It is a case of economic security. US National Security Advisor Daleep Singh spoke about this on the Odd Lots podcast a month ago. The goal is an integrated supply chain across all three countries, and an end result of marketing the ice breaker capacity to other allies.
Yes, he says 'What do they get. Well, in exchange, we agree to integrate our ice breaking supply chains so that they are interoperable at every stage of production', but that doesn't actually benefit Finland
Furthermore, suppose that it actually was something substantial, some kind of deal that NATO icebreakers are to be made by the US, Canada or Finland, then you screw the Aker group in Norway, who also make icebreakers.
The way I see it they expect that since the Canadians have been able to nab the shipyard after the disorder caused by the sanctions they can transfer all the knowledge from the Finns and make the icebreakers themselves, seizing appealing high-tech shipbuilding niche from the Finns, and they offer nothing in return but bullshit.
An integrated supply chain, sure, maybe that can save money, but once you've transferred your knowledge you no longer have your niche.
I think this is very obvious in the talk because of the vagueness in what is offered to the Finns; and my interpretation is that nothing meaningful is offered to the Finns and the the US is just expecting to seize this niche.
I don't think the 'there'll be enough for all of us' talk is plausible either. Surely, there might be an expansion demand, but there's really only the Baltic and the polar area that matters, and maybe US and Canada together do need 40 or so icebreakers to keep the North-West Passage safe and open in case it is to become a major trade route, but they'll last basically for ever, and my understanding is that the US is talking about only nine or so.
"US: cost $800-$900 million per ship ($1.1-$1.3 billion in 2024 dollars)
FIN: Finnish shipyard can build a heavy icebreaker for just a few hundred million dollars"
Bill North Americans for $500-600 million per ship? Can give some discount if significant amount of these projections indeed gets built
ODD LOTS: "And our best estimate is that the global total global demand for ice breakers over the next decade from allies and partners is between seventy and ninety vessels."
Its like showing someone a color and asking how many letters it has. 4... 3?
blau, blue, azul, blu
The color holds the meaning and the words all map back.
In the model the individual letters hold little meaning. Words are composed of letters but simply because we need some sort of organized structure for communication that helps represents meaning and intent. Just like our color blue/blau/azul/blu.
Not faulting them for asking the question but I agree that the results do not undermine the capability of the technology. In fact it just helps highlight the constraints and need for education.
I agree and do not think any company would make that investment directly. Nvidia selling to Microsoft renting to OpenAI, I'm sure you could make that add up to $100B on paper. In the long run the economics are likely much more complicated and consist of "agreements worth $x".
Your point is interesting because I see this across the home hardware industry. Cheap electronics were subsidized by data collection and I suppose that market was lucrative until it wasn't. It happened behind the scenes, we knew it was going on, but it was abstracted away enough that we did not think about it. Now what is happening is that the hardware providers are getting into the marketing game directly. Personally in the past year I've given up on two pieces of hardware Alexa and Roku because they have morphed into ad machines. The market is open for privacy, convenience, and quality. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be the only major player in that space right now and we are paying their premium.
Apple is already one of the largest ad companies in the world and they are clearly working very hard to get bigger($10.34 billion ad revenue in 2023).
Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them. Also fan boys, I'd be willing to bet if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise instead of being appalled.
> Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them.
Apple's $10B of ad revenue primarily comes from promoting apps within its App Store, similar to how grocery stores charge for premium shelf space or end-of-aisle displays. This is an in-store, first-party system where data collected is used exclusively within Apple's ecosystem to personalize the user experience. These ads aim to increase app visibility within the App Store, maintaining a controlled and private "first party" environment.
In contrast, Google’s $300B advertising ecosystem extends far beyond its own platforms, surveilling and tracking user behavior across millions of websites and even physical locations. Google integrates with 85% of credit card transactions in the U.S., creating extensive user profiles that feed into a global ad tech and data brokering network with thousands of data brokers. This system supports highly targeted ads that follow users across the internet and beyond, typically sending users to third-party sites and services.
The difference lies in the scope and method of data collection and usage: Apple’s approach is about, and data remains within, its ecosystem, while Google’s extends to pervasive cross-platform tracking and profiling.
> if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise
This is indeed likely, since as an example, Apple spends extra time and energy to prevent even themselves from getting data, such as how they break up your Apple Maps trips directions requests into anonymized segments, to avoid letting themselves capture users' full trips. Apple deliberately makes their own data use more difficult, and in some cases makes certain uses impossible for themselves, to serve users' privacy. When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.
TL;DR:
For both ad platforms and privacy engineering, as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".
> When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.
That's exactly what Apple did with their supposed "opt out" work a couple of years back - they take a lot more data than apps on their platform are allowed to.
