HN user
It’s really surprising. When Apple announced the multi-billion dollar deal with Google to power Apple Intelligence I thought great things were coming. Instead we are getting more and more bad news: delayed Pro models and AI leadership leaving. I wonder if Apple know something the rest of us don’t know or if they are already regretting their decision.
Ok, weird, I don’t know how the system works then. My wife is Colombian and on her last entry she just scanned her passport and that was it.
No, if you don’t change your passport you only have to scan your fingerprints once in the EU.
I believe the coding tool revenue is an important factor right now but not the endgame. The AI companies have to become consumer products to justify their gigantic valuations. We always talked about the “super apps” - one app that fulfills most consumer needs, like WeChat in China. OpenAI is the company most visibly making a huge bet on becoming a “consumer super device”, even designing their own hardware to stop being dependent on Apple and Android. The long term battle is not AI companies vs SaaS, but rather AI companies vs big consumer brands - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon. Imagine having the ultimate digital assistant that you can throw any task at. Under the hood it creates its own code and interfaces on the fly to help you accomplish your task. By using LLMs as coding assistants we are all training them to become really good at it. If the newcomers succeed to deliver the ultimate digital assistant first, then even a monster like Apple could become obsolete.
I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…
I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
Maybe not a relevant experience then, as most people in this forum look for startup advice and take on external investment.
You can totally setup a Inc or LLC equivalent pretty fast in Germany as long as you stick to the standard. What he is setting up is basically an LLC owning an Inc.
Looks like he got hot milked by “advisors” who insisted in an overly complicated setup. Setting up a UG is fast and easy as long as you stick to the standard and you don’t need advisors or lawyers.
You can do the same in Germany. Costs 29 Euros with an online form. Once the sole proprietorship is setup you apply for your tax id and done. The whole process took 2 weeks in my city. Legally you can even start invoicing as soon as you registered your business.
The problem with OP is that he chose an overly complicated structure. Probably got milked by lawyers and advisors.
I don’t know the specifics but the OP chose a complicated setup. Why not just use a GmbH which is the equivalent to an Inc in the US? The capital requirement is 12500 in the bank not 25000 as stated. There are online services that run the whole process for you similar to Stripe Atlas. Even setting up a UG (with 1 euro stating capital) is very easy but you have to upgrade to a GmbH once you receive investment (investors usually demand it). For the whole process there are standard forms. You only need to pay lawyers if you want to personalize your setup.
Maybe OP was just not advised well which is surprising given the amount of information available online (startup guides for Germany)
For me it was the missing piece when working with Claude Code. I am a PM by formation so neither do I know how to design nor do I know how to code but I am pretty good at describing what I want and why. I just played with Claude Design for a while and it made it really easy to explore different solutions, reorganize the interface, adjust little detail with the "comment" function, move buttons around, etc. Then export to Claude code including the design system, and I spend way less time writing a spec and can focus more on corner cases and the ugly details. 2 years ago I still had to hire a freelance designer and a developer for small projects, now for the fraction of the cost I am totally independent and can iterate as much as I want. We always mention that "the design is not unique" or "the software architecture is not clean and the code to verbose" - I get it I managed Series C startup product teams before I got sick of the VC shit show. Now I am working mostly with lifestyle businesses and SMBs that have the ambition to be profitable - and average is good enough for them. They gain access to custom designed software for specific use cases which was completely out of reach for them 3 years ago. Custom solutions meant working with mediocre, overpriced agencies creating "solutions" with Wordpress. Anything I can do with the Claude stack is on higher level at a fraction of the cost. And as long as it works and looks good those business don't give a ** about unique design and scalable software engineering.
I have never used mastodon, but why is it so much better than X (twitter)? I also follow a small group of people on X that I find interesting and I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab. I know that the “For You” tab abyss is right there. I opened it once, was shocked by all the crap the system assumed I would like, and never went back. The good thing is that nobody forces me to use it. I am perfectly fine in the “following” feed and not exposed at all to recommender systems trying to grab my attention. Only the ads in the feed annoy me - and they are so bad that I wonder how X makes any money.
