thephyber

Some in China, but also Thailand and Mexico. They seem to be playing whack-a-mole with manufacturing contractors and changes to tariff policy.

It's still an issue with the newest generation cameras. If you record at the highest resolution and FPS, the camera can't shed the heat fast enough.

but government policy is now making Chinese consumers poorer than they otherwise would be

What country has perfect government policy?

The US has atrocious government policies. