onesociety2022

But there a ton of other VCs who poured money into SaaS businesses. They have the opposite incentive. They want tokens to be cheap like a commodity so the value accrues in the SaaS/app layer.

You don't need mass surveillance to enforce such a ban. Once the US Govt declares Chinese AI models are banned, no US business will use them nor distribute them. Any cloud service that rents out GPUs in the USA will explicitly prohibit the use of Chinese open model weights in their terms of service (you open yourself to a lawsuit if you violate their ToS). Any Tokens-as-a-Service provider will refuse to serve those tokens to customers in the US.

Sure as an indie hacker, you could go download the weights for a Chinese model with a VPN, and then attempt to run it at home by building your own GPU cluster but these large models require quite expensive hardware to run on and so it makes it less likely than anyone would invest that much capital to do something that is illegal. There's no way for them to sell a legal service using those tokens. So it can only be strictly for personal use (the Govt won't care because very few people will have that kind of money and risk appetite). The other option will be that there will be some shady third-party providers in foreign countries who are willing to sell tokens from these models to US consumers knowingly.

Governments can do anything they want by passing a new legislation. In your example, they could easily pass a law that states that any ToS cannot reject service to a customer based on the color of their attire. In the USA, it's obviously already illegal for a business to reject service to a customer based on some protected classes like race.

This is probably the reason. Volvo brand is well established in the USA while Polestar is new. So not very Americans would complain if Polestar is banned as compared to Volvo.

VPN is not a replacement TCP/IP stack. I literally meant the TCP/IP stack in the XNU kernel. It might be an esoteric example but it's not that far off. DMA already forced Apple to open up browser engine layer so third-parties can now bring in their own browser engines in the EU and are not restricted to using just WebKit.

Yes I'd like some of these too but at the same time I get an uneasy feeling when I think that some potential idiot in a regulatory body in every country is now going to decide which API surface needs to be made available to third parties. If they take it too far, they could end up making nonsensical choices and kill innovation.

I never understood how any regulatory body is going to decide which APIs in iOS must be made available to third-parties to hook into. So what if I'm a third-party maker of TCP/IP stack and I want Apple to offer me the ability to sell my custom TCP/IP stack to my iOS customers as a replacement for the stock TCP/IP stack that ships with iOS. Clearly no regulatory body has cared about that because it's too niche of a space?

So some government official will scour the entire API surface of iOS and decide which ones Apple needs to expose to third-parties? They have already decided App Store and Payments APIs need to be made available. Now it looks like they also expect off-device foundation models need to be made available to third-parties.

What about making Apple Watch specific APIs in iOS be made available to all third-party watch makers so any one can bring any smartwatch and use it just as effectively as the Apple Watch with an iPhone? What about all the AirPods specific APIs that lets Apple offer a better experience with AirPods than a generic bluetooth earbuds? What about Apple Pencil? And so on... If you go down this path, the list is endless.

Apple has pulled a Tesla here. FSD on HW3 cars is stuck on old software with no upgrade path as of now. Tesla is potentially justifying it by calling it "FSD (Supervised)" so they don't have to do an expensive retrofit to them even though they sold these cars originally with the promise of fully autonomous driving.

All the iPhone 16/Pro owners have been waiting for Apple Intelligence features announced from that WWDC 2 years ago. They didn't get delivered and now won't ever be delivered with on-device intelligence due to the 8GB RAM limitation.

My ISP has a 1TB bandwidth cap per month. You have to pay $30 extra to unlock unlimited bandwidth but I assume even unlimited bandwidth has some limit after which they throttle. They already charge $105/mo for 600Mbps down and 25Mbps up with just the 1 TB limit.

I’d happily take symmetrical 300 Mbps with a 5 TB cap instead of asymmetrical Gigabit speeds and 1 TB cap.

I’m paranoid that actually blocking internet access to the TV will result in filling up the TV’s disk with all of this intrusive data they have collected waiting to be uploaded, eventually run out of space and brick the TV. This could be just bad software or actually malicious where they intentionally break something if it loses connectivity for too long and they can see you using it with other connected devices.

We really need normies to care enough about this to the point manufacturers will need to think they need to advertise on their TVs that they are privacy-friendly and don’t collect anything as a selling point. Until then, they don’t really care. I just wish someone like Apple made a TV with their Apple TV functionality baked in that I could trust.

Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?

Apart from the price, I think what's really attracting people to the Neo are the cool colors. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago trying to buy a M5 MacBook Air and I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on next to me from people looking at the Neo. Almost all of it was positive and people really love the colors!

I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recommending the Neo to anyone like my mom who use their laptop mostly just for browsing and FaceTime calls, and even the MBA is overkill for that.

I love AI summary and AI mode in Google search. I think it should be up to you (the human) to use your judgement to decide when to do further research by following the links and when to just rely on the AI summary. If I'm searching a TV show by name, I'm generally just looking for an overview, the IMDb rating and a review of that show. If AI summary gets that wrong, it's not the end of the world. I don't bother doing further research. There are a lot of such casual searches I do daily for which AI summary is good enough.

