This is a podcast I've been watching, it's a branch of Scott Galloway's podcast
https://youtu.be/K8b1An5Rpcs?si=z7cix2YBS4UDHNSf
China's lowcost open-source AI is suddenly everywhere in Silicon Valley. While the US is spending billions of dollars building ever bigger models and data centers and inflating what some analysts say looks like an AI bubble, China is doing the exact opposite, it seems. cutting prices, opting for open sourcing weights, and shipping models that are cheaper, lighter, and surprisingly competitive, and American companies are flocking to them. Airbnb CEO says his team ditched Chat GPT for Alibaba's Quen model because it's quote unquote fast and cheap. Venture firms are switching to Moonshot's Kimmy LLM, and developer data show nearly half of the most used models in the US last week were Chinese. Alibaba just slashed prices on its flagship model again as part of a full-blown AI price war and a sign that involution has come to Chinese AI.
What kills me is that this is basically capitalism 101 and the Chinese are proving to be a whole lot better at it that the US.
During a recent interview with podcaster and OpenAI investor Brad Gerstner, Altman lost his cool when he was asked outright how it all adds up.
“How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?” Gerstner asked him. “You’ve heard the criticism, Sam.”
“If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” a taken-aback Altman replied curtly. “Enough.”
Surprised by the confrontation, Gerstner let out a laugh in response.
“I think there’s a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares,” Altman said, digging in his heels. “We could sell your shares or anybody else’s to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly.”
The problem is that there needs to be a starting event to pop, and that might happen tomorrow, next month, next year or in 2 or 3 years. So until then, we just watch and wait.
The Axios piece is a bit strange, it suggests that Klein was a driver in having the Democrats not vote for the budget, but fails to mention that it looks like he was left high and dry when the 8 senators did the deal.
Klein is certainly stretching for the middle of the road credibility, he had on Ben Shapiro immediately after the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is a bit like interviewing a stagehand who built the sets about how a play went down.
He also had Amit Segal on about the I/P conflict and prefaced the interview with basically a trigger warning about the views, saying that Segal is 'far to the right' of Klein.
You could ask me what do I expect Klein to do, well, that's his choice, but if it were me, I wouldn't want to cosplay Gen Z David Broder.
i thought we were trying to get new blood into leadership?
Ossoff is 38 followed by Lujan and Schatz (both 53) After that, it is Warnock and Booker (56) and Duckworth (57). It's not like there is a lot of choice.
nous, is it out of the realm of possibility to imagine Elizabeth Warren? I was looking at seniority and Patty Murray is actually the most senior, I'd like to think that a woman would send a message, though youth is also good. In the imaginary reality that plays in my head, In my dreams, I imagine Bernie changing to Dem and getting put as minority leader, which is why I don't like waking up in the morning now...
I'm not trying to bust anyone's chops here, but it is interesting to start at the beginning of the comments, and search for instances of 'Manchin' and see how the discussion takes on a life (or perhaps multiple lives) of its own.
I’m not entirely clear why this would be a damning criticism.
I think it is damning because if a bunch of other senators in vulnerable seats are going to these 8, they are admitting that public opinion wants them to fight and they can't acknowledge it.
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyrapyXZfsA
Shane Goldmacher..there's one no vote that I found especially interesting.
Michael Babaro.: Who?
Goldmacher: John Ossoff. He is the most vulnerable senator up for election next year. So, he will face the voters and he's running in Georgia and really focused on his general election, right? No one's running against him in the primary right now. And what the no vote here says is that he doesn't want to risk backlash from inside his own party in this campaign. Whether that's from a potential primary challenger who could get recruited from one of these angry groups or whether it's the small donors who are fueling his campaign deciding, you know what, maybe we're not so into John Ossoff. He doesn't want to risk backlash.
Babaro; That's fascinating because as you're suggesting, John Ossoff could reasonably be most focused on a Republican opponent in a general election saying you should have voted to reopen the government. That's what matters in this race. And instead, what you're saying is he's more worried about upsetting Democrats in a potential primary. And that's what animated his vote on the shutdown. And in the end, he votes to keep the government shut down because he wants to look like he's on the side of the Democratic base. That's what we think happened here.
Goldmacher:Yeah. And I have not talked to Senator Ossoff here, but what you can see is that there are two choices. Choice one is vote to reopen the government and say, "I'm going to buck my party and I'm going to reopen the government even if people in my left attack me for it." Right? That's a selling point in a lot of places, right? And so here's a Democrat saying, you know, that's not the right calculus here to the extent he's making a politically motivated choice. The right calculus is to make sure that your own party likes you and supports you and sees you as a fighter because you want that energy behind you in a coming midterm election.