Kinda crazy then, that advertising is a mandatory feature of the iPhone whereas it's something that Google lets you disable on the AOSP. You'd think that a company like Google is a pretty low bar, but even they get some stuff down better than Apple does on iOS. I'd never switch back to iPhone having seen what a clusterfuck cloud storage is on iOS...
> as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".
Don't people mostly use this meme ironically to derisively compare two things that aren't distinguished by much of anything?
The realized value of LLMs is going to be output from a data to AI pipeline. From raw data to actions or insights. This is Microsoft's play to control the entire process. They are attempting to abstract away all the "tooling" needed to manage and process data.
It falls down because there is no discretion left to the consumer. Objectively, the computer is already processing all the data you are interacting with. Subjectively it is assumed its ephemeral. Computer forensics proves this wrong.
So I think to refine my opening statement, the realized value of LLMs is going to be the output from a "curated" data to AI pipeline. Which Microsoft is not providing with this solution.
Another interesting takeaway is that because you are taking a single line capture the pixel distance equates to time not to distance like a normal image.
What that means is that if you pick two points on the car, you can measure that distance in pixels and multiply by the frequency to get change in time.
Divide the actual physical distance of those two points by that result and you know how fast the car was traveling.
I can say that Acquired at least has done some of the most interesting storytelling on the founding of companies. It's like taking 5 different books on the same topic and abridging the best parts together with some commentary sprinkled in.
If it is simply a platform for them, I'm okay with it because of the quality of content.
I like how Acquired ventures beyond recent tech startups and discusses older and non-tech companies like Walmart [1] or Hermès [2]. Their interview with Charlie Munger [3] was a particular treat and ended up being one of his last interviews.
Wonder if there was consideration given to mechanically moving mirrors to facilitate the light positioning rather than moving the light source itself. It may lend to modularity as well if you need to switch out light sources (LED to Laser) and could allow for more complex configurations like notch filtering to remove unwanted reflective wavelengths. My first guess is it may have been cost as mirrors and filters are expensive.
You guessed right -- mirrors are expensive, and also heavy; plus it's yet another piece to align (in infrared, so you can't use unaided vision to align the optics; yes, you can use a coaxial visible beam to help with this but that's also expensive and hard for various reasons). If you're using an incoherent light source there's also the problem of collecting all that light and focusing it onto the sample, and each optical element incurs some loss of light.
In the end, the actual LEDs themselves are tiny; a PCB containing the LEDs + driver ICs is smaller, lighter, and brighter than any mirror/lens assembly I could easily source with the requisite coatings to operate efficiently in this frequency band.
For a laser source, a fiber optic source can make a lot of sense, but fiber optics optimized for this frequency of light turn out to be pretty expensive, and the termination of the fiber optic still needs a collimator lens. At the end of the day, the net weight and cost budget still works out in favor of mounting a laser diode directly on the microscope head, so long as the power requirement is under a watt. Beyond that, the weight of the heat sink starts to be a factor, and an off-board laser starts to make more sense.
There is a delicate balance though. The draw of the RPG is that you play a character who usually has an outsized impact on the world in comparison to most everyone else. If we expect the NPCs to operate as independent entities, how do we manage their ambition so that they don't individually, or in aggregate, impact the world more than you? Without that, your character becomes another cog in the machine; it's their world and you are simply living in it... Which I could see having a certain appeal and may be just another genre.
Some of the most hilarious and enjoyable parts of gaming is manipulating the environment in ways developers didn't anticipate. With more intelligent NPCs there will be opportunities to give them instructions, and let them go to get it done.
Crafting instructions that lead to NPC's working to achieve a goal that wasn't anticipated, and provides you with a resource that couldn't otherwise be had in the game, will be a whole new aspect to gaming, and inspire a desire to experiment and explore.
That sounds really cool, as a genre, actually. You would have to figure out what given NPCs actually want, and how you may be able to use that, to make them do what you want. And not based on some lame script, but complex world and character models. I'm sold!
closest thing ive gotten to that is eu4. How good the diplomacy model feels ebbs and flows, but I really do love the feeling of sitting there analysing alliance structures, friendships, rivalries, desires for specific bits of land etc until I finally figure out how to break up that bloc/pry out that country from their alliance group/get that large power to have reason to ally with me, a tiny dutchy
What makes cyberpunk 2077 such a great game is that the world doesn't revolve around you, it exists despite you, and you see this in all of the side-quest events that are happening in the background. The world being alive despite you, and not for you adds a whole new dimension to the universe.
Sandbox games are pretty big. Not my thing at all, but I’m sure there’d be a big market for believable open-world RPGs for example. They’d probably be more simulators than narrative-driven games.
ollama run hf.co/{username}/{repository}
Example: ollama run hf.co/peakji/steiner-32b-preview-gguf:Q4_K_M
Source: https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/ollama