I’m using Zed, but I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone yet. They claim 1.0 but in reality it’s still beta software. It is fundamentally broken in how it deals with the file system so the project panel and git panel can easily miss changes, and it’s still not clear if they’ll even address it.
At least it seems the next release might fix the bug where the git panel will jump to a different repo when you click on a file in it. They should seriously have fixed basic stuff like that before releasing 1.0. But they got in lots of cosmetic changes to the markdown viewer.. they really need to consider their priorities
What the West is doing is forcing China into a situation which is impossible to sustain when their economic dividend runs out. Especially considering these investments are fuelled by an extremely high level of debt.
And it’s not a given that they’ll catch up. I think it’s fair to say that their development of jet engines is on track to be obsolete before they’re competitive.
They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.
i dont think it will - they still have a chokehold on battery production (which implies dominance in the EV sector), and they also control the vast majority of all rare earths. The chinese gov't can subsidize chip research/development with these other sectors that are dominating.
The west is the one that need to watch out for their own economic dividend running out from the past century.
"Economic dividend" really means "Demographic dividend". It's when your fertility rate decreases but your total population isn't decreasing yet, so you get more people to work more as they spend less time as parents. This of course is a self perpetuating cycle and ends in demographic collapse. China's population is now decreasing. The West's population is still growing. China is in the most literal sense dying. It's what you get for having a one child policy for 50 years. But hey, for a beautiful moment in time they really created a lot of shareholder value.
What makes you think they don't have a domestic market?
The Chinese domestic EV market is the largest in the world.
Chinese factories are full of Chinese robotics.
Companies like Huawei are struggling to meet the domestic demand for AI accelerators, while growing volume very fast year over year.
The Chinese domestic AI market is massive, but we just don't hear much about it outside of the models that are also sold here. Can you even name the models that ByteDance (China's Meta) makes?
As far as exports go, China is a low cost producer for many things. If the US doesn't want to buy high quality EV's costing 1/2 the price of a Tesla, then there are plenty of other countries happy to do so. The US is only 5% of the global population - there are lots of other consumers out there.
> They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.
Is this really true? Can't they just keep exporting "forever"? What requires them to find a domestic audience? I can think of some other countries that have done quite well mostly without finding a domestic audience (eg, Switzerland comes to mind, and frankly Europe might largely be in the same bucket).
Europe (by which I assume you mean EU or possibly Euro area) has a fairly balanced balance of trade overall.
And a teeny-tiny country like Switzerland can't be usefully compared to something as big as China - the rest of the world can easily consume whatever the Swiss produce, but there are limits to how much Chinese can produce until consumption will have to shift to domestic consumption because the world doesn't have infinite ability to pay for its demand.
That said don't expect any big change anytime soon - there are very strong political incentives to keep the status quo with China focusing a bit too much on exports.
Apple threw plenty of shit at the wall when Jobs ran the ship. The hockey puck mouse and the Mac Cube was under Jobs. The first Apple TV. That was pretty much what the Vision Pro is: a side project to test the waters and get some experience with a new format. It’s just that the Vision Pro by its nature is a much more expensive and ambitious side project.
All the three product you mentioned is exactly the kind of things Steve Jobs did. Don’t make him into this mythological flawless visionary.
There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.
There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.
You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.
> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.
No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).
> Oil is a must in military.
I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.
I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)
> EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled
And not many of them are recycled, because making new ones is cheaper. Unfortunately it's true for most of the stuff you see. So no one is incentivized to recycle.
> You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need.
Sure you can use batteries to maintain the power grid sync, it's a valid solution but is it THE solution? It is the most expensive solution you have today to maintain the grid, both day time (frequency sync for example) and night time.
It is a lot cheaper to just use coal/gas/nuclear station to maintain the grid. That's the point I'm trying to make. It is a lot easier, cheaper and more diverse to just use coal/gas/nuclear as the main source and maybe 20-30% wind/solar.
It's not that you CANNOT do it. It's that it doesn't make sense to switch 100% to wind/solar, and will be very stupid to do such thing.
> No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance.
Oil produces plastic, a major component in all of the "renewable components". I'm not talking about oil as energy.
> I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller.
You'll be surprised. Look up how much reserve quantity in serious militaries. Cut off oil and you lose a war in a month.
Wake me up when you have jet fighters & tanks with batteries.
> Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
Yes. Every country in the world needs oil, especially in military. Do you want to defend against Russia?
> There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
That's the point? You can be energy secured for a decade at least. Supply chain issue is a much bigger problem if you want to go with solar/wind. There is no country in the world except China that can produce full pipeline of solar right now. Would you want to depend on China for the supply chain?
There is no denser energy source you have today than nuclear. Denser energy = good. It's always been that way since beginning of human history. It is also clean. It should be the essential. Everything else should be just an alternative.
The best time to build nuclear is decades ago. The second best time is now.
I don’t think the cookie banner is useless. It’s annoying the hell out of everyone which is creating political demand for another round of legislation that should solve the issue properly.
It was a relatively easy fix which didn’t fully solve the issue but made the very real issue of pervasive tracking visible to everyone.
It doesn’t seem like AIs are accelerating at all if you ask me. We seem to be plateauing. Smaller and open weight models are catching up to the closed weight frontier models on benchmarks. If AI labs were able to use the smartest models to accelerate their development, the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic would be accelerating away from their competitors. But no such thing is happening. The focus has shifted from intelligence to cost and speed.
The breakthroughs in mathematics are impressive. But it doesn’t feel that different from what machine learning has done with Chess, Go and protein folding. They’re finding patterns in our systems and in nature. That’s what they’ve always been good at.