If they were voting to give their colleagues cover, it means that their colleagues don't see what is happening as a 4 alarm fire.
I haven't read a lot about this, the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. I did read something along the lines that nous laid out, that maybe the 8 senators, all of whom were not running again, were providing cover for other senators. This to me is an even more damning criticism of the move.
The only silver lining I can see is that Trump will feel emboldened by this and the whole shit show could really explode in their faces. I suppose that the second is that Schumer might get voted out and they get someone who has a spine.
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
In his book, Yasuda portrays Zaitokukai [an ultra-nationalist and far-right extremist political organization] as a product of feelings of economic uncertainty among the working classes of Japanese society. In other words, they feel socially and economically isolated, and can experience positive emotions by channeling their ill feelings into hatred of Koreans.
Sociologist Higuchi Naoto conducted interviews with Zaitokukai participants and came to very different conclusions. Instead of finding social or economic anxiety as infuences on joining the movement, Higuchi found that many of his interviewees had been raised in politically conservative households or had been involved in conservative political activities for the year.90 The idea that they are just “ordinary” people who, due to anxiety, join nativist groups was misleading. Most of Higuchi’s interviewees were already ideologically on the right:
"There are, in this sense, specific problems with Yasuda’s opinion that Zaitokukai is made up of “your neighbors.” There are certainly many activists in the nativist movement who are “ordinary people” with jobs, but ideologically they are not “neutral or apolitical”; they are conservative."
People who are already subscribed to a conservative worldview are more receptive to how nativist groups frame and introduce information. Higuchi sees these nativists as an outgrowth of the existing nationalist and revisionist movement of the 1990s and a conservative establishment that already encouraged hostility toward Korea and China. He also argued that the geopolitical situation in Asia has aided in their rise. Issues such as war responsibility, the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea, and ongoing territorial disputes fueled hatred toward people from Korea and China. Higuchi found that the attitudes of Zaitokukai members toward immigrants from countries such as the Philippines and Brazil, who tend to have a lower socioeconomic status than Korean and Chinese immigrants, were not particularly negative. This is very different from the observations of scholars of the far-right in Europe and the United States, for whom the perceived economic or cultural threats from immigrant laborers, or demographic replacement, are central ideas.
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
novakant,
I don't know if this will cheer you up or not but I've got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.
No believing Christian fundamentalist accepts that Mormons are real Christians. Farther outside the pale than even Catholics.
Consider that Italians and Irish were considered black around 140 years ago. 60 years ago, people doubted that a president could be Catholic while at the same time not accepting that Martin Luther King represented actual Christian beliefs. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do backflips on points of cognitive dissonance.
This New Statesman podcast had a detail that I found fascinating (at the 3:50 mark), that Andrew, in his published statement, said that he was relinquishing 'my titles'.
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
Did you go with the iphone 17? For me, the battery is the key driver of a new phone, and the current phone I have is a 13, and my wife and I will probably get a 17 now. I realize that it is not just the battery, chip and phone design makes a huge difference, but it's surprising to me that the models cycle thru without much improvement, so I can't imagine just going up one or 2 model numbers
Pro Bono's quote reminds me that the inner circle of George Bush was dubbed the 'Mayberry Machiavellis' (and Gemini tells me it was not by a democrat, but by a former White House staffer under Bush)
Just an ancillary observation, in hindsight, it is almost overdetermined that the first Black president had to have a white mother and be from an exotic locale like Hawai'i. One could claim that his Chicago stint was important, but I think it was more important that he wasn't from a traditional place we might imagine a black candidate coming from. I don't think it wrecked Harris' chances that she went to a HBCU, but it is hard to imagine a male candidate graduating from Howard or some other HBCU.
On “Pop!”
This is a podcast I've been watching, it's a branch of Scott Galloway's podcast
https://youtu.be/K8b1An5Rpcs?si=z7cix2YBS4UDHNSf
China's lowcost open-source AI is suddenly everywhere in Silicon Valley. While the US is spending billions of dollars building ever bigger models and data centers and inflating what some analysts say looks like an AI bubble, China is doing the exact opposite, it seems. cutting prices, opting for open sourcing weights, and shipping models that are cheaper, lighter, and surprisingly competitive, and American companies are flocking to them. Airbnb CEO says his team ditched Chat GPT for Alibaba's Quen model because it's quote unquote fast and cheap. Venture firms are switching to Moonshot's Kimmy LLM, and developer data show nearly half of the most used models in the US last week were Chinese. Alibaba just slashed prices on its flagship model again as part of a full-blown AI price war and a sign that involution has come to Chinese AI.
