South Korea’s conservative ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP), is pushing for legislation that would give the semiconductor industry subsidies and an exemption from a national cap on working hours.

Yes, that’s what South Korea needs… longer working hours…

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don’t think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it’s not just a matter of Google being assholes, what’s the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

Just Google for Mihoyo and Energy Singularity. They invested $65M back in 2022.

This is the one that’s partly funded by Mihoyo, using the absurd amounts of money they made with Genshin Impact.

The power of the anime waifu, in the palm of your hand…

It’s nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don’t care THAT much about pedos. It’s not a cause that’s motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

Did the car get successfully recharged though?

Loyalty pledges are kabuki theatre. There’s no point talking about them, since the state has plenty of degrees of freedom to force citizens to do what they want, with or without them. And not just the Chinese state; the US just outright decided one day that no US citizen will be allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as though citizens are property of the government – they didn’t need no signed loyalty pledges to enforce that.

Yes, you caught me out as a pro-CCP shill. All hail Xi Jinping, thought leader of the world (please ignore my previous comments calling him a dumbass).

Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn’t have targeted it. You don’t have to be educated at IC to figure that out.

Chinese orgs love signing MOUs. Looking at the underlying story, this looks like bog standard research into computer vision and related topics. If it were the Chinese government wanting to steal stuff, they’d be going after companies. There won’t be anything in Imperial College that they won’t find already in top Chinese universities, let alone their tech giants.

Huh? China has much better domestic sources of AI tech than anything out of Imperial College.

The British always like to think they’re on par with the US in all things, so I guess now they’re imagining they’re the world leaders in AI and the Chinese want to steal their tech…?

It’s pretty sad to see Vox’s decline into gutter clickbait media. I guess it was inevitable once Klein and Yglesias left, and their mediocre minions took over.

Reads like NIMBY propaganda. “Oh no muh construction dust.” Bitch you live in a desert…

The US can make them, they’ll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.

Years later, after untold exaflops of computing, the AI’s answer appears on the screen: “Dunno”.

Thanks for the information! It’s pretty distressing that the EU, in its zeal to do the right thing, seems to be protecting the big AI companies from FOSS competition.

Any word on the final legislation’s treatment of free and open source models? At the drafting stage, there were warnings that the requirements would basically shut out FOSS projects, thereby entrenching proprietary models from tech giants. Later on, there was talk about possibly adding carve-outs to protect FOSS, but I couldn’t find the details.

“Businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.” – Milton Friedman

My phone is better at navigation etc anyways.

You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that’s not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like… being good at navigation.

This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the “car” aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.

“The wealthy and corporations” have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they’ll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain’t nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.