Google likely won't rent compute from SpaceX, they have a substantial share of SpaceX (they own 5% of it) and need the IPO to be valued highly, so to prop up the IPO stock, they made this announcement, but if you read the fine print, both SpaceX and Google are allowed to cancel it at any time, as-in, after they cash out from the IPO.
I think there's likely many things even today, hidden papers, that discovered things, that no one has really decided to give it a shot and try, or figured out what can be done with it.
The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
Wasn't there a study whose result was that people are not actually running faster but the better results are mostly attributed to changing/improving grounds and better shoes?
Edit: Can't find the study anymore. This one [1] at least partially attributes to material.
Training has also evolved drastically over time at the highest end of athletics. Periodization, nutrition, recovery and the size of the talent pool being scouted are all occurring alongside the advances in materials and equipment. It would be difficult to separate them effectively.
Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only a matter of time.
Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?
I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.
Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.
At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
> I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata
This is only true for the lower financial strata though. It’s only the poorer people for whom shopping in so-and-so’s wife’s boutique is a meaningful experience.
Yep. Some of my pants have rips and visibly bad stitching because I ripped them and am bad at stitching. Then I see people at the same parties buying brand new ripped pants. At least I fit in, I guess.
> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate
sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)
There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.
Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?
I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.
The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.
You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.
The Wikipedia page has linked references. You’ll have to provide more evidence for me than your statement for me to disbelieve them after I read through to confirm that the Wikipedia article wasn’t misinterpreting or misquoting.
Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.
They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.
At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.
Funny that despite Neuromancer's prophesying the ubiquity of gene-splicing in future culture, William Gisbon specifically discounted it in this instance. As per the Finn: "Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak".
The way to determine how you know if you have picked the best horse to clone would be the secretary problem[1] for optimal stopping. This is somewhat plausible among polo horses because of the artificially small population size of pedigreed and trained horses.
The simple version of the problem is you ride about 1/e of the total population and then the first one that is better than all previous ones is your best option. For a pro polo player who would also breed and train others in the off season, over a multi-decade career, it's not perfect, but in aggregate, they are positioned to be pretty good.
Will there be black swan horses? Absolutely. They aren't even black swans, they're inevitable, but if your goal in the sport is to compound your average performance over time without significant setbacks (loss of a prize horse), then cloning a top player's best horse is a good bet.
I find the ethical discussions around horse cloning and sports lack a lot of domain competence in both what riding is, and the stewardship and biology it entails. From a sensory and ontological perspective, a horse is basically an alien being with a peanut sized brain that it falls to our species to be responsible for its existence. Cloning a few to adapt them for survival in our world is profoundly more humane than selling the surplus from breeding programs for meat or leaving them for predators and disease. Even though the philosophers comments about objectification were paraphrased for publication, their perspective is dumb.
> the whole point of these ETFs is to make sure I don’t get a say in the matter, since I’m a terrible stock picker
When you IPO, the company basically can set its own price. Then investors can buy it or not at that price. If you set the price so high it makes your company one of the biggest, it means automatically index funds will buy you at the price you set for yourself, no questions asked.
To prevent abuse from this, index funds that track "biggest stocks" have a waiting period, it was often 1 year. That way, by the time the index buys the stock, the price should be reflective of what the market think it's worth, not what the company decided it was worth when they IPOed.
These ETFs have always done this, because you want to hold the biggest company the market chooses as biggest, and not that the company decided.
I don't think a democracy is necessarily a recipe for utmost economic success, it's more about having the ability to replace the leadership if they are failing the people. Without that, it's only a matter of time until you're stuck with a leader who's terrible, even if you currently have a good one.
I think many democracies have been struggling though, to find a good leader, lots of democracies been replacing their leaders over and over in recent times. That's definitely something to worry about, why aren't good leaders applying to be on the ballot or being voted in?
The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.
What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.
I bought the Snapdragon Elite X over a year ago based on the promises of Qualcomm to bring solid Linux drivers at some point. Fast forward to today, Linux for that SoC is still a hot mess.
One of the hassles with ARM machines is that you might technically be able to boot Linux on it but your Thunderbolt, display out, wireless, etc. will lack support and not work.
Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but given the DGX Spark only runs Linux, and this is apparently a sibling in a laptop form factor, maybe it won't be too difficult to get Linux up and running effectively? Probably (a lot) more easily than Asahi on Apple Silicon, anyway.
I'm sure someone can get the CPU/GPU running but things like wifi/bluetooth/USB ports will be rough since they will presumably integrated with the chip in a non-standardized ARM way. Almost all of the ARM laptops are basically unusable with GNU/Linux.
Which ones have you tried? Right now I'm on an MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910.and wifi/USB/sleep/hibernate works. DT is going to be the death of ARM, but the real challenge has been to get the GPU to work under Firefox.
While thats true, its not what you think it is. WSL1 was VM in a traditional sense, it ran under windows. When you install WSL2, it basically changes your computer core OS to be a bare metal hypervisor (specialized version of Hyper V). Its the same concept as any cloud provider letting people provision VMs that run at native performance on the actual hardware. So WLS2 can talk to hardware like Graphics cards natively, and request ram on demand.
You can also install windows managers in WSL2. For example https://github.com/Lamarcke/i3-on-wsl. You can also install rainmeter on windows https://www.rainmeter.net/ if you want customizability. You can make windows look exactly like mac os with that.
WSL 1 was not a VM in a traditional sense. WSL 1 was a Windows subsystem which translated Linux syscalls into NT syscalls (e.g. file open). NT has capabilities there from its origins in the 90s supporting in theory user spaces for posix/os2/...
Interix was better! I look back fondly on my Gentoo GNU/Windows desktop. Imagine a full first rate native POSIX subsystem, with equal footing to Win32. The things we lost over the decades, I could cry...
The Philosophical Zombie thought process is dumb, because zombies don't exist, so the entire premise depends on something that quire frankly might be impossible for the very reason it is arguing against.
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