gizmo

Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor. It's not a perfect system, but it's much better than direct bank debit where the customer has very little recourse. There is also a significant privacy issue. Today my bank can only see the sum total of my credit card purchases but not what I buy and from which vendor. Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs. I know credit cards get a lot of hate (here and elsewhere) but as a consumer I think they're exceptionally convenient.

If businesses are rational agents that seek to maximize profit then yes you would expect agentic AI to eat SaaS. But this is not the world we live in. So much of business could be automated with 1990s technology. A model that predicts societal change should also be able to explain why this time it's different. Historical precedent says we should expect:

- modest incremental gains in productivity

- society will remain mostly the same

- very few people will take advantage of the opportunities unlocked by AI

No DDR4 is affected too. It's a simple question of production and demand, and the biggest memory manufacturers are all winding down their DDR4/DDR5 memory production for consumers (they still make some DDR5 for OEMS and servers).

The big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market.

I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.

Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.

The problem with your perspective is that citizens can still tell right from wrong. And the public is much less Machiavellian than those in charge. The people can change how their leaders act, but won't when they believe any attempt to steer towards pro-social geopolitics is pointless.

I should also point out that some countries are much more bellicose than others, in direct contradiction with your nihilist view.

Flops per watt is relevant for a new data center build-out where you're bottlenecked on electricity, but I'm not sure it matters so much for existing data centers. Electricity is such as small percentage of total cost of ownership. The marginal cost of running a 5 year old GPU for 2 more years is small. The husk of a data center is cheap. It's the cooling, power delivery equipment, networking, GPUs etc that costs money, and when you retrofit data centers for the latest and greatest GPUs you have to throw away a lot of good equipment. Makes more sense to build new data centers as long as inference demand doesn't level off.

For those who don't know, the French (and British) instigated the Suez crisis. It was a highly illegal attempt at regime change in Egypt and the US along with the USSR and United Nations rightfully pressured the French to stop. Bizarre example to illustrate the need for military independence.

When AI tools make it easy to cruise through coursework without learning anything then many students will just choose to do that? Intellectual development requires strenuous work and if universities no longer make students strain then most won’t. I don’t understand why you think otherwise.

Google is the favorite to win AI by a mile. Not only do they have some of the best AI people, they have absolute unmatched distribution with youtube, search, gmail, docs, chrome, and android. As impressive as OpenAI is they don't have anything except for their brand. It should be clear by now that nobody has a strong lead in training. Nobody has a strong lead in access to compute. Nobody has a killer app because the interface is just chat or voice. And what happens when you can't compete on product? Distribution wins. And Google's advantage here is almost insurmountable. Google can fumble the next 2 years and still end up on top.

You describe the "fake email jobs" theory of employment. Given that there are way fewer email jobs in China does this imply that China will benefit more from AI? I think it might.

Not every business loses 95% of their market cap in 3 years. Many companies bleed out slowly as they struggle to retain their market share in the face of new competition. This is normal. It's not normal for a business to just collapse out of nowhere.

Did shareholders and investors collectively make money from the whole ordeal? Looking briefly at the numbers, it looks like they didn't. During the profitable years IRobot made $639 million (sum total) but they lost -$737 in the collapse that followed. No dividends were paid either during the good years. Shareholders were left holding the bag.

Building a business from nothing to IPO is a real accomplishment and I won't diminish that. However, if a business collapses and incinerates more money than it has ever made during the sum of all profitable years calling it a "real success" is a bit of a stretch.

I think that the database layer is the wrong layer for reconciliation of change sets.

The main problem with any sync system that allows extensive offline use is in communicating how the reconciliation happens so users don't get frustrated or confused. When all reconciliation happens as a black box your app won't be able to do a good job at that.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to go through the trouble of creating a less powerful engine because it's not economically advantageous then the consumer should just get the better engine by default.

It's ridiculous and insulting to buy a new car (a big purchase for many) to be presented with options where the manufacturer went through considerable effort to _make the car worse_. Manufacturers should be in fierce competition to offer the best cars at the lowest price point.

Chinese competitors will absolutely crush Volkswagen and Volkswagen will have nobody to blame but themselves.

This is all sizzle no steak. Marketing without substance, frankly.

A proof-of-concept doesn't provide any value. For Linux to gain further adoption a gargantuan effort is needed to get things from 90% done (or 90% working) to fully working. Any Linux distribution is already suitable for government use. Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian. They're all fine distros. The only remaining problem is quality. Things don't work or suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. For government use that's a deal-breaker. It's also a deal-breaker for gamers. Which is why SteamOS has been relentlessly fixing reliability issues. So if I had to bet on a linux distro going mainstream, it would be that one.

Her personal politics are not extremist in the conventional sense. She is a center-right technocrat at heart. She believes people like her have to protect Europe against the idiot masses. When she dismantles European civil rights she does so for the "greater good". People can't be trusted to vote in their own best interest, or so the logic goes. She thinks she and people like her protect Europe against the rising populist right. I think she's badly mistaken and that the populist right is fueled by EU arrogance, and the GP probably shares that view.

Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.