What kills me is that this is basically capitalism 101 and the Chinese are proving to be a whole lot better at it that the US.
"
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts about this and they emphasize it is not just an Nvidia bubble, but a problem with the whole industry. A couple of them point to this exchange with Altman
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-loses-cool-revenue
The problem is that there needs to be a starting event to pop, and that might happen tomorrow, next month, next year or in 2 or 3 years. So until then, we just watch and wait.
On “Spelunking for fun and profit”
LJ channeling Atrios, interesting!
lol. I am large, I contain multitudes.
"
The Axios piece is a bit strange, it suggests that Klein was a driver in having the Democrats not vote for the budget, but fails to mention that it looks like he was left high and dry when the 8 senators did the deal.
Klein is certainly stretching for the middle of the road credibility, he had on Ben Shapiro immediately after the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is a bit like interviewing a stagehand who built the sets about how a play went down.
He also had Amit Segal on about the I/P conflict and prefaced the interview with basically a trigger warning about the views, saying that Segal is 'far to the right' of Klein.
You could ask me what do I expect Klein to do, well, that's his choice, but if it were me, I wouldn't want to cosplay Gen Z David Broder.
"
i thought we were trying to get new blood into leadership?
Ossoff is 38 followed by Lujan and Schatz (both 53) After that, it is Warnock and Booker (56) and Duckworth (57). It's not like there is a lot of choice.
"
nous, is it out of the realm of possibility to imagine Elizabeth Warren? I was looking at seniority and Patty Murray is actually the most senior, I'd like to think that a woman would send a message, though youth is also good. In the imaginary reality that plays in my head, In my dreams, I imagine Bernie changing to Dem and getting put as minority leader, which is why I don't like waking up in the morning now...
"
I'm not trying to bust anyone's chops here, but it is interesting to start at the beginning of the comments, and search for instances of 'Manchin' and see how the discussion takes on a life (or perhaps multiple lives) of its own.
"
I’m not entirely clear why this would be a damning criticism.
I think it is damning because if a bunch of other senators in vulnerable seats are going to these 8, they are admitting that public opinion wants them to fight and they can't acknowledge it.
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyrapyXZfsA
Shane Goldmacher..there's one no vote that I found especially interesting.
Michael Babaro.: Who?
Goldmacher: John Ossoff. He is the most vulnerable senator up for election next year. So, he will face the voters and he's running in Georgia and really focused on his general election, right? No one's running against him in the primary right now. And what the no vote here says is that he doesn't want to risk backlash from inside his own party in this campaign. Whether that's from a potential primary challenger who could get recruited from one of these angry groups or whether it's the small donors who are fueling his campaign deciding, you know what, maybe we're not so into John Ossoff. He doesn't want to risk backlash.
Babaro; That's fascinating because as you're suggesting, John Ossoff could reasonably be most focused on a Republican opponent in a general election saying you should have voted to reopen the government. That's what matters in this race. And instead, what you're saying is he's more worried about upsetting Democrats in a potential primary. And that's what animated his vote on the shutdown. And in the end, he votes to keep the government shut down because he wants to look like he's on the side of the Democratic base. That's what we think happened here.
Goldmacher:Yeah. And I have not talked to Senator Ossoff here, but what you can see is that there are two choices. Choice one is vote to reopen the government and say, "I'm going to buck my party and I'm going to reopen the government even if people in my left attack me for it." Right? That's a selling point in a lot of places, right? And so here's a Democrat saying, you know, that's not the right calculus here to the extent he's making a politically motivated choice. The right calculus is to make sure that your own party likes you and supports you and sees you as a fighter because you want that energy behind you in a coming midterm election.
If they were voting to give their colleagues cover, it means that their colleagues don't see what is happening as a 4 alarm fire.
"
I haven't read a lot about this, the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. I did read something along the lines that nous laid out, that maybe the 8 senators, all of whom were not running again, were providing cover for other senators. This to me is an even more damning criticism of the move.
The only silver lining I can see is that Trump will feel emboldened by this and the whole shit show could really explode in their faces. I suppose that the second is that Schumer might get voted out and they get someone who has a spine.
On “When virtues become vices”
wonkie, that's an excellent observation, especially if the dems do fold on the shutdown as has been reported.
On “Weekend music thread #05 Tuvan throat singing”
nous, I should have known...
