hmm, this Economist article from earlier this month shows just how bad things are in India:
https://archive.is/bttaV
The last thing india needs is more bureaucracy and regulations and restrictions on personal freedoms (not to mention a free press which they've plummeted since the current PM's party took control).
>To put it in perspective, it will have a generating capacity far greater than that of the Three Gorges dams in China and Itaipu in Brazil. With a projected capacity to produce 40.000 megawatts of power, the Grand Inga Dam is more than just an ambitious megaproject.
Three Gorges Dam's capacity is actually 22,500 MW (not 80), and the Yarlung Tsangpo project in Tibet is estimated at 60,000 MW (not 300), making Grand Inga's proposed 40,000 MW capacity indeed significant but not the largest.
DeepSeek-R1 0528 performs almost as well as o3 in AI quality benchmarks. So, either OpenAI didn't restrict access, DeepSeek wasn't using OpenAI's output, or using OpenAI's output doesn't have a material impact in DeepSeek's performance.
Not everything that's written is worth reading, let alone drawing conclusions from. That benchmark shows different trees each time the author runs it, which should tell you something about it. It also stacks grok-3-beta together with gpt-4.5-preview in the GPT family, making the former appear to be trained on the latter. This doesn't make sense if you check the release dates. And previously it classified gpt-4.5-preview to be in a completely different branch than 4o (which does make some sense but now it's different).
EQBench, another "slop benchmark" from the same author, is equally dubious, as is most of his work, e.g. antislop sampler which is trying to solve an NLP task in a programmatic manner.
The benchmarks are not reflective of real world use case. This is why OpenAI dominates B2B. As a business, its in your best interest to save money without sacrificing quality.
"Follow the money."
Businesses are pouring money into the OpenAI API. This is your biggest clue.
I saw an interesting interview from 50's by one of India's founders on the topic of democracy in India: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WyWUlIbcRH8 . It seems India still has a long way to go, and the current government is reversing the trend.
I really hope the west thinks long and hard about foreign investment in/free trade with India without preconditions (although these are doubtful from the US under the current administration, maybe the EU can step up). The west had this idea that opening up trade with China would make the country more democratic and free, but it had the opposite impact (the extra resources only made things worse in these areas at home and aborad, especially after Xi's takeover in 2014).
The first point is completely invalid, here a lot of press, YouTubers berate Indian government in daily basis they do not suffer any setbacks except when netizens call out false propaganda in numbers for both pro and anti government media.
Second point the Indian leader arrested was involved in huge scams in liquor and policy, he used to live in a lavish palace and got called out by enforcement directorate. It's good he got arrested.
Canada has not provided even a single proof for Indias involvement in extrajudicial killings but instead harbor people who threaten Indians regularly. Despite extradition treaty Canada has become a safe harbor of terrorists and refused to extradite terrorists even after repeated requests by India.
Reversing the trend ? Are you kidding me, previous government imposed emergency rule when their position was threatened and commited human rights abuses.
> Second point the Indian leader arrested was involved in huge scams in liquor and policy.
unproven, and the timing could not have been more suspicious:
"Amnesty International, an international human rights group said that the arrest of Kejriwal and the "freezing of Indian National Congress’ bank accounts", a few weeks before India's general elections showed "the authorities’ blatant failure to uphold the country’s international human rights obligations".[45][46]"
> Despite extradition treaty Canada has become a safe harbor of terrorists and refused to extradite terrorists even after repeated requests by India.
How about despite an extradition treaty, India has never submitted a claim against these so called terrorists and like normal democracies use the courts to argue their case for extradition. In Canada the courts are generally far more independent than those in India. Note - speech calling for a separate state by itself is not terrorism in any country that values free speech (heck half of Quebec regularly does this), only calling or acting for violence means crossing that line, i haven't seen any evidence for the latter (but I'm open to be proven wrong - from independent credible sources unlike those you listed).
> Reversing the trend ? Are you kidding me.
Yes, according to the article I originally cited and others, India has become less democratic. Caste violence and religious tension (i.e. chants of "love jihad") seems to have gotten worse - true to India's founders video in the 1950's I shared of democracy in India.
The first link you shared of hrw...in one of the incidents it showed the arrest of newsclick.
The problem with international media houses is that they don't report why someone has been arrested on what charges and with what process. Newsclick offices has been raided for allegedly taking funding from CCP for propaganda and also inciting Delhi riots.
The second instance when the hrw is saying that Delhi police arrested 'peaceful protesters', there were RIOTS! A police offices was stabbed in two digits, a boy' limbs were amputed while being alive and left to burn in his shop. They were not peaceful protests in any case.
Amnesty international did the same thing. It did not report why Kejriwal was arrested. Kejriwal's lavish mansion made with money of tax payers has been a topic of mockery by Indian public. His party lost elections badly because people knew that the arrest was not whimsical.
I won't comment on topic of court more, as I don't know you can be right.
