Everyone knows third time’s the charm!

Lightning, made by Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the half marathon in 50min 26sec, according to a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as E-Town, where the race kicked off.

The performance by the robot marked a significant improvement from last year’s inaugural race, during which the winning humanoid finished in 2hr 40min 42sec, more than double the time of the human winner of the conventional race. Most robots were unable to finish.

I’m genuinely quite surprised by how much these humanoids have improved in the span of a year. I thought that based on last year’s result, there was no way that they could get under an hour, let alone beat the human record. Next year’s race should be quite interesting to watch.

2019, the U.S. Treasury Department accused Dehghan of using a company in Hong Kong as a front to procure more than $1 million in sensitive equipment for use by companies with ties to Iran’s missile program and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

That didn’t stop him. A Treasury designation is meant to prevent a company from being used to acquire restricted goods.

The city’s ease of setting up new companies and moving money has made it a global financial hub and a useful spot for evading sanctions.

It’s quite ironic that the financial and legal framework that Britain had set up is making Hong Kong so suitable for avoiding punitive western sanctions.

One really important takeaway from this, as professor Marandi mentioned, is that the ceasefire is also time for Iran to replenish their missile and drone stockpiles and reorganize their forces. Yes, the US and Israel are certainly using this opportunity to regroup and prepare for the next strike as well, but Iran is not sitting idle, and they can continue to churn out munitions faster than the US can produce interceptors. He also makes it clear that the Iranians were largely expecting this negotiation to fail, so it wasn’t some ‘fell for it again’ moment.

Hopefully Iran uses this ceasefire, however long it lasts, to make a sprint to the bomb. I don’t think anything can truly offer sufficient deterrence other than a verified nuclear weapons test. I have no idea how quickly they can manage that, however.

Interestingly, one of the biggest winners in the region from this war could be Oman. They emerged practically unscathed from this war, with all their infrastructure intact, and they suddenly get a cut from the Hormuz toll system that Iran will set up.

Of course, tourism and international investment would likely take a hit, as with every other country in the region, but I think the new toll would more than make up for those losses, and they can take direct advantage of increased oil prices with their undamaged oil infrastructure.

I think he’s part of Drop Site, so it’s almost certainly a joke rather than a deranged fantasy.

I assume the 11th one is Palantir?

Iran’s ability to externalize the consequences of this war (i.e. cause a global oil and economic crisis) is a point of leverage that the other countries invaded by the US lacked. This means that the war isn’t likely to settle into the kind of stagnant forever war that characterized Afghanistan, bur rather force the US to either keep escalating or back down. I believe the US would keep escalating until they suffer significant casualties, which might create enough domestic and international pressure for them to formally offer genuine concessions.

Alternatively, they (or the Israelis), may decide to go for the nuclear option instead. The same justification that the US used to nuke Japan, that they are fanatics in highly defensible terrain and thus too costly to defeat conventionally, can easily be repackaged and sold to the public for Iran. In that case, I can’t really make any predictions beyond that point. I really, really hope that doesn’t happen, but I can’t dismiss this possibility either.

I don’t see what’s wrong. They have enough diesel for the current quarter. That’s as far as anyone should care about, right?

Honestly, even if you believe transformer-based LLMs running on GPUs are the end-all, datacenters are still such a rapidly depreciating asset just with incremental improvements in processing technology. Add in the possibility of ASICs or a different computing substrate entirely, as you mentioned, and you’re looking at these multi-billion dollar investments becoming obsolete in a few years.

Well, as long as he focuses on the actual windmills and not the wind turbines, it’s not too big of a deal. Too bad he doesn’t seem to know the difference.

Clearly, they just needed to show some guts and everything would’ve worked out.

You’re telling me they planned a whole two quarters in advance? Impossible!

Logistically speaking, how would that work? Isn’t the whole point of being in a single market to prevent this exact sort of economic singling out?

The US had vastly more competent senior officials during Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam, and were still running around like headless chickens. They now have a cabinet of dunces fighting against an enemy more prepared than any of the previous ones. It appears that they are currently following the hallowed strategy known as not having a plan.

Llama 3.1 8B Seems like a pretty weird choice to me, given that it’s already pretty outdated at this point. I know the Qwen team will be launching a new 9B model soon, so maybe they’ll switch to that soonish.

Excellent. I’m guessing they still need to import the cells and/or wafers before assembling the panels, but it’s a step in the right direction for building up domestic industry and reducing exposure to oil.

Some administration officials are, in fact, discussing ways to limit Chinese investment in the U.S. on national-security grounds, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is absolutely comical. They hate China so much they want to stop getting money from them.

Automating and decarbonising mining should definitely a high priority. It is nearly impossible to eliminate health and safety risks for miners, so any progress in keeping people away from the mines is pretty nice.