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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The “cheap Chinese labor and lax laws” thing is not exactly the issue, at least not these days. The thing is that Chinese industry has spent decades working out how to refine these minerals, and they’re the only ones who are now able to do it at scale. So other countries that extract and process rare earths (which as noted aren’t actually that rare) often ship semi-processed ore to China for final processing.

    Sure, other countries can replicate these capabilities if they’re willing to put in the effort. It’s like China’s challenge with EUV lithography, but in reverse. It will take significant time. Also, building up a rare earths processing industry probably involves not just spending capital, but also major environmental risks while you’re doing your trials.










  • I honestly don’t know how to read the situation. Ukraine’s fought terrifically, but their status seems far less sustainable even if you discount the Trump stuff. I don’t put a lot of stock in these claims that Russia is on the verge of imploding due to the stress of the war, any day now. It is possible, but mostly seems like wishful thinking.

    External aid changes the situation a bit, but not ultimately that much because no Western power seems willing to directly intervene with troops. Barring that, the overall situation between the two countries feels a bit like what Shelby Foote said about the US Civil War: “the North fought that war with one hand behind its back… If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back.”



  • “European leaders” operate under a permanent disadvantage because they have to agree among themselves to do anything. This leaves them unable to take the initiative geopolitically, and prone to taking whatever’s the path of least resistance lying before them. The US and Russia have concluded that Europe will roll over and accept whatever they are presented with, after some angsty wailing, and unfortunately they are probably right. Not inviting Europe to talks is just a dominance move showing that they know the Europeans can’t do anything about it.

    Unfortunately for Europe, this is just the logical end point of their institutional arrangements. In a domain like geopolitics, where there are intelligent players looking for advantage, it is suicidal to turn off your ability to make decisions.


  • Dylan’s just being deliberately obtuse. Deepseek developed a way to increase training efficiency and backed it up by quoting the training cost in terms of the market price of the GPU time. They didn’t include the cost of the rest of their datacenter, researcher salaries, etc., because why would you include those numbers when evaluating model training efficiency???

    The training efficiency improvement passes the sniff test based on the theory in their paper, and people have done back of the envelope calculations that also agree with the outcome. There’s little reason to doubt it. In fact people have made the opposite criticism, that none of Deepseek’s optimizations are individually groundbreaking and all they did is “merely engineering” in terms of putting a dozen or so known optimization ideas together.