Miscellaneous News

[A potato]

Fun fact: the character that Takaichi was quoting was eventually beheaded for attempted genocide.

More like the Isayama (The Creator) ruined his character at the end. He turned him into a crybaby simp.

 

[supercat]

China's demographic crisis is greatly exaggerated. According to Glenn Luk (graph below), by the 2040s:

• Slight decrease (~10%) in total workforce, but huge increase in overall human capital, advanced skills, etc.
• Workforce with tertiary education will double over next 20y and about half of these people will have STEM or some kind of advanced manufacturing training.
• So capability to do high-value add engineering, tech, design, etc. could DOUBLE in next 20 years.
• The number of workers in PRC who have done a hard STEM degree in college or have had vocational training for adv mfg could eventually be > Rest of World combined.
• To drill down further, look at PISA scores for 15 yo kids. A much larger fraction of students in China are prepared for hard STEM, engineering, etc. than in the US or EU. We only have PISA data for certain regions of PRC, but internally researchers can compare Gaokao scores across regions to determine that the limited PISA data is reasonably representative of the whole country, esp. in the next 20 years as inland provinces become richer.
• ~200M workers in advanced factories can produce all the manufactured goods required in the entire world.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1995864829895025115

 

[Faisal Iqbal]

The China rare earths problem isn't as bad as we think. It's much worse: a look at gallium​

Here is the brilliant idea, Department of War should start buying the GaN based mobile chargers from Chyna and start licking them...

 

[Randomuser]

More like the Isayama (The Creator) ruined his character at the end. He turned him into a crybaby simp.
View attachment 165630View attachment 165631

I like how AOT kinda died after the ending and no one talks about it anymore. Same as Game of Thrones.

Even when a series ends, if its truly memorable and ends on a good note, it will still be talked about such as Naruto which ended over 10 years ago. But when you have a really bad ending, it kills off people's will to talk about it anymore.

Might be a bad sign for Japan then.

 

[FriedButter]

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IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs​

AI companies are spending billions on data centers in the race to AGI. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has some thoughts on the math behind those bets.

Data center spending is on the rise. During Meta's recent earnings call, words like "capacity" and AI "infrastructure" were frequently used. Google just announced that it wants to eventually build them in space. The question remains: will the revenue generated from data centers ever justify all the capital expenditure?

On the "Decoder" podcast, Krishna concluded that there was likely "no way" these companies would make a return on their capex spending on data centers.

Couching that his napkin math was based on today's costs, "because anything in the future is speculative," Kirshna said that it takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center.

"Okay, that's today's number. So, if you are going to commit 20 to 30 gigawatts, that's one company, that's $1.5 trillion of capex," he said.

Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said.

Investor Michael Burry has recently taken aim at Nvidia over depreciating concerns, leading to a downturn in AI stocks.

"If I look at the total commits in the world in this space, in chasing AGI, it seems to be like 100 gigawatts with these announcements," Krishna said.

At $80 billion each for 100 gigawatts, that sets Krishna's price tag for computing commitments at roughly $8 trillion.

"It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.

Reaching that number of gigawatts has required massive spending from AI companies — and pushes for outside help. In an October letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts in energy capacity every year.

"Decoder" host Nilay Patel pointed out that Altman believed OpenAI could generate a return on its capital expenditures. OpenAI has committed to spending some $1.4 trillion in a variety of deals. Here, Krishna said he diverged from Altman.

"That's a belief," Krishna said. "That's what some people like to chase. I understand that from their perspective, but that's different from agreeing with them."

Krishna clarified that he wasn't convinced that the current set of technologies would get us to AGI, a yet to be reached technological breakthrough generally agreed to be when AI is capable of completing complex tasks better than humans. He pegged the chances of achieving it without a further technological breakthrough at 0-1%.

Several other high-profile leaders have been skeptical of the acceleration to AGI. Marc Benioff said that he was "extremely suspect" of the AGI push, analogizing it to hypnosis. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said that AGI was "overhyped," and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said that AGI was a "marketing move."

Even if AGI is the goal, scaling compute may not be the enough. OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever said in November that the age of scaling was over, and that even 100x scaling of LLMs would not be completely transformative. "It's back to the age of research again, just with big computers," he said.

Krishna, who began his career at IBM in 1990 before rising to eventually be named CEO in 2020 and chairman in 2021, did praise the current set of AI tools.

"I think it's going to unlock trillions of dollars of productivity in the enterprise, just to be absolutely clear," he said.

But AGI will require "more technologies than the current LLM path," Krisha said. He proposed fusing hard knowledge with LLMs as a possible future path.

