mullingitover

You’d think a head of product at a tech company would embrace a “it’s literally impossible to have your password stolen if you use this” technology.

India and Latin America doing some final assembly is kind of a whimper of a counterpoint.

Most of this litany is trivially refuted by pointing out that roughly 40% of the world's declared 5G Standard Essential Patents were developed in China. The only reason they don't completely dominate telecom globally is the panicked invocation of national security fears to erect emergency trade barriers.

"China won in ecommerce? Nope. Their dominance is overwhelmingly domestic."

Their domestic ecommerce market eclipses the US and the next several biggest markets combined. You can argue protectionism, but then you have to face the reality that the US is doing its own flailing protectionism today.

Generally, this is an embarrassing category error of an argument. Running models on ASICs, IoT devices, and EVs are infrastructure and hardware plays: areas where China is inarguably so good that it's a problem.

the winner will be whoever burns their models to ASICs fastest.

It'll obviously be China, and they won't need the bleeding edge of lithography tech to make it happen. Every Chinese smartphone will have something like Sonnet 5, along your car (well, not those of us in the US, but we'll look longingly at pictures of them while we drive whatever the government decides we're allowed to drive in Fortress America).

Give it ten years and your smart litterbox from Temu will be running its own local model.

The U.S. was openly a pirate nation for most of the 1800s.

Like with the ICC, the US respects or doesn’t respect international law strictly when it’s beneficial to the state’s interests. China really can’t be held to a different standard. This activity is grade school level geopolitics: the global system of government is anarchy.

China has presented itself and its leadership well over the past few decades. Upward-rocketing standard of living. Brand-new gleaming cities. Bullet trains everywhere. Incredible EVs so advanced and affordable that every other nation's auto industry is crashing out about it. They've done so well that young people in the US view socialism more positively than young people in China.

Meanwhile here in the US we're now known for: bombing schoolchildren for some reason (but refusing to admit it and apologize). Killing millions of children via a massive rug-pull on global aid programs. Being absolutely brainrotted at the highest levels of leadership off our own toxic social media. Being a global bully and a backer of genocide.

AI company, supposedly

Mainly it’s a REIT that bought a bunch of hardware which is now depreciating like fresh lettuce. They don’t even have a way to use it productively for AI purposes themselves and are instead renting it to competitors, who are using it to lap them.

It’s honestly a howler to imply that this isn’t a deeply corrupt regime that’s openly doing crimes. The burden of proof is frankly on the argument to the contrary at this point.

The president is making a genuine, serious attempt to install his personal attorney to the office of Attorney General and he has a good chance of succeeding. This country is cooked.

Call it what you like, but it’s basically the same dimensions as the 2025 Outback and that’s generally called a ‘lifted wagon’ type vehicle.

I love the Trailseeker for being the anti-Tesla car. I rented a Tesla a while back and have driven friends cars: I hate everything about their UX. It's like people who never drove a car tried to invent a car from how they imagine it should work. Horrible. I won't go into detail about all the way's it's a superior design, I'll just say that it has normal door handles and that's gist of the design philosophy.

The new eTNGA platform has been bumped up to 150 kW and while it's not crazy Hyundai speed, but it's been fine on a road trip. The charging curve makes great use of that 150kw.

The only sort of gripe many have with Subaru/Toyota is their completely whiffing the software, particularly the route planner. The redeeming factor is that charging infra is becoming so common that you don't need a crazy software system to avoid running out of battery. There's a charger pretty much every 50 miles or less everywhere you'd want to go.

GNC used to sell freaking GHB in the 80s and early 90s!

I accidentally bought a midlife crisis car: a Subaru Trailseeker EV station wagon. It was cheaper (and more to form) than the 2026 Outback.

It just happens to be the fastest production vehicle Subaru has ever sold. Rip-your-face-off speed wasn’t even what I was after, I just wanted an EV wagon and it’s the only one in existence. Still: stupid fun and very unique car, I’ve had it for two months and haven’t seen another one on the road yet.

In 2026 the modded gas cars that are so much slower and ridiculously loud are honestly confusing. I absolutely love them for autocross, but people building track cars and then...never taking them to the track, pretending their suburb is a track, is just sad.

From your own link:

Main ingredients: Durum wheat flour, water/eggs

May be going out on a limb here but I think it might be the eggs?

Many of these services, which use simple tools like drills and dental probes to disable the recording light, have been advertised on Meta's own platforms. There are also dozens of videos on YouTube offering DIY tutorials.

