larrysalibra

Ben's article "distills" down to 2 reasons that US frontier labs shouldn't be "afraid":

1. US frontier lab unit economics are better 2. US frontier labs are moving up the stack making tools that are "stickiness" and will prevent users from switching.

For 1...he doesn't provide any evidence for US lab unit economics being better...the major input to unit economics is electricity...which is cheaper in China. And building data centers and connecting them to electricity is both cheaper and an order of magnitude faster in China. The main input that US labs might have an advantage in is in cost/access to chips, but that given the level of chip investment in China it seems unlikely to hold.

For 2...there's little evidence these tools are sticky. At least in programming, the trend seems to be tools like opencode that support multiple models and providers.

And even when they are sort of sticky, as we know on hacker news, people figure out how to point the tools they like to competing models even when the app doesn't official support it.

And every improvement in model capability makes it increasingly easier to make your own tools.

Wrote more on this in a blog post that has an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982061

Direct link: https://larrysalibra.com/ben-thompson-is-wrong-us-frontier-l...

Thank you for reading! The prices in the iea chart seem to be a few years old.

This list (https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/) has US prices at 14.9 US cents/kwh and China at 10.8 US cents/kwh as of Q2 2026.

Tbh hard to tell how accurate those are either.

The larger issue is that (apparently) new US data center bills aren't getting connected to the grid because of lack of capacity (and the lack of planned growth in that capacity) compared to the very high growth in Chinese installed capacity.

Can you either at build time or runtime specify a minimum macOS version? No one running macOS 26 (for example) is using a 10 year old WebView.

You're right, it is an easy technical fix.

Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan.

Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed".

I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!

Wow thanks! I just ran into my claude code session limit like an hour ago and tried the method you linked and added 10 CNY to a deepseek api account and an hour later i've got 7.77 CNY left and have used 3.3 million tokens.

I'm not confident enough to say it's as good as claude opus or even sonnet, but it seems not bad!

I did run into an api error when my context exceeded deepseek's 128k window and had to manually compact the context.

I was skeptical at first but like it a lot after trying out the betas. It's all very intuitive if you've used visionOS before and the potential readability problems aren't really an issue in practice.

If he was on a student visa in Hong Kong he was able to access public health care for close to free.

All Hong Kong residents are eligible (anyone with an HKID and permission to remain >= 180 days).

This was a homework assignment in my second grade class!

The next day we had to follow our instructions exactly in class to make the sandwich which was hilarious. A formative experience for me!

Yes, it’s still open.

10am to 9:30pm every day.

https://surl.amap.com/ooIMl6hgaqj

I tried Deepseek R1 via Kagi assistant and it was much better than claude or gpt.

I asked for suggestions for rust libraries for a certain task and the suggestions from Deepseek were better.

Results here: https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/1883016984021090796

under 16 year olds cannot vote, are not represented and have no recourse.

when one group votes to make rules for another group that cannot vote, it can be called many things, but "democracy" is not one of them.

This was in line with my experience in El Salvador in June of this year as well…if you don’t specifically seek out a business because you already know it accepts bitcoin, it’s not going to take Bitcoin.

Of the businesses in El Salvador marked on a map as supposedly accepting bitcoin (in bitcoin hotpots like Bitcoin beach), ~1/3 wouldn’t actually accept it for some reason or another.

That said, Bitcoin acceptance in El Salvador was still much better than I expected (perhaps my expectations were too low).

With a bit of planning, patience and persistence it is possible to have an entire trip in El Salvador using only Bitcoin

I grew up in Cleveland and saw these around occasionally...never knew anything about the backstory though...pretty interesting!

I had heard stories about Euclid Beach Park sort of like one hears stories of Coney Island. Never really understood why these parks disappeared.

The press release from CFPB the article is about: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...

How does JPEG XL compare to Apple’s current default HEIC? Is HEIC eventually going away in favor of JPEG XL?

You can already record in 3D both from the headset, from iPhone 15 Pro and higher and with Canon’s new upcoming lense:

https://www.usa.canon.com/newsroom/2024/20240610-lens

It’s uncanny to record something with the Vision Pro and then play it back while you’re sitting in the same location…feels like a glitch in the matrix.

Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry:

#1 Hacker News

Thanks! I’ve added it to my list to give it a try!

Just did research into this question...I'm someone that played piano as a child and wanted to get back into it. I wanted to get something that would integrate with apps, good action and sound without making a massive investment in case I don't stick with it. I also wanted something that was small and easy to move.

My digital piano just arrived a few hours ago.

I decided on the Roland FP-30X after trying several models in store.

