What does a panda have in common with your ex-boyfriend?

I invite one over and he eats shoots and leaves.

I do find it crazy that pcgamer is reporting this, because the rest of the news media has just faceplanted on journalism. Reminds me of the Bush Admin, when Rolling Stone Magazine was one of the only reliable sources of news thanks to the extreme corruption within the major publications.

One could posit an ideal public sector development studio that takes grants from the state/federal government to produce useful Open Source software. Think public radio or public broadcasting, but for apps.

Hell, it isn’t even wild in the current moment. Modern day AWS and Azure subsidize much of its small/new user client base with the massive public sector clientele. OpenAI and DeepSeek are both the product of giant state-sponsored initiatives to develop AI that is free at point of service. Plenty of the original internet architecture was the product of public investment and grants, as was the university-centric ARPNET that would eventually be commoditizated into the commercial World Wide Web.

Look up the history of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the pioneering of Mosaic, the first widely available GUI-based web browser. It was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which licensed the original design for the tiniest fraction of what it would ultimately generate in future revenues.

Microsoft Edge

Building my entire data model around the Tienanmen Square copypasta. I can run this thing on a Raspberry Pi plugged into a particularly starchy potato and it reliably returns the only answer I’ve thought to ask it.

This is Whataboutism and you are clearly a Wumao agent sent here to destroy democracy.

Guantanamo becoming the modern American Auschwitz feels appropriate, given the US’s relationship with Cuba for the last century. I wonder if this’ll end with an immigrant roundup, or if we’re going to see Marco Rubio spur Trump to open up a full on land war and ethnic cleanse against the island.

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand.

Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.

If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit.

The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.

Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.

Doing the Arrested Development Sweat Lodge bit to a bunch of Silicon Valley dipshits will be very funny.

DEI is about finding the best candidate for the job, and paying them fair wages.

No it isn’t. Its about finding the best PR pitch for the university you’re recruiting in. Since American universities are going to shit, tech companies are moving abroad to hire cheaper (and often, frankly, better) developers overseas.

This creates a knock-on effect as well, since hiring is often part of a traditional march out to a select set of college campuses or by referral from existing employees. As Google/Meta/Amazon staff up with more and more East Indian workers, the networking effect sets in and future hiring fixates on the same places the last crop of hires came from.

The DEI line is just whitewashing for H1-B programs the tech sector already embraced. Now that its no longer in vogue, we’re “Getting rid of DEI” to keep doing the H1-B programs that tech has embraced. Its all post-hoc PR rationalization.

This is the direction Google was heading anyway. More H1-B visas. More precarious employment for developers. More downward pressure on wages. Longer hours. Shittier living conditions. Eat the Bugs. Live in the Pod. Then spend your free time telling people to Like, Subscribe, and Share your 10 Neat Tricks on how they can make it all the way to the “coding goon for a defunct software company” proletariat high water mark.

The presence or absence of DEI was always just window dressing for shit these companies wanted to do anyway. DEI never really worked save as a means of shoving off the then-current administration’s interrogation of Silicon Valley business practice. Now that the old Bidencrats are gone and the new Trumpocrats are in, its time to say “Actually all the Vivek Ramaswamy clones we’re importing are part of the MAGA vision and they always have been”.

Can we never joke about sensitive topics?

Sure. Won’t stop you from getting heckled for bad taste.

Pick Up Artistry reduced to just offering every girl you want to meet a cigarette.

Awkwardness is incredibly cheap to film and turn around into content. Less that you find it entertaining and more that you’ll fixate on it as a clip in a long line of similar looking content. HBO / Discovery Channel love this kind of low-rent reality TV, because it gets people into watching the first episode purely on shock value. Also great for getting the name recognition of the show up among the critically lucrative “I’m too mature for cartoons but not mature enough to watch normal TV” 13-21 demographic.

Literally the only thing that matters is whether your cursor hovers over it or your scroll pauses for a second as you pass over it. The Algorithm will flag this as “We have your attention” and feed you an increasing quantity of the slop until you give in or you stop using whatever media service is delivering it.

Feels like we’re edging into TLC territory. Can the contestants be very obviously disabled or made up to look particularly grotesque in any particular way? The show needs an extra “ick” factor to properly sell it.

“Trail Trash Texts” or “DMs from My <Insert Series of Synonyms to Slurs Here>”

Then it can be a hot topic of daytime news media. Maybe see if you can even get it sued or censored or find someone who was fired for watching it on the job. The show will do huge numbers.

What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of “exclusive” AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.

Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that’s divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.

And now people exchange one American Junk-spitting Spyware for a Chinese junk-spitting spyware.

LLMs aren’t spyware, they’re graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that’s good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.

Not really a question of national intentions. This is just a piece of technology open-sourced by a private tech company working overseas. If a Chinese company releases a better mousetrap, there’s no reason to evaluate it based on the politics of the host nation.

Throwing a wrench in the American proposal to build out $500B in tech centers is just collateral damage created by a bad American software schema. If the Americans had invested more time in software engineers and less in raw data-center horsepower, they might have come up with this on their own years earlier.

TSMC just finished building out a foundry in Arizona, so there’s a nativist argument that we don’t need the island’s original facilities anymore.

Democrats and Republicans have been shoveling truckload after truckload of cash into a Potemkin Village of a technology stack for the last five years. A Chinese tech company just came in with a dirt cheap open-sourced alternative and I guarantee you the American firms will pile on to crib off the work.

Far from fucking them over, China just did the Americans’ homework for them. They just did it in a way that undercuts all the “Sam Altman is the Tech Messiah! He will bring about AI God!” holy roller nonsense that was propping up a handful of mega-firm inflated stock valuations.

Small and Mid-cap tech firms will flourish with these innovations. Microsoft will have to write the last $13B it sunk into OpenAI as a lose.