Safrane

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@EndClosedAI @tphuang Of course they do, but the appearance of state-guaranteed monopolies make these companies soft and uncompetitive.

It is good for them to fight for the market, until the point where it gets too hostile (e.g. forcing vendors/customers to pick a side).

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@albinojiginosis @kopite7kimi One of Jensen's pet peeves is letting AMD eat their lunch. Jensen's too proud for that to happen, and if AMD does something good he's going to hulk smash them.

That assumes AMD also want the consumer GPU market at the moment, which they don't.....because AI, AI, AI.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@RnaudBertrand That was last year, i.e. ancient history for KSA.

And then there's the quote "Another person familiar with the situation confirmed that the Saudi Central Bank no longer wanted to be publicly involved with the project, while adding that it continued to engage more discreetly."

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@GlennLuk Absolutely, no one trusts big AI with their secret sauce when OpenAI got caught red-handed by Apple for corporate espionage. That and Trump once banning use of Fable by foreign nationals.

It will be like Bridgewater/Qwen where businesses fine-tune open models for their own use.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@ykurotsu @mrjeffu Unlike the US, in Japan & the Westminster system cabinet ministers are career politicians who are given a portfolio, and ministers routinely gets shuffled. So it happens a lot.

The ministers carry out the party manifesto & the PM's wishes, by directing the civil servants.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@GlennLuk Their most important task is AI chips now that Chinese open-weight AI models will become increasingly important in business where full control is necessary for confidential internal info. Same reason why Jensen's preaching such models.

Someone's gotta make those golden shovels.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@six801972698970 @RnaudBertrand @Oliver0512 Exactly. A 50-story wall of rock & water hits the mountainside, and sloshes back into a 20-story wall of rock & water backflowing to the NW. Neither's survivable.

There's nothing to rescue; the destruction on the Chinese side's total & whatever remained are now deep in Nepal.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@RnaudBertrand As expected, the US will break the open source community. And the US will do it by forcing allies to ban the use of Chinese AI.

For example Australia and a few others already banned Deepseek for government employees.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@PeterLiuCASM @pstAsiatech No one's going to buy it.

It will be private equity/IPO, and the Chinese op will pay Elon license fees for the Tesla badge. In effect it becomes an XPeng or Nio.

Berlin may be sold to a different (maybe Chinese-owned) crowd.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@pstAsiatech Same thing happened with EVs. COVID border closures locked many Western auto journalists and experts out so no one in the West really knew what was going on, and what China's carmakers were cooking.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@tphuang CXMT is a potentially radioactive company liable to be hit with entity list sanctions on the day of the IPO, adding to that the uninformed fickleness of Chinese investors who buy on margin (just like those Koreans who lost their shirts), so of course they'll have to price it low.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@achilleanpro @mrjeffu @dynojp And you and I know that she won't.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@terrybythebay @academic_la Iran's playing a different game - The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve are about to hit the minimum mark, before the caves storing the oil start to weaken & collapse. And China/Japan cannot stop importing forever.

Iran is counting on Aug/Sep before the oil market turn into chaos.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@izakaminska Everyone knows it's a caricature, or are you implying that there's also something sinister in the 1987 movie Spaceballs?

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@izakaminska @mccrcknad ad hominem attacks often still has merit on their own.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@StevenMcGuinne9 @TheProf741 @Steveonstradey @PippaCrerar 1) Nigel did not actually get a majority of votes last time around.

2) The polling was before him making Clacton's electorate look like fools, by calling a useless by-election to cover his own arse, and with 1) it's reasonable that he will suffer the humiliation as punishment.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@NightsinFIlm @RnaudBertrand Yeah one just park on the side of the road and put up a sign. I've seen quite a few at suburban roads at weekends in Australia and NZ. Some even put up gazebos, tables and chairs. Usually watermelons/cherries.

You drive/walk by, see the price, stop your car/walking and go buy.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@RM_Transit @volkswaagen1 And then you have stuff like this: https://t.co/Mk5e9gHT3n

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I found this absolutely hilarious.

So China has this nationwide policy called "Green Channel" (“绿通”): if you transport fresh produce like fruits or veggies, you don't need to pay highway tolls.

It's real, I checked, here is a government website describing the policy: https://t.co/1ktAm1lL1c

This is meant to reduce food costs and reduce friction in food logistics. If you're a small farmer producing - say - watermelons in Xinjiang, thousands of kms from Eastern cities, highway tolls alone could cost more than the watermelons themselves are worth.

There is, however, a loophole that's going viral on Chinese social media these days 👇 It applies to pickup trucks! So if you have a pickup truck, you just need to pack the back with cheap cabbage and - voilà - free highway for you 😂

So in China these days, if you go on the highway, you're increasingly seeing more and more pickup trucks packed with fruits and veggies in the back 😅

It actually doesn't go wasted and may even work in favor of the policy. When they arrive at destination, the drivers do sell the produce so, on top of waiving highway fees, they even make a profit - basically becoming the small-scale food distributors the policy was designed to support.

The video describes a driver from Zhengzhou, Henan who reportedly bought 500 yuan of cabbage, drove toll-free to Xinjiang, sold it for 1,500, then loaded up watermelons for the return trip and sold those back in Henan. He saved 2,000 RMB in highway fees and probably got his gas paid by the food profit!

I'm myself planning to drive the whole summer touring Western China with my family in an RV: I wonder if it applies, I might try it! If you're in China and see a French guy driving a RV packed with cabbage, don't get surprised 😂

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@RM_Transit @volkswaagen1 It's an issue in China due to its size. You can't ensure that every vehicle (e.g. a truck w/ Tibetan plates) entering a tollway is registered to an account. And you have the cash economy.

Here in Melb unpaid tolls is a crime, and many cheat the system with fake/no plates etc.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@LambDownUnder @Mr_Armageddon1 That explains Big W.....I heard they're bleeding money from that one.

[Safrane @Safrane4]

@LambDownUnder It's a bloated organisation with high costs, especially land banking. I got two Woolies in a 5 minute walk from each other, it's cannibalising sales but who cares as long as a competitor doesn't set up shop, right?

2 players isn't enough, Aldi keeps them honest but we need more.