Pro-tip: many of the big name digital pianos are half the price in the mainland China market than in the rest of the world. Often for an upgraded model as well.

FP-30X was 3850 CNY (~US$550) including the Roland KPD-70 three pedal unit and KSC-70 stand. Delivery (to Hong Kong) was ~400 CNY.

Another good option is the FP-18 which is a mainland market-only China model that's an upgrade overthe FP-10 in that it has more sounds and also supports three pedals. It's about ~1200 CNY cheaper than the FP-30X. Downside is slightly inferior sound and speakers compared to FP-30x

I also tried out the Yamaha portables...P-525 was excellent but about 3x the cost of the FP-30x. I didn't really like feel of the action of the cheaper Yamaha (P-225?).

So far FP-30X has been great...the bluetooth MIDI interface and bluetooth interfaces work seamlessly with my iPad. I haven't tried out Hanon Pro yet but it's been really thrilling to try out the various piano learning apps. If I had these back in the 90s, I'd probably be a much better piano player now! Better late than never!

Yes, daily.

Mobile workspace for programming with Mac screen + 1 visionOS safari window for documentation and + 1 visionOS safari window for Kagi Assistant (Ai chatbot access)

General browsing, reading and watching apple tv or youtube (via juno).

Writing...magic keyboard + vision pro. Missing are decent writing apps...the popular iOS/iPadOS/macOS disabled their access on visionOS. I end up using Notes because I don't have a microsoft office subscription and Pages also isn't on visionOS.

I don't use it for all of these use cases every day.

Actually realized I was using Firefox Focus on that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Just downloaded Firefox to try it and it's also the same as Firefox Focus...no issue. Could it be an extension? Fwiw, I don't have any extensions installed on any of the browsers.

Silky smooth on both a two year old Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (Xiaomi 12) using both Chrome and Firefox and on a iPhone Pro Max 15 using Safari. Might be some other problem with your phone?

Unplugging the power is the primary on-off switch.

Yes. Adding "narco-" in front of any previous leader or official the author apparently doesn't like doesn't do much to help with clarity.

Hard to tell what's going on from this article in that the author seems so biased against Prospera. Sounds like they made an agreement with one government that for various reasons lost power and that the new government wants to cancel the deal.

The OP is likely trying to deliver something like Superhuman ($30/month) - speed and keyboard focused-email - but for todos. I would imagine there is very little overlap between that market and people who use vim or emacs + plugins.

The great thing about torrents is that you (or anyone else who cares) can single-handedly solve the problem you're complaining about by seeding the torrent.

Exactly! The English speaking countries the parent mentions make it “easy” for young people to move there because they want more people to tax at their confiscatory tax rates. The goal of many people buying these other citizenships is to get them without having to become tax resident. Often they have residence visas or PR rights in other places.

For example if you’re an American with a Thailand elite visa good for 20 years or Singapore or Hong Kong PR you might want to get rid of your US passport but to do that practically you need another - literally any will do but these ppl don’t have an interest in becoming tax resident in another high tax place with complicated world wide reporting requirements…that’s literally the problem they are trying to solve by getting rid of the U.S. one.

1. The U.S. isn’t at the top for visa free places to travel…a number of passports in Europe and Asia are better.

https://www.henleyglobal.com/passport-index/ranking

2. Yes - an example I travel to frequently is Vietnam - it is visa free for Italy but not for USA (former American Italian here)

3. Generally no - USA is the only major country that taxes based on citizen and not by residence or territorially

4. Embassies very rarely help anyone “when something bad happens” - in the event of a large natural or political disaster they might help. Most (including the USA) have a policy of not being able to help you in most situations beyond giving you the contact of a lawyer, doctor etc.

5. Most of the time no, but some places do prohibit citizens from having multiple citizenships or acquiring new ones: iirc Singapore is one of those.

Wrote about my citizenship changing adventures here since you seem interested! https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/

Same is true for maritime racon navigation marks which transmit a morse code letter as identification in response to the reception of a radar pulse...the morse code is then visible on the radar display.

We had to learn morse code for Hong Kong's "grade 1 pleasure vessel certificate of competency" -> a credential required to operate pleasure vessels greater than 15 meters in length.

It's pretty easy to pick up and there are a few phone mobile phone apps that make learning morse code fun.

I found setting the environment immersion to around 50% lets me see enough of my keyboard so I’m not groping around for it.

I’d also like to see app re-render your iPhone, Apple Watch and ipad screens which are pretty blurry in pass through. Also some sort of workaround for Face ID on iPhone when you’re wearing Vision Pro. Seems like things Apple is uniquely positioned to do.