Opensource or local models will always heavily lag frontier.
Who pays for a free model? GPU training isn't free!
I remember early on people saying 100B+ models will run on your phone like nowish. They were completely wrong and I don't think it's going to ever really change.
People always will want the fastest, best, easiest setup method.
"Good enough" massively changes when your marketing team is managing k8s clusters with frontier systems in the near future.
People do not care about the fastest and best past a point.
Let's use transportation as an analogy. If all you have is a horse, a car is a massive improvement. And when cars were just invented, a car with a 40mph top speed was a massive improvement over one with a 20mph top speed and everyone swapped.
While cars with 200mph top speeds exist, most people don't buy them. We all collectively decided that for most of us, most of the time, a top speed of 110-120 was plenty, and that envelope stopped being pushed for consumer vehicles.
If what currently takes Claude Opus 10 minutes to do can be done is 30ms, then making something that can do it in 20ms isn't going to be enough to get everyone to pay a bunch of extra money for.
Companies will buy the cheapest thing that meets their needs. SOTA models right now are much better than the previous generation but we have been seeing diminishing returns in the jump sizes with each of the last couple generations. If the gap between current and last gen shrinks enough, then people won't pay extra for current gen if they don't need it. Just like right now you might use Sonnet or Haiku if you don't think you need Opus.
This is the assumption of a hard plateu we can effectively optimize forever towards while possible we havn't seen it.
Again my point is "good enough" changes as possibilities open. Marketing teams running entire infra stacks is an insane idea today but may not be in the future.
You could easily code with a local model similar to gpt 4 or 3 now but I will 10-100x your performance with a frontier model and that will fundamentally not change.
Hmmm but maybe there's an argument of a static task. Once a model hits that ability of that specific task you can optimize it into a smaller model. So I guess I buy the argument for people working on statically capped conplexity tasks?
PII detection for example, a <500M model will outperform a 1-8B param model on that narrow task. But at the same time just a pii detection bot is not a product anymore. So yes a opensource one does it but as a result its fundamentally less valuable and I need to build higher and larger products for the value?
Gpt3.5 as used in the first commercially available chat gpt is believed to be hundreds of billions of parameters. There are now models I can run on my phone that feel like they have similar levels of capability.
Phones are never going to run the largest models locally because they just don't have the size, but we're seeing improvements in capability at small sizes over time that mean that you can run a model on your phone now that would have required hundreds of billions of parameters less than 6 years ago.
The G in GPT stands for Generalized. You don't need that for specialist models, so the size can be much smaller. Even coding models are quite general as they don't focus on a language or a domain. I imagine a model specifically for something like React could be very effective with a couple of billion parameters, especially if it was a distill of a more general model.
I think we'll eventually find a way to make the cycle smaller, so instead of writing a stackoverflow post in 2024 and using a model trained on it in 2025 I'll be contributing to the expertise of a distributed-model-ish-thing on Monday and benefitting from that contribution on Tuesday.
When that happens, the most powerful AI will be whichever has the most virtuous cycles going with as wide a set of active users as possible. Free will be hard to compete with because raising the price will exclude the users that make it work.
Until then though, I think you're right that open will lag.
I don't know about frontier, I code nowadays a lot using Opus 4.5, in a way that I instruct it to do something (like complex refactor etc) - I like that it's really good at actually doing what its told and only occasionally do I have to fight it when it goes off the rails. It also does not hallucinate all that much in my experience (Im writing Js, YMMV with other languages), and is good at spotting dumb mistakes.
That said, I'm not sure if this capability is only achievable in huge frontier models, I would be perfectly content using a model that can do this (acting as a force multiplier), and not much else.
> People always will want the fastest, best, easiest setup method
When there are no other downsides, sure. But when the frontier companies start tightening the thumbscrews, price will influence what people consider good enough.
The solution is proxy everything. The agent doesn't have an api key, or yoyr actual credit card. It has proxies of everything but the actual agent lives in a locked box.
Control all input out of it with proper security controls on it.
While not perfect it aleast gives you a fighting chance when your AI decides to send a random your SSN and a credit card to block it.
