Don't forget, burner phones still exist. You can handle everything in cash if you're smart. The phone isn't important, you just want a cheap sim with no tracks leading to you.

So confirmation bias. Gotcha. That's generally not a great way to make sweeping generalizations about 50% of the population. You ever hear that adage about smelling shit wherever you go, maybe check your shoes?

I gave you the data, as they say "facts don't care about your feelings."

Safe, yeah. Private, no. If you want to verify whether a user is a real person, you need very personally identifiable information. That’s not ever going to be private. The best you could do, in theory, is have a government service that takes that PII and gives the user a signed cryptographic certificate they can use to verify their identity. Most people would either lose their private key or have it stolen, so even that system would have problems. The closest to reality you could do right now is use Apple’s FaceID, and that’s anything but private. Pretty safe though. It’s super illegal and quite hard to steal someone’s face.

On the one hand, this is possibly dubious in that things that aren't generally considered to be part of defence will be used to inflate our defence spending numbers without actually spending more than previous (i.e. it's just a PR move) But on the other hand, this could be immensely useful in telling the NIMBYs to fuck right off. What's that, you're opposing infrastructure improvements, new housing, or wind turbines? Aw, diddums, that's too bad. This is deemed critical for national security, and thus the government can give it approval regardless. Sorry Bernard, sorry Mary, your petition against any change in the area is going nowhere.

It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.

I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.

Won't someone think of the shareholders?!