This right here is why these stupid camera-on-face products are non-starters outside of very niche applications. They're never going to the next iPhone because people will assume you're secretly recording and there's a non-zero chance someone is going (rightfully) get freaked out and suddenly make it a very serious problem for you. Like did these product people ever talk to the average parent from the midwest and ask what kinds of violence they'd gleefully mete out on someone they believed to be covertly recording their children?

It's a scenario that makes these things unthinkable for public use.

Beyond this, everyone already has an excellent camera on their phone and there just isn't a need to have a face camera on all the time.

These products seem like a very easy IQ test for product managers and investors and yet huge market cap companies are failing it.

Another is that the vaccination gives the immune system a firm kick up its B-cells, activating it against other bugs that might contribute to dementia.

It's weird that they kinda gloss over the very real and open questions here, because the idea that the AS01 adjuvant is involved in the dementia protection is very much alive and an ongoing topic. A paper from last year[1] looked into it and found that the Shingrix shingles vaccine and the RSV vaccine are about the same in their risk reduction for dementia (with a bunch of caveats).

I believe the current evidence point to the shingles vaccine helping, but also a protective effect happening from the AS01 adjuvant on its own.

I'm not a researcher but my layman's take is that the Economist whiffed it here, and there's a more interesting and complicated story to be told beyond this clickbait-adjacent science journalism.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12198376/

(Also worth noting: these people were adamantly opposed to religious freedom as a principle. Just ask any of the dead Maryland Catholics who had the audacity to live near them. The Constitution was in no small part a rebuke of these people's religious bigotry).

They had religious freedom in the Netherlands. The idea that they were persecuted is a very stubborn myth.

They went to the Americas in search of the same thing as most immigrants: money[1].

[1] https://www.history.com/articles/why-pilgrims-came-to-americ...

I had a hilarious interaction with a Spectrum technician when I was dealing with an oversubscribed node with my home service (same issue you're describing here).

He was a line tech and was fully aware that my slowness wasn't related to the line, and as he replaced all the lines to my house he enthusiastically recommended that I report the company to the FTC and demand a refund for the service degradation which wasn't meeting their advertised speeds. He actually gave me great advice for getting my case escalated and I was refunded for several months on my service.

They eventually got the node upgraded (I was once struggling to get 60Mbps down on the same line I'm getting >1G on today), and they're upgrading everything to DOCSIS 4.0 currently. I'm not trying to sell you on them, just saying they'll likely work their problems out in the long run. Fundamentally, coax line connection's floor is Starlink's ceiling as long as the nodes are able to keep up.

Crazy, I didn't realize starlink is in the gigabit range for bandwidth? And how are they getting past the speed of light wall on their latency?

You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.

Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.

Of all the hills to die on, this is one of them I guess.

You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].

Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.

https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

So for comparison, Pol Pot only killed 3 million people in total according to upper bound estimates.

There's no universal human instinct to commit human sacrifice, and while it may have happened in scattered groups it wasn't "commonplace."

On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.

This goes against the firm stance of every major religion, and well documented studies showing that humans universally have innate sense of fairness upon which ethical systems are founded. There may be some difficult ethical questions, but there a far more which are very clear-cut.

Models are tuned to give ethical responses and right-leaning responses are judged by RLHF process to be unethical. That's your problem.

It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.

You make a great case for state capitalism, comrade!

They just like gambling.

So why to people suffering from poverty like gambling so much more than everyone else?

There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future.

Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope.

Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle.

Business executives look at this and think "at this rate of progress we'll have self-driving cars in a few years!" and start making serious plans for that world.

In reality I think we're going to be riding bikes for a long time. That situation of increased individual contributor productivity makes engineers more valuable, and increases the utility of engineers rather than making them a burden on your budget.

Thus, cutting headcount right as they had huge potential to become vastly more productive was a stupid move. It's an admission that you don't know how to manage people effectively, which is embarrassing when you're paid mountains of money for your management skills.

Adventists are okay with meat as long as it’s kosher generally.

I think the bigger factor is that they’re teetotalers.

My data points, though: two of my vegetarian teetotaling Adventist family members died of Alzheimer’s. The lifestyle is clearly not a cheat code for defeating dementia.

I don't think my point got through: purchasing vegetables and fruits, essential staple foods, involves some amount of discernment. It's not like grabbing a USB cable out of the box of identical USB cables.

Passing this task off to someone who's essentially the lowest bidder and doesn't care about picking acceptable quality goods, in my repeated experience, does not work. They pick unusable goods, wasting my time and money.

I've had to be taught this lesson an embarrassing number of times before it really sunk in, but it finally did. I'll not that this applies getting delivery from local stores. Grocery pickers are simply not aligned with your interests.