OTOH if I'm looking up an answer to a tax question, I don't just immediately trust the first answer from AI mode. I use it more as a knowledgeable friend who is not a tax attorney and so cannot be 100% trusted, but he/she is giving me useful pointers to go do deeper research and arrive at an answer.

If they are doing this, they should make tokens from open weights models tax-free. It will incentivize labs to make their models open.

There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.

+1 I find the general disdain for C-suite or senior engineering leadership on HN so silly. These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved. Yes, some of them are sheep and will blindly copy what is fashionable but so do a large swath of ICs.

If you want incredibly fast adoption of AI within a company, the best thing you can do is to signal from the top that tokenmaxxing will be rewarded (or at least not be punished for it).

1. It forces everyone including the lazy ones who normally wouldn't invest their time in learning anything new to actually install codex/claude and learn to use them.

2. It prevents any middle manager from putting up blockers for adoption/experimentation ("this is new, I don't trust this, let's do it the old familiar way", "this might be expensive, we care about efficiency here", etc). Once the C-suite dictates tokenmaxxing is allowed, every middle manager will fall in line instantly.

3. Tokenmaxxing is not choice you have to live with the rest of your life. A year or two from now, once C-suite is satisfied with the rate of AI adoption within their org/company, they can just as easily switch the focus to efficiency. Teams will be asked to justify their token spend and start to optimize.

Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.

All that tells me is they did find an efficiency. If they didn’t, their driver supply would have dropped. Unlike the taxi business, Uber/Lyft can tap into otherwise dormant supply of drivers who already own a car but aren’t willing to spend all 40-60 hours a week driving a taxi. With Uber/Lyft, they can become part-time drivers (they have flexibility and they can use an asset they already own anyway). Is it worse for the full time taxi drivers who used to have the supply artificially constrained in the old medallion system? Yes, but does it also benefit others who want to do this as a flexible job, zero skills required other than driving, no boss to deal with, no job interviews, etc. Yes!

You can’t actually - due to the RAM shortage you can’t even upgrade to an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM. That model has been discontinued. Even the 96GB model has a wait time of 5 months in most locations. This is the reason why the resale value is so high.

Huh? The gym analogy doesn’t even make sense. People didn’t go to gyms when they were farming with oxen. Gyms are popular now precisely because tractors exist and you don’t need manual labor to farm anymore but people still need the physical exercise for their health. Society has adapted to the arrival of new life-changing technology. Our education system needs to adapt to new technology like AI too. You can probably uplevel a lot of courses and cover a lot more interesting topics than before and teach real application of things you learned aided by AI. Just like when I was doing a CS major 20 years ago, they didn’t spend too much time teaching me assembly programming beyond 1 or 2 lectures (they let me use a compiler for programming assignments!).

If AI can do the work, maybe the test should be more focused on what AI can’t do? This is like anyone still doing a traditional coding interview with leetcode problems just because they haven’t yet done the work to figure out what to test for in a world where Claude Code exists.

This article is written by a company building an AI cybersecurity solution. Not sure how much you can trust them on this topic - their business will get destroyed if Mythos is actually so superior to existing models that it doesn’t require a big investment into the scaffold/harness to find security vulnerabilities. If the model is too good, then what’s the value of their solution?

If you want to blatantly lie and hide your true reason for rejecting them by making up other stuff in the debrief notes, that would be possible. But at that point, you are the unethical person. You can technically do the same thing just because you wanted to discriminate based on race, sex, etc (that would be both illegal as well as violation of corporate HR policies).

I assume you work at some small startup where you get to dictate who you will hire based on your interpretation of what a candidate’s past work history tells you about their morals/ethics. But that shit won’t fly if you are interviewing at other large companies. You can’t reject someone just because they have OpenAI on their resume. In fact I have never heard of any FAANG company ever blacklisting candidates from some other company. So you rejecting someone is not going to move the needle much. They can leave OpenAI whenever they want and Zuck will offer them 8-9 figure pay packages :)

I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.

For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).

Stripe hit a $159 billion valuation on Tuesday and said it was on track to reach an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.

Wow! This is the quality of reporting from CNBC? The $1B ARR number is just for Stripe's Revenue products (Billing, Invoicing, etc). That doesn't include their main business (payments-related products).

You are conflating iCloud Keychain with the rest of the iCloud data. iCloud keychain is always end-to-end encrypted. Apple cannot decrypt it even if they receive a subpoena. The other iCloud data like your photos are not end-to-end encrypted by default unless you turn on Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 There is a table showing exactly what is E2EE under Standard vs ADP mode.

In the news article you shared above, it's very likely this person did not have ADP turned on. So everything in their iCloud that is not E2EE by default could be decrypted by Apple.

This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.

Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

Illegal just means there’s a black market. You pay some guy in cash and he gives you a smuggled Starlink terminal. Neither buyer or seller is likely to be anymore sophisticated here than someone trading in any other smuggled goods (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, etc).

If what you say is true, why would Apple ever force a switch to eSIM? I’m now less likely to buy a new iPhone because I don’t want to deal with this eSIM fiasco. It’s to their detriment. If their goal is to sell more phones, they would want to eliminate all friction to switch to a new phone. So what you are saying doesn’t add up.