They are permitted to do business there. You just have to make a bargain with the devil. 50% of your domestically incorporated branch is Chinese owned. Then you have the requisite technology and IP transfer. Most sensible companies would not accept such a bargain, but you have quite a few investors only interested in the next quarterly profit going up to the right. And they've made that bargain repeatedly.
It can host large datasets as well, yes. It is hosted by CERN, so it is not specifically IT in any way. It also allows you to restrict access to the files of your submission. It has no requirements to submit your LaTeX sources, any PDF will be fine. There are also no restrictions on who can publish. You'll get a DOI, of course.
Everything published on arXiv could also be published on Zenodo, but not the other way around.
It is just a preprint repository. It is pretty open (the stories where a preprint was rejected or delayed unreasonably are extremely rare). It offers the basic services for a math/compsci/physics themed preprint repository.
I don't see much of a monopoly, nor any "moat" apart from it being recognised. You can already post preprints on a personal website or on github, and there are "alternatives" such as researchgate that can also host preprints, or zenodo. There are also some lesser known alternatives even. I do not see anything special in hosting preprints online apart from the convenience of being able to have a centralised place to place them and search for them (which you call "monopoly"). If anything, the recognisability and centrality of arxiv helped a lot the old, darker days to establish open access to papers. There was a time when many journals would not let you publish a preprint, or have all kinds of weird rules when you can and when you can't. Probably still to some degree.
Optane was a victim of its own hype, such as “entirely new physics”, or “as fast as RAM, but persistent”. The reality felt like a failure afterwards even though it was still revolutionary, objectively speaking.
The Hobbit is today usually viewed through the lens of The Lord of the Rings, and The Lord of the Rings is viewed with the baggage of 70 years of post-Tolkien epic fantasy culture.
Being deeply embedded in that culture myself, I must admit that these illustrations don’t appeal to me at all, and don’t match my mental imagery of the story. But I can see how they might have looked like a perfect fit to someone who read The Hobbit with a fresh eye when it was still fresh. I wish I could have read it like that.
I inhaled Lord of the Rings on first reading. I lived inside it. And it had no illustrations except maps, right? But later when the movies came out they were a big disappointment for ne, they were not the world I had visited. And they were boring. Had I not read the books before, they might have been just fine.
Yeah, the (Peter Jackson) movies were basically LotR seen through the lens of decades of D&D and Warhammer Fantasy, a peculiar aesthetic which of course grew off LotR itself.
I'm guessing that Tolkien would have deeply hated it all with a burning passion.
Yeah, I guess the tens of thousands of PhDs who are working on LLMs full time are just collectively wasting their lives. Everyone except you is simply too dumb to see it.
Most privacy issues with today’s technology industry are caused by companies behaving like private service providers, when in practice they are somewhere between public utilities and government agencies in terms of their necessity and inevitability.
In many companies, you don’t need to bother applying without a LinkedIn profile. You’re not even going to be considered for a position, full stop.
You’re committing the classic fallacy of confusing mechanics with capabilities. Brains are just electrons and chemicals moving through neural circuits. You can’t infer constraints on high-level abilities from that.
This goes both ways. You can't assume capabilities based on impressions. Especially with LLMs, which are purpose built to give an impression of producing language.
Also, designers of these systems appear to agree: when it was shown that LLMs can't actually do calculations, tool calls were introduced.
It's true that they only give plausible sounding answers. But let's say we ask a simple question like "What's the sum of two and two?" The only plausible sounding answer to that will be "four." It doesn't need to have any fancy internal understanding or anything else beyond prediction to give what really is the same answer.
The same goes for a lot of bugs in code. The best prediction is often the correct answer, being the highlighting of the error. Whether it can "actually find" the bugs—whatever that means—isn't really so important as whether or not it's correct.
It becomes important the moment your particular bug is on one hand typical, but has a non-typical reason. In such cases you'll get nonsense which you need to ignore.
Again - they're very useful, as they give great answers based on someone else's knowledge and vague questions on part of the user, but one has to remain vigilant and keep in mind this is just text presented to you to look as believable as possible. There's no real promise of correctness or, more importantly, critical thinking.
And the amount of work that could be delegated, with equal or better results than those from average human workers, is far higher than currently attempted in most companies. Industries have barely started using the potential of even current-generation AI.
Agreed, and with each passing month the work that 'could' be done increases. I don't write code anymore, for example, (after 20 years of doing so) Opus does that part of the job for me now. I think we have a period where current experienced devs are still in the loop, but that will eventually go away too.
China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
> As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.
On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.
No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".
> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.
The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.
I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live.
All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
What nonsense. The "rest of the world" understands the message loud and clear: China shows up to do business. America shows up to bomb. It's a pretty reasonable choice. Anyways, people now ant a BYD, not a Chevy - because its a better car.
I can't think of any time in the last 50 years when anyone outside of the US actually wanted a Chevy, aside from a rare person who wanted a Corvette maybe.
The car that's actually been super-popular outside its own national borders for a long time now is the Toyota, not anything from the US. BYD is indeed changing this.
We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.
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