Mining is first and foremost a material logistics problem. If I need to study significantly more material to retrieve a economically viable amount of sight after elements it will be always a difficult proposition.
The economics are out of whack in the mining industry in the 2020s as well.
North American mining firms tend to be private sector, but in Asian countries like China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam the mining conglomerates and processors are state-owned enterprises, or in the case of Japan and South Korea, private sector firms with a controlling stake owned by a sovereign development fund.
This is why we need a Temasek or Mubadala for America.
I feel like we'll see more and more of that style of ownership in the US when it comes to mining. We're already seeing the government buying stakes in semiconductor companies, as well as subsidizing manufacturing.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.
American and European pension funds do not act like Sovereign Development Funds (SDFs) - they tend to act under a mandate of "wealth safeguarding", and tend to target dedicated asset pools without short-term liabilities. A fund like CalPERS has an added issue that it has become hyper-politicized.
The only North American pension funds I can think of that act like SDFs is the Ontario Teacher's Venture Growth arm, but they've begun pulling back from venture and growth funding.
> But the US in general hates "state owned enterprises" in the form that China has
We don't need a China style model tbh.
A coordinated trust banking model with a controlling stake owned by an agency or ministry like in Japan and South Korea is probably a better analogue for the US - in most cases we have the IP, human, and financial capital, it's coordination that is lacking. The issue is antitrust fundamentalists would balk at that kind of government enabled consolidation. The IRA and CHIPS would have been steps in the right direction, but who knows now with this admin. They are discussion SWFs but I do not trust their ability to execute.
I would love In-Q-Tel to transition into something similar for Cybersecurity and Enterprise SaaS, but they have issues.
There's a really huge difference. Membership of the group is not secret nor are the proceedings of their conferences etc. They have a twitter handle for goodness sake - that's not what you do if you actually want your society to be secret.
The thing they do is publish work by all members under a single pseudonym.
I just spent a good 2 hours trying to debug a SM6 Vulkan issue with unreal engine using an LLM, it had got me to good state but UE kept falling to load a project, it transpired that the specific error message would provide a fix as the top Google result, which I found when I eventually decided to look for myself.
LLM did help a lot to get some busy work out of the way, but it's difficult to know when you need to jump out of the LLM loop and go old skool.
Fwiw I think the ratio of times I needed to go to google for a solution instead of an LLM is like 20:1 for me so your mileage may vary. Depends a lot on the specific niche you're working in.
Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.
In the interest of full disclosure my setup is quite esoteric for unreal dev. Linux and nixos no less. To be honest I'd probably have given up on nixos long ago without LLM support. It's actually really quite handy to be able to share a declarative specification of my environment.
It's also extremely exploitative, the premise is actually that we will offload the burden of raising next generations and then effectively steal those that we need to prop up what would naturally be hollowing societies.
Yes, if the process works in the way it's being sold to us, it skims off their smartest, most talented and ambitious people--the people they most need to improve conditions in their own nations.
No one is stealing anything, millions willingly immigrate, they get to live better lives (according to their desires) and the home country gets back increased trade, transfer of capital, tourism, and many other things.
It has been legal for quite some time, why do you think companies and high worth individuals provide so much money to the political elites, and quite often to both sides. It's just that Trump is quite vulgar and has thrown out any pretense, but they were all quite guilty.