Sounds Like you rediscovered the “opportunity solution tree” (Teresa Torres) and were skipping a crucial step in product management / UX which is product discovery. I would suggest not to generalize your learnings by saying “why most product planning is bad…” and rather use a more humble title “why our product planning was bad and what we did about it”.
it's quite confusing to see half a dozen models to choose from in the UI. In an ideal world, ChatGPT would just abstract away the decision
Supposedly that’s coming with GPT 5.
Exactly, they like to call it “bringing new energy to an old industry”.
Why is everyone so sure that technology can’t be the moat? Why are you convinced that all AI systems will be very similar in performance and cost, hence be interchangeable? Isn’t Google the perfect example that you can create a moat by technological leadership in a nascent space? When Google came along it was 10X better than any alternative and they grabbed the whole market. Now their brand and market position make it almost impossible to compete. I guess the bet is that one of the AI companies achieves a huge breakthrough and a 10X value creation compared to its competitors…
Stock price is a bet on the future: - intel: uncertain future for their X86 business lines. AMD caught up and even overtook Intel in desktop, laptop and SERVER. Extremely high Capex on Fab business with uncertain outcome. Can they really compete with TSMC, Samsung, etc? No real AI growth story to tell, (yet).
- AMD: took the X86 crown from Intel in some areas. Also suffers from big threat of ARM processors. The bet with AMD is that they will be able to compete with NVIDIA to become a major GPU provider in the AI boom.
Government should force google to give competitors access to its search index so that they have a real opportunity to build a competing service on top of it, AI or search. The same way monopoly telcos were forced to open infrastructure to competing service provides.
Google products are getting increasingly crappy. Would be great to see what others could build with their information monopoly.
The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.
It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?
I talked to a fair share of late stage VCs and they like to think of themselves as “category king makers” - the term itself reflects the general sense of humbleness in the VC community. Besides the “venture predation” described in the paper “category king making” also entails cutting off potential competitors from funding. The theory is that once a Softbank or Sequoia have chosen their horse other VCs will be discouraged to invest in the same category as it “is taken”. And many times the VCs actually act behind the scenes and actively discourage their peers to seek an investment in a competitor of their “category king”. It truly is a disgusting game to watch once you have been close enough. VCs for better or worse are the essence of the tech ecosystem. Make the world a better place. my a* :)
If you are a ChatGPT Plus user you can also use ChatGPT 4 with the AskYourPDF plugin. The advantage is that you can just feed the PDF through your own URL and don't have to upload it to a third party.
I guess I was too precise when I wrote "Brazilian Portuguese" and caused some confusion. ;) It is actually quite different from European Portuguese, especially when spoken.
Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English. I have lived or worked in countries where those languages are spoken. Each language feels like a unique perspective on life and unlocks the understanding of a new culture for you. When talking to a taxi driver or reading a local newspaper you will be confronted with words or phrases that have no literal translation into your mother tongue. For a moment you are left without clear references and you have to make a significant cognitive effort to understand a concept that does not exist in your native culture (and therefore language). The construction of new references and meanings is what makes learning a new language all worth it. Understanding a new way to describe this world (while ideally living in a different culture) can make you a more empathetic, curious, and serene human being - in opposition to the polarizing black and white thinking that dominates most parts of the world these days.
The euro has actually recovered about 10% from its low last year. The problem is Apple’s pricing strategy. Very static and never sacrificing not even a little bit of margin.
There is nothing but economic interest. If you want to predict how any company, startup or not, will behave just look at how they make money. In 99% of the cases companies act according to their business model. It is that simple, there is nothing else. All the "we will make the world a better place" rhetoric and mission statements are just recruiting and PR BS.
At this stage it looks very unlikely this car will ever make it to production. They ran out of money and try to save the program through crowdfunding https://electrek.co/2023/01/26/the-future-of-solar-evs-dims/
Samsung
“ MacBook Pro with M2 Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro.”
You could simply do nothing with it and let nature take back the land. Natural restoration.