Independent credible sources :p. Name any media house and I can show how they have repeatedly used media as a propaganda page with full of fake news whether left or right(except reuters maybe).
The only thing credible is reading from multiple sources to know fully about an incident. What I like about Opindia is that it provides a very comprehensive coverage of every incident with sources and proofs at
every line and has even corrected itself in past for mistakes.
India has not become less democratic that is just a farce by some parties who neither have any agenda, neither consistent neither in touch with what people want, they are just envious that they are being repeatedly loosing elections in multiple states of India. They only cry India is less democratic when they lose elections.
The opposing party repeatedly wants a caste census and invites regularly people of different castes against other castes. In fact caste violence is at its lowest period, since from my parents times. Young generation have stopped believing in birth castes except to make Instagram reels.
Love jihad, I can show you hundreds of cases when a member of a community (you can guess) has posed as member of other religious group for an affair to be finally have his identity revealed after marriage after which domestic violence and sexual exploitation of the victim arises. Now before you say that it is a 'Hindutva majoritian' agenda, well not when the church groups of Kerala raise the same issue in their community.
Regarding extrajudicial killings if I remember correctly arrested person was Indian, not sure if it was proved that he was connected to Indian govt.
And for Canada yes they didn't provide any proof but instead had to backtrack on their statements:
OpIndia is an Indian far-right[2] news website known for frequently publishing misinformation.[11][12][28] Founded in December 2014,[18] the website has published fake news and Islamophobic commentary on numerous occasions.[37][43] OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers liberal media,[14] and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)[47] and Hindutva ideology.[3] According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems to be in opposition to the BJP and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP.[13]
Did you get a chance to read the US attorney's indictment and alleged connections to the Indian govt?
Opindia has no hesitation on declaring itself as a right leaning site but frequently publishing misinformation? That's exaggeration.
It backs whatever it writes with independent research, attached videos documents, cctv footage, other news houses as best as it can.
Sure it made its mistakes but not so much as other media houses in India.
There are much worse media houses that opindia especially on the left.
And Wikipedia? That's neither reliable or consistent. It itself has been shown to be edited by whimsical propagandists to serve their own means in past.
The articles sources can be checked and not only opindia other news houses have reported on Gurpreet Singh Pannu
I'm unclear which of those things you don't think applies to the US as well?
It may not be as blatant, but the current administration is openly attempting to muzzle the press (i.e. banning the AP from Whitehouse), the last few US elections have been mired in law enforcement interactions (FBI investigation into Hilary's emails, Trump's various trials), and extrajudicial killings on foreign soil have openly been a thing since Obama's drone-strike-happy administration.
He also bought one of india's last major independent traditional media outlets (NDTV) years ago. The comparison I can think of is if MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were all run like Fox news in terms of alignment with Trump. In a country where 25% the population is illiterate this is especially concerning as a significant portion of the electorate can only access their news from traditional media (TV, radio).
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
No idea about Shein, but I was shocked how easy/good Temu return policy was. My wife bought some rugs and some prints and they were not as described/pictured.
Took a minute in the app to generate a qr code, then I had it to the post shop the same day and they refunded within 3 days.
I wouldn't (personally) buy clothes to wear normally from them, but something like beach shoes or a poncho for a festival I'd maybe get there.
TIL Temu has a return policy. I thought the return policy was "throw it in the trash and be out the money (albeit 1/10th of what you would have paid in a regular store)".
It's not fast-fashion they are competing with — they invented ultra-fast-fashion. Their platforms (Shein and Temu) are fully geared towards allowing manufacturers to jump on board the latest hypes and trends and have a saleable product on there within a week or so, to sell for a few weeks until it is no longer trending.
They need to get their priorities straight - stop directing trade policy towards tech companies employing 1000's of workers on $250,000 a year and start building factories employing 100's or people on 25c an hour.
International shipping from China to the US is subsidized by USPS under the Universal Postal Union rules since China is classified as a developing country. Terminal dues to the US have been increasing over the last 5 years to compensate for this.
It's still crazy to me that we classify the second largest economy as a developing country. Especially when said "developing" country is trying to flex it's muscles over the world stage and attack its neighbors.
China can either remain a developing country subject to rules imposed by developed countries. Or it can join the developed countries and shape those rules. It can't do both.
That would probably require that they receive federal funding to subsidize postage rates, which is unfortunately not going to happen (especially not under DeJoy).
Yes, perhaps the government should subsidize (or allow states to subsidize) the fixed costs of mail, just as we subsidize the fixed costs of roads, so that our business can be competitive. Is this what China does domestically, or what the US does when we charge for international shipping? Point is, we should at least list all the ways that we can be more competitive, rather than cheering isolationism that makes us all worse off.
These 2 failures could have been easily avoidable both times.
I really wish there was a push in the US government to create and stockpile plutonium-238 and ensure it's readily available, subsidized, and offered for all US probes/rovers/other scientific instruments in space (whether it be for NASA's use who currently has to ration because of how little they have left, or for private use after approval).