On “Still I Rise”
In regards to this
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/05/zohran-mamdani-transition-team
I'm wondering if Mamdani said 'I've got an all female transition team' or if this is something a Graniuad writer noticed and made it the lede.
On “People and poliltics”
I don't want to be the old geezer who blames everything on the internet, but it seems to me that all the touted ability to hook people up with like minded individuals has a lot of people missing the diversity in their own backyard. That diversity used to keep these sorts of opinions in check, even though they were held by people, by isolating people, it allows them to flower. Not a new idea, but one I think holds.
I've been reading Jeffrey Hall's Japan's nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism, and he has this
That last point is interesting, as it suggests that there is a stronger class element involved in this for the West than it is for Japan.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
novakant,
I don't know if this will cheer you up or not but I've got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.
On “Horrifying stuff”
No believing Christian fundamentalist accepts that Mormons are real Christians. Farther outside the pale than even Catholics.
Consider that Italians and Irish were considered black around 140 years ago. 60 years ago, people doubted that a president could be Catholic while at the same time not accepting that Martin Luther King represented actual Christian beliefs. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do backflips on points of cognitive dissonance.
On “Monarchy in the UK”
Interesting stuff. I wonder if anyone vetted Andrew's statement. Clearly damage control mode.
On “Ramsayer, Korea and me”
Michael, I love the structure of the three reasons. I think this is why we all understand comedy...
On “Monarchy in the UK”
This New Statesman podcast had a detail that I found fascinating (at the 3:50 mark), that Andrew, in his published statement, said that he was relinquishing 'my titles'.
Telling and totally unsurprising.
https://youtu.be/F2Ww_82ifhg?si=2vC0VBGuVb0IbF6l
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
This was supposed to go up a day earlier, but I got confused with the date line. Thanks and apologies wonkie!
My confession is that I really don't know anything about flowers. Though I am a big fan of Candide...
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Fair warning! If anyone posts a comment about a music topic they like with a couple of youtube video links, it is liable to be front paged! You have been warned!!!
"
Muchísimas gracias, Russell! I accidentally left the link in at the bottom, as I thought I was going to add to Russell's post, but thought better of it, but will leave it there cause I think it will be of interest
Another article that I remember had me wondering about how this clave thing worked was this
Article Title: The Clave: Tricky Latin Rhythm, Hard to Master
Author: Robert Palmer
Publication: The New York Times
Corrected Date/Section: October 5, 1980, Section D, Page 22
which now seems to have disappeared from the NYT archive (thanks to GftNC for looking!) If anyone else wants to apply their google-fu to finding it, in my memory, it is definitely worth a read. It gives the anecdote of one band having to re-record an entire album because they had reversed the clave. Ouch!
But watching Russell's explanation above, I realized that the clave is not something you can read about and figure out, you actually have to have two things to bang together. I'm slightly closer to understanding it, but since there is not a lot of Latin music jams out here in rural Japan, I'm afraid that like a lot of my other desires, it is going to be an unrequited love,,,
On “Something Different”
Did you go with the iphone 17? For me, the battery is the key driver of a new phone, and the current phone I have is a 13, and my wife and I will probably get a 17 now. I realize that it is not just the battery, chip and phone design makes a huge difference, but it's surprising to me that the models cycle thru without much improvement, so I can't imagine just going up one or 2 model numbers
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
Hartmut, a best guess
====
In [Venice]
Rollers [ahead]
It's so full of fun
While you roll, you feel the groove
Such a sport that makes you move
Grandpa
and mama too
Freaks are all the same
police chief and businessman
They are rolling
They are rolling
to the holy land
Roll
Roll
Roll on baby roll x2
skating here in the rolling disco
Lights are blinking wild
exotic clothes and bathing suits
skintight is a style
repeat chorus
Mama's rolling with a baby on her back
Just moving like the wind
headphones upon her ears
full of power
full of power
There's a crazy [??]
repeat chorus
On “Bal des Ardents”
Pro Bono's quote reminds me that the inner circle of George Bush was dubbed the 'Mayberry Machiavellis' (and Gemini tells me it was not by a democrat, but by a former White House staffer under Bush)
On “The South shall writhe again”
Just an ancillary observation, in hindsight, it is almost overdetermined that the first Black president had to have a white mother and be from an exotic locale like Hawai'i. One could claim that his Chicago stint was important, but I think it was more important that he wasn't from a traditional place we might imagine a black candidate coming from. I don't think it wrecked Harris' chances that she went to a HBCU, but it is hard to imagine a male candidate graduating from Howard or some other HBCU.