Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.
Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.
Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.
Is this approach any different from what Cape is doing? Or is it just a competitor started by one of the founders of Calyx?
Interesting aside, Cape supports GrapheneOS, one of the competitors to the (currently dormant?) Calyx OS.
Also, some of the complaints given by those that resigned from Calyx don't, for me, instill faith in those who were in Calyx leadership roles. (I have no clue if this applies directly to Merrill, though.)
Part of me thinks that nobody wants to be the one that pops the bubble, so it's safer to just play along and throw in a few hundred billion here and there.
There was a post on the GrapheneOS forums a while back, from Micay, claiming that a well-known YouTuber who had backtracked on recommending GrapheneOS (because of Micay's behavior, according to the YouTuber) had probably actually backtracked because the YouTuber was financially involved with a competing project. My initial reaction to the post was, "Oh, I guess this is that paranoia I've heard about with Micay." My thought was reenforced when it was further claimed, in that thread, that the YouTuber was active in a forum well known for online bullying of people they don't like. The whole thing definitely sounded paranoid.
In the thread, though, there was in fact linked paperwork where the YouTuber had registered the company in question, and also links to a verified account on the forums in question (using the YouTuber's real name).
So, yeah, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that Micay knows a million times more about this technical and application space, and the political and business dynamics around it, than most HNers.
And I also believe that he's actually been personally targeted for harassment, from multiple directions, over the years.
So he's learned and earned some... vigilance.
And overall, I suspect that GrapheneOS is much better for the vigilant mindset.
I donated money partly with this in mind.
I don't know whether the project has a PR expert working with them already, but if not, that would be a nice pairing with the very smart and vigilant people on the team.
Most people rather trust some newspaper or magazine instead of investing 10 minutes into researching on their own only to then start sockpuppeting for the conclusions of the author who probably didn't do their due diligence in writing the piece in the first place.
"Sockpuppeting" has connotations that don't apply here, and it's an important term for other pressing purposes, so we don't want to dilute it. Does "parroting" express your intent well enough?
I always found this take a bit odd. Not because I think he's wrong necessarily, but because they realized that piracy is a service problem and then proceeded to fail to compete with piracy in a number of ways.
E.g., I don't need an account to pirate, but I need an account to purchase games on Steam. I don't need a launcher or extra software / external services to play pirated games, but Steam requires the launcher, which requires internet, which requires the Steam servers to be up, etc. I can archive pirated games long term and they're likely to continue working as like as computers exist to run the code, but many Steam titles will stop working when Steam shuts down. I can transfer pirated games to my kids or whatever when I'm done with them (or in my will when I die), but Steam doesn't allow either individual title transfers or wholesale account transfers.
It was always baffling to me that they simultaneously hit the nail on the head with identifying that there are advantages of piracy beyond cost while also seemingly going out of their way to not offer most of those advantages.
For me, he was incredibly right. Steam is so much easier than pirating games, you generally did need accounts to pirate, monthly subscription to either rapidshare/gator equivalent or a VPN to torrent.
The vast majority of steam games run just fine when not started via steam. A few AAA titles might require it but in many years of running steam I've never encountered it as an issue.
Family sharing works fine, and how is steam going to prevent you from giving your acct to your kids? You're okay with violating copyright law but not the steam TOS? Pirated/Cracked games also often had a limited lifetime, updating would break them as cracks were highly version-dependent. Steam with cloud saves, auto-updates, built-in workshop, and the many sales is overall a much better user experience.
> The vast majority of steam games run just fine when not started via steam.
AFAIK many of them still rely on Steam, though. They'll run when you manually run the exe, but will they run on a machine that doesn't have Steam installed and doesn't have internet access? I know some will, but I'm skeptical that just being able to start the game from the exe means it's not linking in Steam services and will work in such a scenario.
> Family sharing works fine, and how is steam going to prevent you from giving your acct to your kids?
They've banned accounts in the past for being transferred. Why wouldn't they do that again? Also, doesn't it seem a bit silly that the solution to a service shortcoming is "just violate the rules of the service"? Why not just offer transfers and make the service better? And, AFAIK, you're probably technically violating copyright the same by transferring the account to your kids as you are by pirating. Your kids don't have a license to the game, only you do (and it's non-transferable).
Regarding family sharing, not all games support it. Additionally, that wasn't always an option (namely, back when Gabe made this statement). And that ties into another issue with Steam: you're at the mercy of what Valve chooses to do. If, in 2035, they decide that they're going to charge a monthly fee to access the games you bought, you're just up shit creek. If they decide to remove family sharing, drop support for your platform, etc. I don't understand why I would want a license I bought in 2006 to rely on a service's decisions in 2035.
AFAIK Steam has this too. The Subscriber Agreement clearly states that you're not guaranteed continued, free access to Steam. If they decided they wanted to charge you to access games you already bought, they could.
I finally gave up on PayPal. Years ago, some hardware vendor had a discount for paying via PayPal. I made an account using my real personal info and personal payment cards, and they immediately flagged the account as fraudulent.
I put in a support request and, after some back and forth with support, they eventually, what I think was weeks later, marked the account as legitimate. At least, that's what they said they did. That promo was still going, so I tried it again. PayPal still wouldn't let me pay due to being flagged as fraud. In a follow-up with PayPal, they claimed it would take a few days before I could actually use the account. The promo expired at the end of that day, so I just deleted the account and decided PayPal is a waste of time.
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