My general point is that discussing the intricacies of potential local AI model usage is way over the head of the people that would even in theory care about the facile “AI PC” marketing message. Since no one is making it trivial for the casual user to actually do anything with those NPUs, then it’s all a moot point for this sort of marketing. Even if there were an enthusiast market that would use those embedded NPUs without a distinct more capable infrastructure, they wouldn’t be swayed/satisfied with just ‘AI PC’ or ‘Copilot+’, they’d want to know specs rather than a boolean yes/no for ‘AI’.

The issue is that to the extent that might even make sense, no major player is actually doing anything to help that happen. Every big player is exclusively focused on taking AI use cases into their datacenters, because that’s the way to maintain control and demand subscriptions.

If you did do it, then the users would complain that the ‘AI feature’ as executed on their puny NPU is really slow compared to what the online alternative does.

So that scenario is a hypothetical, and they are trying to make sales based on now. ‘AI PC’ doesn’t make any sense because people imagine what you describe, but in reality just cannot tell a difference because nothing works any differently for their ‘AI experience’. Their experience is going to be a few niche Windows features work that most people don’t even know about or would want.

Well, first Dell’s use of ‘confused’ is mainly a way to walk “away” from AI as a marketing strategy without having to walk it “back” (they can’t walk it back: Microsoft will keep Copiloting it up, the processor comparies will keep bundling NPUs, and the consumer exposure to AI will continue to have nothing to do with any of the ‘AI PC’ or not). So ‘confused’ is a way to rationalize the absence of ‘AI PC’ in their marketing strategy without having to actually change what they are doing.

But to the extent ‘confusing’ may apply, it’s less about ‘AI’ and more about ‘AI PC’. What about this ‘AI PC’ would impact your usage with AI, for most people the answer is ‘not at all’, since mostly it’s over the internet. So for the layperson, an ‘AI PC’ just enables a few niche Windows features no one cares about. Everything pushing around the ‘AI’ craze is well away from actually running on the end user devices.

More to the point, the casual consumer isn’t going to dig into the nitty gritty of running models locally and not a single major player is eager to help them do it (they all want to lock the users into their datacenters and subscription opportunities).

On the Dell keeping NPUs in their laptops, they don’t really have much of a choice if they want modern processors, Intel and AMD are all-in on it still.

It’s just a softer thing to say than ‘a lot of people hate AI and it’s alienating potential customers’. They can’t come out and say that out loud, they don’t want to piss off Microsoft too much and they aren’t going to try to do NPU-free systems (it’s not really possible). They aren’t going to do anything to ‘fight back’ against the AI that people hate (they can’t), so their best explanation as to why they pull back from a toxic brand strategy is that ‘people just don’t care’ rather than ‘people hate this thing that we are going to keep feeding’.

But if they need to rationalize the perspective, an “AI” PC does nothing to change the common users experience with the AI things they know, does not change ChatGPT or Opus or anything similar, that stuff is entirely online. So for the common user, all ‘AI’ PC means is a few Windows gimmicks that people either don’t care about or actively complained about (Recall providing yet another way for sensitive data to get compromised).

In terms of “AI” as a brand value, the ones most bullish about AI are executives that like the idea of firing a punch of people and incidently they actually want to buy fewer PCs as a result. So even as you can find AI enthusiastic people, they still don’t want AI PCs.

For most people, their AI experience has been:

• News stories talking about companies laying off thousands or planning to lay off thousands for AI, AI is the enemy
• News stories talking about some of those companies having to rehire those people because AI fell over, AI is crap
• Their feeds being flooded with AI slop and deepfakes, AI is annoying
• Their google searches now having a result up top that, at best, is about the same as clicking the top non-sponsored link, except that it frequently totally botches information, AI is kind of pointless

For those that have actually positive AI experience, they already know it has nothing to do with whether the PC is ‘AI’ or not. So it’s just a brand liability, not a value.

Ok, now that makes sense, and I can see the strategy.

Some unsubstantiated tip submitted during the 2020 election? Leave Trump’s name in and emphasize how tenuous Trump’s presence is in the Epstein files.

Your linked document appears to be a part of more substantial testimony, so redact Trump since it’s not really suitable for debunking.

I missed that, currently it’s published without that redaction… https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 8/EFTA00025010.pdf

When did they redact it?

Actually, that tip didn’t even pretend to redact Trump’s name. This was not one of the documents where someone had to highlight/copy/paste to ‘defeat’ the redaction.