All systems crash "under memory pressure" but there are no details provided that show what the actual issues are? You can write software that is very robust under memory pressure in a low level language, for instance by forking into multiple worker processes. If a process dies because of OOM this would then not affect any of the other processes. The kernel will do all necessary cleanup and do so nearly instantly.

I also don't understand why under "extreme load" there would be excessive memory pressure in the first place. When a server can't keep up with incoming requests it doesn't need to continue spawning new workers/goroutines. You don't need to .accept() when you don't have the resources to process the incoming request.

Very strange article.

- He means written dialogue. Think Plato.

- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise

US startups also don't care about US regulations. AirBnB, Uber, Tesla, Coinbase and many others break the laws in the US they don't like. I'm not making the moral argument that breaking laws is always wrong. Instead I'm simply pointing out that breaking "bad laws" is culturally accepted in Silicon Valley but not in Europe. Silicon Valley startups do what it takes to win.

After WW2 Volkswagen didn't change their name or Nazi branding (if you haven't seen the uncropped version of the VW logo you're in for a surprise) exactly because people in Allied countries refused to buy German cars after the war. Even if VW or BMW or Mercedes had rebranded and apologized it would have made no difference. Their ties with Nazi leadership was too strong for any apology to be credible. What Frenchman would buy a Nazi car over a French car in 1950s? And so the German car companies focused on domestic sales, which meant they had to appeal to humiliated (former) Nazis for sales for which any rebranding would have been a negative.

German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.

Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know.

I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.

That so misses the point. Not all work that pays contributes equally to society. Some jobs that pay well (because they are of value to the employer) are harmful to society as a whole. If you harm society for 40 or 50 hours every week you're not going to make up for that with an hour or two of volunteer work.

Phones and tablets are already among the most energy efficient devices. A tablet sips power compared to a desktop PC. Isn't energy use totally dominated by lights, cooling and heating of the spaces we inhabit?

Repairability rules I like. Rules about OS updates are good too. But the energy claims look like BS to me:

In 1990, the annual electricity consumption for (networked) standby of the base stations and charging cradles of cordless landline phones was 37.1 kWh. In 2020, without measures, this would have been 24.5 kWh. Due to the Ecodesign standby regulation, this was reduced to 16.1 kWh in 2020, a 34% saving. Due to the addition of the 2023 Ecodesign regulation on phones, this is expected to further reduce to 8.0 kWh in 2030, a 63% saving versus no measures.

Am I reading this wrong or does this almost open up any server bound to localhost to the outside?

I think proxy_pass will forward traffic even when the root and try_files directives fail because the junction/symlink don't exist? And "listen 80" binds on all interfaces doesn't it, not just on localhost?

Is this clever? Sure. But this is also the thing you forget about in 6 months and then when you install any app that has a localhost web management interface (like syncthing) you've accidentally exposed your entire computer including your ssh keys to the internet.

1. Europe joined the US willingly in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with article 5 NATO countries could have protested against it or provided minimal non-combat support.

2. This isn't about blame or NATO or ethics. This is about the Economist rewriting history.

Much of what this article writes is not true:

- You can absolutely get in trouble for voicing political speech in Europe. We've seen plenty of headlines of people who got fired in Europe for making offensive statements. In the UK in particular criticizing the wealthy is extremely dangerous because of slander laws.

- Europe absolutely does not have an extremely generous immigration policy. An estimated 24,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. And this is because of European policy. It's because Europe refuses to honor refugee/asylum claims at the airport desperate people are forced to cross the sea in rickety dinghies.

- Europe does not track wealth of its citizens. Many companies are privately held. Many assets are held overseas. So how does the Economist know wealth inequality is low? But it is known that every time a heat wave hits Europe many elderly die because they can't afford to cool their home.

- “Nobody in Europe is even casually implying they will invade other countries.” Did the Economist forget that European soldiers actually joined the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq? Europe also used its military to topple the Gaddafi government in Libya. Europe doesn't just talk about invading other countries, it actually has invaded other countries in recent history. Must be amnesia! (You might believe these invasions were morally justified, but that's beside the point.)

- It's true that Europe does not have out of control tech execs who boast about throwing bits of Europe into the wood chipper. But this is because Europe's entirely depends on the US for tech and we don't have any oddball "founder CEO" types. There is no European Bezos, Gates, Jobs, or Musk. CEOs in Europe are professional managers. It's not the same.

The article isn't horrible, but it makes way too many claims that don't hold up to slight scrutiny.

All too often it's those companies that worry excessively about saving a few dollars that also have meetings for everything, glacial decision making, poor strategic focus, tons of internal politics, and so on.

Security is not that simple. Duplicate HTTP headers, utf-8 in HTTP headers, case insensitivity etc has resulted in countless security vulnerabilities over the years. Do you reject suspicious requests? Do you process the request but filter out invalid headers? What about suspicious headers being returned from the app being served? You have to make choices here and if you choose unwisely bad things happen. The spec is of little help here, because web browsers and other web servers (and downstream app servers) don't adhere to the specs being sometimes too lenient and in other times too restrictive in what they do.

Just take a look at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-5.5 to get an idea of how any choice made by a web server can blow up in your face.

The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring. Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.

The new reserve currency won't be a single country's currency but a basket of currencies, where the ratio contribution of component currencies gets adjusted every once in a while.