Protect Your Sovereignty 🇺🇸

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

They’re so mad.

One hell of a letter in The Times today from General Sir Nick Carter, a former head of the armed forces He warns that Britain risks becoming ‘Belgium with nuclear weapons’ unless it spends more on defence ‘Successive governments have hollowed our armed forces out to such a degree that if we do not spend what is needed now to arrest that decline, and transform them for the modern world, we risk becoming Belgium with nuclear weapons. And our enemies are watching’ Times letters: Britain’s slide down the Nato league table thetimes.com/article/5c37102…

Fable just downgraded to Opus because I am calculating a Groebner base on one round of the block cipher PRESENT. This is absolutely ridiculous. I can essentially not use Fable to review my 2008 MSc thesis without triggering "cyber safeguards". A friend of mine had the down...

How much faster are modern computers? Here's a fair example: compiling the same code on old and new. I have a VAX4000-705A, which is about 50 MIPS, or 50x as fast as my PDP_11. I wrote a bunch of code for it today, but I'm cross-compiling it on a Mac. But I _can_ compile it on the VAX if I choose, and here are the results: Mac Pro M2: 0.178 seconds VAX4000: 1 min 7.59 seconds That makes the Mac about 380X as fast as the fastest VAX ever made!

Midcentury-modernists understood the difference between Model# (identity and positioning) and SKU/PN# (inventory and disambiguation). In certain light, this is interface design. Latest gaming monitors and their Model#s are shown below. The SKU# became the Model# due to number of reasons but most likely SEO at the expense of everything else. It's interesting to see the friction this causes -- browse gaming forums and the laborious enunciation of full model#s in gaming monitor reviews. Sony falls in this camp as well (WH-1000XM6 headphones). The other end of the spectrum is also equally dysfunctional. Macbook 14" Pro means absolutely nothing except for the general physical size and tier. Which one? Late-2021 or Mid-2023 or Early-2025? Apple does have a SKU#, e.g. MLW394LR/3 but it's buried deep. It'd take quite an effort to find one on your device. The broad category distinction of the Model# is also generic: <None>, Pro, Max, Ultra, etc. "Is it pro or non-pro!??", the process of disambiguation so janky. In stark contrast we have IBM Model 5250. The literal word "Model" is an explicit signifier what is about to follow. Medium granularity, sufficient disambiguation to distinguish from say previous generation 5150. Additional prefixes and postfixes can be added such as IBM Model K-5250X. IBM also had a large hierarchy of SKU#/PN# : Machine type (2065-I), Feature Code (FC7920), PN# (1520510), Software Code (5734-XC6), etc. These would not be hidden from the customer, but prominently displayed outside of marketing contexts for engineers to disambiguate and keep inventory. I think the modern AMD EPYC server chip naming is excellent: 9554 vs 9555, last digit is the generation which has pros/cons for sorting but they must have a reason to put the generation number at the end; perhaps to inventory all 64-core server CPUs, they'd would be grouped together by corecount. There is also an OEM and Retail PN# such as 100-5000328WOF. Anyways, it is quite interesting to see the marketing people following each other in a particular subindustry (gaming monitors).

LinkedIn was already slop. All that's changed is that it's now AI slop.

PALANTIR DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: the latest Spectator World cover, now gone to press. @William_Blake writes the cover story — link below. Doodles by me.

Britain spent a decade choosing to be smaller in the world. Right now the rules on communications, energy and trade are being rewritten. By China. By Russia. By countries that take their own security seriously. We need to be at that table. That's a choice we must make. Strong countries get cheap energy. Weak countries pay whatever the strong ones decide.