There may be other places where they did redact his name, I don’t know. I haven’t bothered and the specific examples that people bothered to highlight weren’t Trump.

Actually, the tip doesn’t allege that it was Trump’s child, it alleges that Trump was present when her uncle killed the baby. It makes no allegation about who the father is, and sadly the list of candidates would be very large in that scenario. He was there near the birth, no claim about who was there for the conception.

I also hate to admit it, but that specific “credible evidence” was a tip submitted via an online form in October 2020. Certainly worth searching for/demanding more to see where, if anywhere, the tip went, but by itself it isn’t credible evidence. There’s so much more credible bad stuff about Trump that makes this quite believable, but until linked to more substantive stuff, probably best to stick to the more concrete stuff. I suspect there were quite a few crafted attempts at ‘October Surprises’ during the 2020 race and Epstein was a solid topic well known by the populace to try those sorts of things.

And I’d be more ok with LLM technology in general if not for:

• The rampant copyright infringement
• The overcommitment of financial and actual resources

In and of itself, ok a neat little trick with some utility so long as it isn’t taken too seriously.

The people wanted actual reasoning AI, not generative AI. They didn’t expect us to devote most of our nominal economic activity toward a few big tech companies to get it. They didn’t expect them to assert that text generators are ‘reasoning’ and when called on it declare that it’s not reasoning as humanity has known it, but here’s some buzzwords to justify us claiming it’s a whole new sort of reasoning that’s just as valuable.

Probably not invade, but some more targeted clandestine operations seem an actually possible outcome…

Practically speaking, if a foreign state feels they are going to get in a violent fight anyway, they may be more inclined to take action that doesn’t require a lot of people to make some key strategic changes.

Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.

Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…

So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.

As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…

Why would Putin enjoy a heavy US naval presence in the contested Artic Circle waters?

In theory, he might not like a heavy foreign naval presence, but Greenland is already NATO aligned. So he’d be trading a NATO aligned region for a US-only region in exchange for a fractured NATO. Sounds like a decent trade. Also keep in mind practically speaking they are probably equally unlikely to actually boost military presence much, and if they really wanted just that, NATO would probably mostly let them do it if USA paid for it, without USA having to take it.

The Danish are not meaningfully contributing to the Ukraine conflict. And there is no reason to believe the big EU militaries would stop feeding supplies to Ukraine if the US invaded Greenland.

This isn’t about just Denmark, which materially would barely be impacted right now since Greenland is doing practically nothing. It’s about the notion of one NATO member invading another, and the absolute clusterfuck that would bring. A USA versus European NATO scenario would be his dream scenario. See “Foundations of Geopolitics”, where it’s mostly about getting Russia’s opponents to fracture and ruin alliances:

Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

This is also the book that makes annexation of Ukraine the top priority, that it must be secured before the broader Russian agenda can be executed. It also says they need to make the UK isolated from the broader EU. They know that above all else alliances must be broken for them to stand a chance to seize power.

Yeah, absolutely nothing in the writing explained why he stuck with the emperor. I feel like the last thing he would have done based on his motivation to that point is stick with palpatine. Beyond being a psychopath, it doesn’t even make sense by those standards.

Empire strikes back set up a couple of plot twists that the series really couldn’t execute on. Nice in the movie since they got to leave it open ended, but bad for the series when they actually had to run with resolving those twists.

So it eventually destroys the company.

So it is just as good as the typical CEO

This is part of why I’m so disappointed in the LLM craze, they basically sucked all attention including some promising uses of machine learning in medicine.

Instead now we put every last memory module towards generative AI…

It is a different substrate for reasoning, emergent, statistical, and language-based, and it can still yield coherent, goal-directed outcomes.

That’s some buzzword bingo there… A very long winded way of saying it isn’t human-like reasoning but you want to call it that anyway.

If you went accept that reasoning often fails to show continuity, well then there’s also the lying.

Examining a reasoning chain around generating code for an embedded control scenario. At one point it says the code may effect the behavior of how a motor is controlled, and so it will test if the motor operates.

Now the truth of the matter is that the model has no access to perform such a test, but the reasoning chain is just a fiction, so it described a result, asserting that it performed the test and it passed, or failed. Not based on a test, but by text prediction. So sometimes it says it failed, then carries on as if it passed, sometimes it decides to redo some code to address the error, but leaves it broken in real life. Of course it can claim it works when it didn’t at all. It can show how “reasoning” can help though. If the code is generated based on one application, but when applied to a motor control scenario, people had issues and so generating the extra text caused it to zero in on some stack overflow thread where someone made a similar mistake.