'll make progress on climate goals as a species, even if in 50 years the US is still building coal plants and criminalizing home solar.
CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh. If that ends up even partway true it'll completely change the economics of power storage.
> CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.
This got widely reported but there doesn't seem to be any source. I'll reference this video [1] to cover the claim along with a comparison to industry projections. Apologies for the video link but I don't have an article handy that addresses the topic as directly.
You're right, I can't find any primary sources for this number. Yahoo[1] reports this number and attributes it to Bloomberg NEF but I can't find an actual article from Bloomberg with this number, or any actual target number in it.
That's plain wrong, they have not announced that price target anywhere. There is speculation that it could be there target internally for the long term, but there is basically zero chance they'll start at that price and no guarantees they'll ever reach it.
You're right, I can't find any primary sources for this number. Yahoo[1] reports this number and attributes it to Bloomberg NEF but I can't find an actual article from Bloomberg with this number, or any actual target number in it.
dumping doesn't depend on profit or loss. Also the legal definition of dumping is less-than-the-"normal value." (see Article VI ANTI-DUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTIES of GATT 1994).
But then China is a non-market-economy, so none of these rules apply in a hypothetical anti-dumping case -- ie, China's local price, or "normal value" doesn't matter.
A normal value for a highly competitive commodity part like a battery is about 3% above cost. CATL charges over 20% above cost. So you might have an argument that CATL has monopoly pricing power and is gouging its customers.
IOW that they're illegally charging too much, not that they are illegally charging too little.
As explained, the price level or the cost of manufacture in China, the exporting country, is completely irrelevant as their local price/cost of manufacturer is artificially propped up by illegal state subsidies or other anti-market tactics to cripple foreign competition past 15 years. Again, China is a non-market-economy.
In those cases, trade regulators can use "undistorted" prices without gov't interference or use a market price in a similarly situated 3rd country as benchmark.
Republic of Armenia,
Republic of Azerbaijan
Republic of Belarus
Georgia
Kyrgyz Republic
Republic of Moldova
Russian Federation
Republic of Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Republic of Uzbekistan
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
The term NME is a specific legal designation for anti-dumping cases. The list isn't static -- unlike China, Vietnam has made a lot of reforms and many speculate they will be removed before 2030.
No need to pretend that Chinese EV/battery companies can compete on their own without the gov't protection or "illegal" subsidies.
> people are just stuck in the 2000s and think that China can't beat the West technologically and therefore must be cheating.
We are talking since early 2010 and on. And it's pretty much what everyone says they are: China has been breaking every trade/IP laws/agreements -- forced IP transfer/IP theft, ban foreign competition, illegal state subsidies to overcapacity, etc to get to where they are in the EV battery market.
They have decent technology (which they stole a decent chunk) and cheat at the same time.. nothing to do with the west feeling insecurity. In fact, the west could benefit from some mobilizing around insecurity
That's not even true for normal bicycles. Serious cyclists can spend massive amounts of cash on their rides.
Aside from that, if you're using this as a vehicle you want more than just the cheapest thing out there. Reliability and serviceability are important when not having the bike means you can't get to work or your kid's school.
> Reliability and serviceability are important when not having the bike means you can't get to work or your kid's school.
True, but this bike is completely non-standard so sort of blows that. There isn't even a direct connection between the pedals and the wheels. If the electrical bits stop responding you don't even have a bike, you have a really awkward velocipede. Every other e-bike that I have ridden or seen is still a bike when there is no power.
By massive amounts, of course you meant "dramatically less than any car", right?
Most serious bicyclists I know, some with wonderful bikes, still spent less on their bikes than the typical American spends getting the air conditioned seats option in their F-150.
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