With the right prompt, the confined AI can behave as maliciously (and cleverly) as a human adversary--obfuscating/concealing sensitive data it manipulates and so on--so how would you implement security controls there?
It's definitely possible, but it's also definitely not trivial. "I want to de-risk traffic to/from a system that is potentially an adversary" is ... most of infosec--the entire field--I think. In other words, it's a huge problem whose solutions require lots of judgement calls, expertise, and layered solutions, not something simple like "just slap a firewall on it and look for regex strings matching credit card numbers and you're all set".
Given a human running your system how do you prevent them damaging it. AI is effectively thr same problem.
Outsourcing has a lot of interesting solutions around this. They already focus heavily on "not entirely trusted agent" with secure systems. They aren't perfect but it's a good place to learn.
Unfortunately I don't think this works either, or at least isn't so straightforward.
Claude code asks me over and over "can I run this shell command?" and like everyone else, after the 5th time I tell it to run everything and stop asking.
Maybe using a credit card can be gated since you probably don't make frequent purchases, but frequently-used API keys are a lost cause. Humans are lazy.
You trust the configuration level not the execution level.
API keys are honestly an easy fix. Claude code already has build in proxy ability. I run containers where claude code has a dummy key and all requestes are proxied out and swapped off system for them.
This has been happening for years. Tgere's a great paper from microsoft on Deepspeed AI inference.
Basically the paper showed methods for how to handle heavy traffic load by changing model requirements or routing to different ones. This was awhile ago and I'm sure it's massively more advanced now.
Also why some of AI's best work for me is early morning and weekends! So yes, the best time to code with modern LLM stacks is when nobody else is. It's also possibly why we go through phases of "they neutered the model" some time after a new release.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before:
US: "please increase military spending"
EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries"
EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation"
EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland"
EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato"
EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you"
EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
> Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
It really did not mean that -- it meant to increase spending to the targets set by NATO and to meet realistic defense needs.
A lot of EU weaponry was and is produced in the EU and the US has known that all along, cooperated and fostered it. The Leopard tank, the Eurofighter, the Rafale, the Lynx, the FV432, the Gazelle -- there is a long list of domestic weapons systems. I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines. The US has at various times partnered with Europe on the development of these systems, and Europe has been able to produce almost all major weapons systems continuously since the end of World War 2.
Europe's much weakened defense posture -- and weakened defense industry -- are their own fault and the result of their own choices. At one time, European countries had much, much larger militaries and could sustain manufacturing of their specific weapon systems -- their own tanks, APCs -- but not after the military drawdowns following the end of the Cold War. There are at least 3 major domestic European tank types -- the Leopard, the Challenger and the Leclerc -- but only the Leopard is manufactured anymore. Europe should probably have consolidated on the Leopard a long time ago.
The US weapons are not "overpriced", and certainly not compared to European weapons, beyond the sense in which basically all western weapons are overpriced. One reason we see consolidation on US weapons in Europe is that the US weapons are frequently very good, having received a lot of use, but also because the US still has some scale in its manufacturing capabilities.
> I'm not sure if they still can do it, but the English made nuclear submarines.
Not really. The Polaris and Trident SLBM systems as well as the nukes they carry are US designs that the UK is allowed to use. And while their current PWR2 reactor is a British design, it is lacking. Therefore the next PWR3 design will be based on US S9G reactors.
The Trafalgar class were nuclear attack submarines made at Barrow-in-Furness shipyard in Cumbria. The current Astute class were also made there.
A nuclear submarine is one with nuclear propulsion, not nuclear weapons (just like a diesel-electric submarine is one with a diesel engine and batteries, not diesel weapons).
It never ceases to amaze me the contortions some people put themselves through to make this US administration seem sane or even vaguely interested in the flourishing of Europe, Canada or the wider west.
When the US points out faults with what EU is doing, the EU just digs its heels deeper out of spite, instead of self reflecting that maybe the US might be right.
It's not contortions, it's the truth, since these points have nothing to do with this US administration specifically.
Contortions is trying to blame EU's multi decade political faults on Trump.
Germany: Ties its economy to Russia despite warnings from the US
Russia: Invades Ukraine
Germany: Destroys its manufacturing economy after energy prices spike from decoupling from Russian gas
Germany and libs/dems: This is all Trump's fault
Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.
