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…

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 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.

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

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

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.

I think those use normal VCSELs. To justify using PCSELs, maybe it would be lidars for long range sensing, like range finding over dozens of meters or something.

This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven’t been able to find applications.

We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they’re not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.

On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don’t really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).

So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I’m sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.

Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Armed offensive against the illegal Myanmar junta.

Some of the prior cases described in this article, as precedents that could spell trouble for OpenAI, frankly sound like miscarriages of justice. Using copyright to prevent organizations from photocopying articles for internal use? What the heck?

If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.

NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input

Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn’t hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.

In this context, the “energy that they put in” only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that’s barely been scratched so far).

So yeah, it’s nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.

Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.

blames American venture capitalists

Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.

Also, most of the people in this movement aren’t even vegan. Isn’t that completely disqualifying?!?

“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”

– Lee Kuan Yew

If anything, the repressed and defensive China of Xi Jinping is falling ever further behind.

I didn’t know it was already settled law. But in that case, why are models like llama still released under licenses? If they are non-copyrightable, licenses should be unenforceable and therefore irrelevant.

Agreed. I would also argue that trained model weights are not copyrightable.