Cutting USAID & Science Won’t Balance the Budget

Cutting USAID & Science Won’t Balance the Budget

Reading the news you might think shuttering USAID and science funding will do something useful towards balancing the budget. It won’t. COMBINED these two represent about 1.5% of the US budget, about $140bn dollars. They are the yellow boxes in the first graph...
Fred Voccola Interview

Fred Voccola Interview

Robin Robins interviewed Fred Voccola onstage at the Q1 Producers Club meeting in Orlanda, FL on Feb 6, 2025. Here are some notes on that because I think it is interesting to hear what Fred has to say. But, he didn’t say much. The top takeaways: Voccola is the...
More AI Spend Than Oil

More AI Spend Than Oil

This is amazing: big tech is spending more on AI than big oil spent on their own infrastructure during the last boom. Surely there is a warning somewhere in this, although I’m a huge AI proponent and think that most of the spend will be justified.

Chinese Censorship: Llama vs DeepSeek

I wrote a program to evaluate Chinese AI models to see how easy it is to get them to break past their builtin censorship. There are a couple of interesting things occurring. First up, once on Hong Kong democracy DeepSeek R1 straight up said it wouldn’t comment....