The whole point is the USA has been complaining that the EU was/is reducing itself to a vassal. No matter what the USA said or did before they didn't seem to care that they had no power anymore because the USA was there to take care of them.
The EU can't realign itself with China because that would destroy the last fragile bits of the EU economy that are left. They are already having issues with the excess supply lands on their shores even since the USA started tariffs with China. They can't deal with this long term.
No, the USA does not, in any way, and has never wanted or even accepted EU countries being independent. They wanted the EU to spend more on US weaponry, and maybe on their own - but would have vehemently opposed any attempt by any EU country to buy Russian, Chinese, Iranian or any such weaponry. They want the EU to stop regulating American companies, but they certainly don't want EU companies being too successful in the USA. They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
They certainly wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market, while of course insisting that the EU and other NATO members buy US built weaponry.
This is really ridiculous. There are many successful EU vendors of defense technology to the US military. Safran, Schmidt & Bender, Heckler & Koch, Saab, Glock, Fabrique National -- there is a long list. The USA has built real partnerships in these areas.
One amusing example is the C7 and C8. These are AR-15 (M16) variants made by Colt Canada and adopted by the militaries of the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway; and used by special forces in the UK.
Where are you getting your information from, that the US wouldn't allow wouldn't allow EU tech companies access to the US defense market?
The right play is to maintain relationships (including arms trading) with multiple major powers - as Canada's PM very deftly pointed out at Davos. Getting closer to China doesn't mean exchanging one master for another - it can and should be a way to increase the alternatives available, without going all the way in the other direction.
> The EU would also have opposed it if the US bought Russian, Chinese or Iranian weaponry.
This is such an implausible counter-factual that I can't even begin to imagine what would have actually happened. Still, I doubt any more than some "public letters" would have been issued, whereas I'm sure that the opposite would have resulted in actual economic pressure from the USA against the EU/NATO country that would have dared, under any administration.
I mean, you offered a basically similar, implausible counterfactual. I think we can agree that it is at least parties that the EU would have opposed purchases of Chinese, Russian or Iranian weapons by the USA and vice versa -- but Russia and Iran have been sanctioned for long periods of time (Iran, basically continuously) by both the EU and the USA, and Russia is the main territorial threat to the EU, so maybe only China is really an interesting possibility here.
Arms trading with China is probably not a good idea at all.
I don't see much sign of the EU becoming a Chinese vassal as in relying on it for defence in return for being told what to do. Trading with China is not the same thing.
I'm not sure that's how it is. Sure NATO countries aren't keen on any of the members being reliant on weapons from potential NATO enemies, for example Turkey buying Russian S-400s but it doesn't mean the countries aren't mostly independent.
Likewise NATO countries aren't keen if one of their members gets a leader who rolls out the red carpet to the Russians and threatens to invade other NATO states. It's not like all the members have to do what the US likes.
No. The US wants the EU to be a vassal, this should be obvious. Why would they want an EU that is more capable of acting against US interests?
The US wants EU to be a vassal, but got tired of paying the protection money for that. Now they are trying, and failing, to keep the EU under their control despite bringing less to the table every day.
Or more obviously the US views China as an existential threat that is about to pop.
US has numerous public docs stating China is prepping for war and has WW2 levels of production. US knows it will be out manufactured in this conflict.
So the US needs:
1. Fully focus on China without distractions.
2. Allies able to handle their own security or help in the fight.
3. Weaken the smaller axis forces as much as possible now before the big event occurs.
Through this lens it alls lines up pretty nicely. Every single world event including US poking europe all work towards these goals.
As of now:
1. EU is finally spending on spending
2. Nato has expanded (sweden)
3. Russia is weakened
4. Iran is weakened
5. Oil production is secure (venuzuela, US internal, middle east)
6. East asia is also spending more on military and heavily aligning with the west (more bases in phillipines)
To me this is going about as smoothly as anyone would expect the buildup to WW3 would go. And it's all going pretty well for western forces. The west is now stronger than it has ever been and getting stronger and the axis forces are all weaker and getting weaker.
You really think EU is going to ally with China over japan, south korea, philipines, and Australia?
