radicalbyte

Our intelligence services have capabilities, it's not just the US. The Patriot / Cloud Act increase the scope outside of intelligence agencies. I'm of the opinion that for military intelligence there is a legitimate need to have some - black - capability. It should just be highly limited in scope.

This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.

EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.

Some of the early models - either the Chevvy or Nissan Leaf - had battery packs which would degrade very quickly. This was causes by the charging system which seemed designed to destroy them.

The expectation in the EV fan world was that modern (> 2019) battery packs were very likely to retain 80% of their charge for well over the time anyone expected with the drop to 80% itself taking most of the car's expected lifetime. This was because the standard extrapolations ignored improvements in charging algorithms and that real-world usages were expected to be better for the battery than the models.

Another prediction we made is that range under cold (or very hot) weather would be significantly reduced and that seems to be the case too.

They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

Claude Code are slopmaxxxing and you're considering their "judgement"? :-)

No they weren't, 50 years ago is when they were working very hard to get people in from Turkey/North Africa to do those jobs because they wanted to pay peanuts and the natives had options.

These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.

Migration in my part of Europe (Holland) has largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. These people are abused as a sort of semi-serf labour mainly in the farming sector.

Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.

They still are. My kids haven't watched a single Simpsons or Family Guy episode but are quoting both regularly.

Facebook et al also quite literally stole email contact lists and installed spyware at kernel level on mobile phones which they used to spy on all Android users. Via the phone manufacturers.

The Samsung with parental control does the same thing as this phone only you don't have to beg Commodore to install the apps your kid's school requires them to install.

It's at most a $200 smart phone (doubling the prices for the DAC + IEMs) being sold at > $500 with a funky design, interesting OS and their own app store.

I hope that they sell millions of these things, enough so that they can afford to buy the Amiga IP... just don't see it happening.

It has the same core spec as a $120 (delivered) Samsung phone and will cost between $500-$600 (delivered).

The C64U is an amazing achievement but it seems too early to go for the smart phone.

Hopefully there is a niche and their business plan is viable for a small number of sales.

Keeping Linux-based devices up and running and somewhat reliable is horrible. I'm 45, I've spent 25 years doing that. Time I'll never get back. Time I'm spending with my kids instead of dicking around with an obscure bug caused by some random dude who is spending his free time doing thankless work maintaining some C code he wrote 40 years ago.

An assumption, I made. Failed, it was.

I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.

Very happy customer here.

I tried to explain to people in The Netherlands this exact problem when they were thinking about switching from single-player to a commercial insurance company model.

Insurance companies always have an incentive to make healthcare services expensive. They have even more incentive to make healthcare expensive and do deals on the backside where their suppliers give them a kickback. Even better if said kickback comes via a side door.

So we went for the commercial insurance companies. It took them 4 years before they change the drug choice from decentralised (Pharmacies deal with drugs companies, received small discounts which funded a good quality of care) to centralised (Insurance deal with drug companies, receives kickbacks) and the Pharmacies funding was drastically cut leading to worse quality of care and more drugs being used. Double-whammy because in the previous system the Pharmacy did medication reviews which almost always result in a reduction in drugs (the thing with drugs is that quite a lot of them are given to reduce side effects of other drugs, the original drug gets cancelled but the side effect reducer gets forgotten and just continues ad infinitum).

Health insurance has been super inflationary since then when controlled for quality of care.

Sounds like me. It's awesome. Only the sheer amount of very clear fraud and the way an entire way of people who, not too long ago, where barely functional, have jumped on the bandwagon (same as with crypto) just sours me on it.

That and Jenson screwing those of us who made him over the last decade.

It'll be better once the fraudsters are in jail and once we're able have boxes with ~1TB ram running off of our solar in the garage.

Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress.

We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.

I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.

No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.

Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market.

Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.

They learned from the failure of crypto and have found their bag holders.

Where did that $70B from the metaverse go to?

Ikea use my country - The Netherland - to avoid paying tax. Same thing that Google and go co with Ireland. They have literal custom agreements with our tax office.

I do agree about China being way ahead and way smarter here, I should add. They've made America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia look really stupid. I've admired their strategic long term thinking for as long as I've been aware of it (~25 years now, they have a long history and deep rich culture and this is part of it).

The tech companies could all move to Texas and the power would be there. They've all won. They all have their monopolies / duopolies.

They would never have been the success they were in the first place without California. It was the culture, the conditions (no non-competes) and the lax regulation (non-enforcement of rules aimed at avoiding monopolies which allowed Facebook to buy any emerging competitor not owned by the Chinese government) which created them.

Germany shut down their atomic power plants and replaced them with natural gas. They even fiddled the EU environmental rules such that natural gas was considered "part of the green transition". That all back-fired when Russia - the source of that natural gas - attempted to use it as leverage to take Ukraine.

We were screaming at them at the time that it was a very very dumb idea to close their nuclear power and against natural gas. As always we were right.

Climate activits? We've been sending riot police and disappearing them for 5 years now whilst the bands of knife carrying racists thugs, funded by America, roam around our streets causing all hell.

That's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it.

We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.

I'd like to regulate them the way American companies are regulated, and then regulate American companies in Europe the way European companies are regulated. Level the playing field.

Not exactly rocket science, it's just copying the things the Americans (and Chinese) are already doing.

I've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.

The problem with taxes in Europe are that the ultra-wealthy don't pay them. That burden is particularly focused on those who are high wage earners. If I look at my own country, as a high earner I'm paying close to a 50% effective tax rate (a little less with mortgage interest deductions). However the billionaire families who own the beer brewers, shipping companies and agraculture companies are paying well under 0.5% effective. They pay less than in the US. Due to this reason we're one of the most infamous tax dodge countries in Europe, apparently the Swedish and German billionaires have tax residency to avoid paying it.