How likely is that to reach AGI? "Even then, I'm a 'maybe,'" he said.

"If I look at the total commits in the world in this space, in chasing AGI, it seems to be like 100 gigawatts with these announcements," Krishna said. At $80 billion each for 100 gigawatts, that sets Krishna's price tag for computing commitments at roughly $8 trillion.

$8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.

depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said.

 

[TK3600]

I like how AOT kinda died after the ending and no one talks about it anymore. Same as Game of Thrones.

Even when a series ends, if its truly memorable and ends on a good note, it will still be talked about such as Naruto which ended over 10 years ago. But when you have a really bad ending, it kills off people's will to talk about it anymore.

Might be a bad sign for Japan then.

AOT is basically about him getting bullied in middle school. The highschoolers are the titans next door. If the writer is American he would have been a school shooter. This is quite obvious as he made reference of the idea in several of his extra art works and side stories like "attack on high school".

Once the edgy guy became succesful and married he mellowed out. He can no longer write edgy story with inspiration so it crashed down. Bad ending for story good ending for writer. He will be a sauna owner instead.

 

[FriedButter]

Apparently, there are Chinese robots patrolling the Indian border now. Unless the object was misidentified and it isn’t a robot but some other observation tool.

There, that’s the road to look at. This thing going on. It’s looking at us. A robot. The Chinese have put up a robot here for us.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1995839269114622363

 

[AndrewJ]

Philippine Navy: Huawei has no backdoors, so we're using Huawei laptops in a drill against China.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1995643965576732964

 

[sanctionsevader]

Taiwan opposition blocks US$40 billion defence budget, prompting protests from ruling DPP​

DPP lawmakers accused the opposition of helping Beijing by blocking a major air-defence investment at a time of mounting pressure from mainland China.

They surrounded the podium and shouted: “Taiwan needs security, not another Wu Sangui!”

DPP bros accidentally letting their inner 明粉 slip out for a sec.

 

[TPenglake]

The thing is, China is not as strong as you (and unfortunately many others) presume. Let us not forget the US & its vassals are still 50% of the world’s GDP and that China’s manufacturing share is only 30% or so of the world’s total. It is not as dominant as often portrayed. Individually China maybe the strongest country, but collectively it can’t take on the entirety of the US empire.

So the reality is that China cannot just stoke the fires of conflict and give reason for the US & its vassals to unite in common purpose. Japan is actually one of the countries China was trying to go neutral on Taiwan, and under its previous prime minister there were signs that Japan might actually be receptive.

Unfortunately in came the right wing chicken hawk who exploited the party’s in fighting to assume leadership. She’s certainly torpedoed relations, but I think the Chinese leadership still assumes she’s a flash in the pan and that the next Japanese leader will be more mature & reasonable. Hence starting small with the sticks so as to not alienate every last Japanese leader and make it impossible for a dove to mend relations.

The only way to beat the US empire in the long term is divide & conquer. You don’t want them putting aside their differences and uniting against you with half the world.

China is strong but not THAT strong.

My two cents is that, there's on paper strength and how effectively one mobilizes that strength. I'm not even being sanguine here, these past few years have given us glimpses of the capacity of the US to both coordinate its allies in response to crisis and the capacity of its own allies to pick up the slack when the US is absent. I think when it comes to Europe the results are as clear as day. They lack the war production capacity and the will to unify in response to a crisis on its own friggin doorstep. The conflict is not even far off, as Russian FSB agents have been operating in Europe and drones occasionally violate the airspace of NATO nations, but Europe still can't agree on how to respond and is ever beholden to electorates who think little of the geopolitical consequences of the war and would rather focus on cost of living, housing, and migration. And that's militarily speaking, on the economic front they've essentially all but admitted defeat against China.

And going against the grain, I do believe the temperature from India has been toned down significantly. They no doubt would take advantage of the situation if they sensed China was losing, but considering that since the Bangladesh coup India does not have a single friend in its neighborhood anymore, its hands are tied.

Imo, the only US allies that it could fully count on joining in a China contingency without question are Aus, Japan, and the Philippines. Even South Korea, despite all the hoopla about netizens from both countries having beef over Hanbok and Kimchi, mostly remains neutral on China issues and has North Korea to keep their hands tied.

And then there's the US itself, where around the globe it has the bigger military than China, but around the globe being the operative words since China was always going to engage the US's pacific operations rather than its whole military, which from the looks of it can become bogged down in Latin America pretty soon.

Obviously, China won't go bum rushing into conflict. Either way you cut it wars are expensive and would throw a wrench into Chinese economic development, the government's number one priority to the Chinese nation. But if things did come to blows, I would say the playing field is a little more level than one would believe.