You really think Russia's current number 1 ally is all of a sudden going to be best friends with EU?
China and North korea are ACTIVELY supporting a war in Europe! China has openly threatened Australia. There are literal north korean troops shooting Europeans right now. Who is north korea's number 1 supporter?
> US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
> US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
It's in both the EU and the US's interest to ensure NATO is the strongest partnership possible and the US's actions over the last few weeks have undermined it almost perfectly.
If you look at actions and results the western alliance is the strongest it has ever been and going to be significantly stronger over the next decade.
Again my point is a theory that either EU and US found a way to make EU citizens get behind military spending or the US found a way to manipulate EU to do it.
You'll know if US and EU are actually not aligned if EU sides with China over USA (which would be suprising to say the least)
Tell me which NATO country came crying, triggered NATO Article 5 and as a consequence a good number of EU NATO (and even non-NATO) soldiers have died for the sole interests of said country?
Why are you moving the goalposts from your parent's point?
Yes, the middle eastern wars were a huge issue form the US, but that doesn't explain EU own goaling itself for 20+ years with terrible policies and choices, with or without helping the US in the middle east.
I am saying that for last 30 years actions of European NATO counterparts was not "undermining the relationship".
Also since 2014 there was a 10 year plan devised to get everyone to strictly follow 2% budget commitment. Which happened before you and I even heard about trump starting a presidential campaign (or even if it was there was nothing about NATO, etc). This happened (better later than never) due to ruzzian attack on eastern Ukraine and with a nudge from Obama administration.
Due to 2022 total war from ruzzia against Ukraine - I believe right now there are talks to commit up to 5% in long run, with at least up to 3.5% in next decade.
I know that Europe doesn't have great PR team, but USA is getting better and better at gaslighting (ruzzia has decades of experience in divide and conquer tactics) that Europeans are allegedly freeloading. Europe has it's problems, but it's solving them democratically, whereas USA needs to see herself in a mirror, before it's too late.
My understanding is that the 2% budget commitment was met or exceeded by all NATO countries only as late as 2025. The Obama administration ended in 2017.
Europeans not taking care of themselves has been "undermining the relationship".
I see -- when you wrote "Which happened before you and I even heard about trump starting a presidential campaign..." you were referring to coming up with the plan, not meeting the target.
If this is some kind of move, fair play, but its ham fisted because rank and file westerners across the world have lost respect and faith in America, that wont be rebuilt by some other president. Nobody will want fighter jets etc controlled by America. Perhaps USA is fine with it but to me it feels severely damaging.
The western alliance as of today is about as strong as its ever been.
No it is not. Very few people in Europe believe that the US would uphold NATO Article 5. The US did arguably not uphold the Budapest memorandum. Allies have stopped sharing intelligence with the US in many areas because they don't trust the US anymore (Trump would burn allied assets in a Truth Social post). Trump has done a lot of bidding for Putin in the Ukraine-Russian war because he does not care about a good outcome for the rest of the Western alliance, he only cares about some peace prize or whatever.
The Western alliance is almost shattered, NATO is on its lasts legs (well, technically, NATO with the US, I think a new NATO with Canada and Europe would rise from its ashes).
"Shattered" as they have together massively increased military spending and weakened their enemies at every step through heavy cooperation. And added sweden to nato.
If you ignored words actions show a big difference.
No. The US does not want an independent EU.
It wants an EU that lets any US company do here whatever it wants.
It wants the EU to split up so it can force bad trade deals on our countries.
We don't want a trade deal that lets you sell chlorinated chicken or other stuff that is currently banned here.
The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff.
Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?
Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.
Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it.
We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.
Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
> I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."
My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
I would like to think US has EU interest at heart, a kind of tough love you would hope. But even if they don't all of their reactions have actively helped the US geopolitical goals.
> You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.
The US might or might not have Europe's best interest at heart or the European peoples' best interest at heart. But certainly not the European Union's best interest.
Honestly so often I take my EU consumer and worker rights for granted, only to hear that they simply don't exist for 90+% of Americans. Amd then I wonder how they even live over there.