Like, why aren't all of space scientific instruments RTG powered like voyager 1 which is still providing useful scientific data 47+ years later. Think about all of the lost scientific insights over the past few decades because either NASA (because of a low stockpile) or private companies like intuitive (from their 2 failures) end up choosing solar panels for their source of power with no other alternative.
Besides the fact that solar panels can fail if they aren't pointed a certain way, they usually offer far less power, and are subject to radiation, micro meteor, or dust damage. All of these are the main reason why these instruments tend to have a far shorter lifespan than voyager 1.
One reason all space scientific instruments are not powered by RTGs is that prior to each launch NASA has to run a very involved and time-consuming risk analysis program to determine just how much of the state of Florida becomes uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years if the rocket blows up on the launch pad.
I had a Look Magazine cover from the early 1950s .. It showed oil barrels full of radioactive waste, with a guy moving one on a handcart, with heavy gloves on! The point of the photo was "radioactive material must be handled very carefully" .. the guy had thick gloves .. for a fifty gallon drum of radioactive waste, among many of them.. Things change
Generally I agree, but Moon is not a bad place for solar panels if a spacecraft has no contingencies and is able to harvest energy during Moon's day and store it in batteries to be used over the night. The sufficient power can be generated by a solar panel of the size (or even smaller) of the spacecraft itself. The other story is for missions like Juno [1] or Europa Clipper [2] which use solar panels near Jupiter - instead of centering develoment and mass budget around payload most of the spacecraft is an enourmously sized solar array. Juno panels generate 14kW on Earth orbit and only 500W near Jupiter [1].
Another non-obvious problem is that RTGs, as any other thermal machines, need a gradient of temperature to work, i.e. to generate electrical power there should be hot (nuclear material) and cold (radiators) side. On interplanetary spacecraft (Voyager, New horizons) Sun is in a predictable (and stable) direction so RTG's radiators can be put in a permanent shadow of the spacecraft. On the Moon the sun is moving, and there is no atmosphere (unlike on Mars where RTGs are used), so on a small spacecraft RTG will need to be dug deep into the regolith which is absoluteky non-trivial since just landing straight sometimes is a problem.
There are always tradeoffs, it is almost never "why don't they just" case in spacecraft development.
It was my understanding that RTGs are relatively dense compared to their energy output. They made sense for Voyager because incident light from the sun falls off as the square of the distance and they were designed to be the farthest-away man-made objects ever.
But if you "just" want to put a probe on the moon, solar panels weigh less than plutonium.
Historically, PU-238 was a byproduct of (fissile) Pu-238 production for nuclear weapons. That need kinda went away with arms reduction treaties beginning in the mid-to-late Cold War. IIRC the US nuclear weapons stockpile is about 10% of what it was at its peak. AFAIK there is no current Pu-239 production in the US.
The need for Pu-238 was recognized years ago as the stockpile of consumed by various space probes and I believe Oak Ridge now products Pu-238 fuel pellets. I'm not sure if this production could be ramped up.
But Plutonium use has various risks associated with it. Aside from the obvious security risks, you're strapped it to a rocket that may explode while launch and come back to Earth. This is effectively a dirty bomb if the RTG containment is breached.
Solar panels are really the right choice for anything out to at least mars. Here we had a probe fall over. Would that be recoverable with RTG? Maybe. Maybe not.
As with everything in aerospace, the reason is a trade-off you are unaware of.
In order to launch an RTG you need to abide to extensive compliance requirements that ensure no ball of plutonium lands in someone's head. Ergo weight. In space, weight is everything.
You are one internet search away from finding the specific power of RTGs and of solar panels on the moon.
That's great but I'm reasonably confident that if the probe ends up sideways, at least half of the science instruments won't work anyway. And no guarantee on communications either.
This is so damn true. I wish people would stop taking companies in China at face value about any of their claims if the CCP has a vested interest in for geopolitical and economic reasons. Bytedance is another example.
It's telling that "South Korea has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of sharing user data with the owner of TikTok in China." - source: >https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gex0x87g4o
I mean it's not like an entity that bypasses sanctions would ever be open about it, as doing so would immediately result in more sanctions and the closing of loopholes. What does the CCP have to gain? What does it have to gain by stealing hundreds of billons of western IP in the past? 4 things: Power, prestige, riches, and the means to keep their power. This has been going in since at least 2004 (see Nortel case: https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...)
The US winning the AI race was a clear threat to those 4 things.Hurting investor sentiment by a) distilling a model which cost billions to develop, and b)spreading propaganda and muddying the waters about costs, gpus, etc, helps them to narrow the gap. Making it open source was not done out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of self interest - another attempt to deflect from their actions (further muddying the waters) and divide the public against taking any further punitive action against the state (given the connection re: SK claims-tiktok algorithms were probably on overdrive spreading their bs) .
The last thing india needs is more bureaucracy and regulations and restrictions on personal freedoms (not to mention a free press which they've plummeted since the current PM's party took control).