Mostly I'm seeing breakthroughs in the ways we use LLMs. Agentic harnesses, MCPs, etc - its the wild west still but we've come a long way from a basic chatbot. Gains are now coming from tools that make better use of the LLMs existing capabilities, and put guardrails on their worst tendencies.
I personally feel like we've plateaued in raw model intelligence (even regressed, I find sonnet 4.6 to perform better than Opus 5) but we've gifted them new skills that allow them to run for longer and explore the search space more thoroughly, making them more effective at the same level of "intelligence".
Take two smart people and a problem to solve. Give one person the tools, the other person nothing. The one with the best tools wins. At some point its more about abilities than raw intelligence. Watching a "frontier" model fumble with basic syntax is still common, but not if you give it treesitter.
The math and cybersecurity improvements this year don’t look like plateauing to me. They’re clearly improving?
But I think they’re becoming more specialized. Luna is working fine for me for ordinary web development, but I was impressed by Sol tracking down an OS-level bug that was causing my Playwright tests to be flaky. Previous models couldn’t figure it out.
A lot of the improvements might be on questions that ordinary users aren’t normally asking.
Agree. We’re going to hear a lot of buzz about recursive self-improvement in the near future, which I’d cynically say is meant to address the naked emperor you just called out.
Can labs get a boost augmenting more of their processes with automation? Sure. Will it result in a self-sustaining takeoff to infinity? … No. It will saturate too. Just my opinion.
Nothing wrong with a conservative take, especially given all the hype, but I often wonder if its hard to see the magnitude of the change at "day-to-day" speed.
And the emotions one gets from reading the "takes" on news sites, blogs, etc leaves a bad taste in ones mouth and in hoping there is no change, we make it even harder to see.
A few years ago, when this all started, we had major breakthroughs fairly often that would throw out all the existing tooling. Now, most of the breakthroughs have to do with improvements to the tools instead. All the gains I see personally have to do with agent upgrades, system prompt tuning, skill tuning, context optimization, etc. Didn’t the last Anthropic release come with some system prompt updates too? Plateauing of the LLMs themselves has long since been the case but that means they’re stable enough to build on which isn’t bad.
We are also using these things to like 1% of their ability. The amount of manual process in the world that could be documented once and then automated is staggering. Decoding and transitioning such process is time consuming, and change is slow until fast.
I think the generators are meant for intentional longer range trips as well. You get the cost savings for a big share of the trip even if you have to use the generators for part of it.
Yeah, could be. The article linked here had very few details on the generators, besides calling it "hybrid electric" which led me to google a bit and found those ranges, but not additional info on how it'll be used. I guess we'll find out mroe when they start flying routes.
These companies know their value was never in the models. There’s a scramble to acquire as much hardware as possible, and to build as many services that people get soft locked into, such that they have a moat when the open weight models fully catch up. Doesn’t matter that the models are open weight, if you want access to the hardware you will have to pay.
I dont see how the outlook is any better for the open weight companies. They’re in the exact same situation as the closed weight companies except they have had much less revenue, and built up less of a brand, leading up the the point where they are equal in terms of model quality.
A blockade of Taiwan could be met with a blockade of China. China can survive much longer on their own supply and reserves. But it’s still something to make them think twice. They don’t have the blue water navy to respond to a blockade. Land connections do not have the scale to work around it.
There’s a small port on the east side of Taiwan which could be used to supply some of the bare necessities. I don’t know if USA would fully enter a war but I do think they might do freedom of navigation exercises east of the island. Would China dear hit a US military vessel with missiles and escalate the conflict. I don’t think so.
USN on paper not capable of blockading PRC anymore, refer to latest Pentagon China Power report, PRC missiles coverage up to west CONUS, likely further, which means USN is globally vulnerable. Iran's shit tier A2D2 can push USN to standoff range, PRC can push USN out of hemisphere. This not mentioning PRC answer to energy/food blockade is proportional CONUS energy infra strikes to deny CONUS energy. PRC doesn't need blue water navy to break US blockade. Highend rockery breaks USN model at scale, on the cheap, relative to bluewater. There is US subsurface but do the math, US subs will run out of VLS cells before they meaningfully dent size of PRC merchant fleet.
There is no part of TW that is not within PRC land base munition range, every inch can be hit within 7 minutes. Of course PRC would hit US ships in blockade scenario which is by definition war. If USN doesn't blockade, then FONAP does nothing, anything supply ship to west TW would be trivially sunk, NVM legally any ship during PRC TW blockade scenario is running PRC blockade (read: entering sovereign One China waters) and can be treated as hostile. US either tries to blockade (goto war with PRC who will run blockade / test US resolve), and if turns hot, risk its westpac / global replenishment chains (including CENTCOM/CONUS) being blown up, or CONUS hits. Just hitting USN replenishment ships, which are exquisitely vulnerable (has to spend hours in port) means USN becomes single deployment assets, i.e CSG in high tempo operations will exhaust fuel (escorts), munitions in days. USN expeditionary model simply isn't viable vs peer who can cripple US logistics tail within ~10000km radius of PRC. Or US does functionally nothing, i.e. FONAP in TW blockade scenario is theatrics.
Given China's enormous land borders and the surrounding seas they share with south east asian neighbors, it's quite difficult to impose a blockade. Observers have been shocked about China's oil resilience during this whole Hormuz fiasco. What would a blockade of Malacca do aside from starving and pissing off south east asian allies and Japan?
At least it seems the next release might fix the bug where the git panel will jump to a different repo when you click on a file in it. They should seriously have fixed basic stuff like that before releasing 1.0. But they got in lots of cosmetic changes to the markdown viewer.. they really need to consider their priorities
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