I looked up to the US as a kid. Then I went to the US about 8-10 times in my teenage years (lost the count) due to my dad's work. We travelled through ~20 states. Only during those trips I realized in what poor life standards most Americans live. My wife lived in the US for a year and had the same experience. She also found that average Americans have real weird believes about the rest of the world (this was in the nineties), like they would ask her whether Hitler is still alive, whether Europe only has US radio stations, and some believed that Europeans don't have fridges.
Another thing that surprised me was the segregation. One time we went out to eat something while crossing some states. Apparently we drove into a black neighborhood, and we walked into a large place with a buffet. And suddenly almost everyone was looking at us completely stunned. Then the other shoe dropped, we were the only white people, and they were probably surprised that white people showed up. They were extremely nice to us, but for me it also uncovered how weird the US is.
Slavery was a major economic drain, it wasnt a boon to the us economy. There is a reason the south remained agricultural and under developed, it was slavery.
They're going to the US for the VC funds and the capital markets, which is America's great competitive advantage globally. In the few industries I went through (PaaS, Health, Finance) what I got was that the regulatory environment in Europe was welcome for being stable and clear, or existing at all in a few cases. There's been one case where I've seen regulation being an issue and preventing business from being fully conducted in Europe, and that was related to banking (in that instance that company had to be set up in Dubai).
One simple example is an extension can't see cross origin iframes. This means it could never do soemthing like fill out a payment form for you if it's an extension.
Limited computation and action space is another as well as bot detection systems.
For example a javascript method trying to automate something like microsoft word in an iframe will have a tough time because the second you inject code in there they will block you.
We honestly haven't faced any bot detection or blocking issues. Owning the browser layer exposes to you much more detection just look at Comet getting blocked on Amazon etc.
what permissions are you talking about? No user permissions/any insecure permissions are needed to navigate cross origin iframes, shadow DOMs and likewise. It comes down to your architecture choices and capabilities - rtrvr can navigate these diff realms without ever taking debugger or such insecure permissions
I think more likely we will unlock browser agents and no company will develop an agent api. They will have a user facing website used by agents or humans the same way.
This also completely sidesteps any actions Ebay decides. It will have all credentials for them and mfa. To ebay this will look identical to the user with no real way to stop it.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california, his office sued over those Trump-era water rules, arguing they violated environmental protections for endangered fish.... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020. So given those facts, I would argue that yes the current Governor is responsible for what happened 100%.
take a look at SB 79 is a 2025 California state law (Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener) that overrides local zoning limits to allow higher-density multifamily housing near major public transit stops, signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 10th 2025, despite local resistance by residents.
Gavin Newsom ran on building housing, and SB79 is him fulfilling his mandate from voters, "local resistance by residents" is why California has some of the most expensive housing in the world.
Gavin Newsom also vetoed AB 2903, the bipartisan bill for auditing of California's $24 billion spent and squandered on fixing the homeless problem, which only got worse. SB79 is another example of Newsom intent to change zoning laws to allow developers to build high density housing which is what the parent comment was about. if you want to be a shill for the governor, thats your business. It looks like willfull graft to me.
there would be no drought if the 2020 Federal regulations were followed. the only reason there's no drought today is because the federal government stepped in and finally opened up the water lines in the North coming south.
keep in mind there used to be a big freshwater lake (Tulare Lake) in the middle of California for at least ten thousand years.....
> In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california ... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020.
How would diverting water from Northern California, where drought was the worst in 2020, to the Central Valley possibly end the drought?
Filling up reservoirs that are upstream by moving water downstream sounds like quite the magic trick.
1. Trump’s order in 2020 had nothing to do with fire, so it doesn’t support your position that this has anything to do with fires.
2. The water management plan has nothing to do with where water flows to fight fires.
3. A legal fight in 2020 is not caused by a bill that was passed in 2025.
> there would be no drought in 2020
That’s not how droughts work. A drought is a lack of rainfall. Moving water can reduce the problems caused by a drought, but it cannot prevent a drought.
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
Who pays for a free model? GPU training isn't free!
I remember early on people saying 100B+ models will run on your phone like nowish. They were completely wrong and I don't think it's going to ever really change.
People always will want the fastest, best, easiest setup method.
"Good enough" massively changes when your marketing team is managing k8s clusters with frontier systems in the near future.
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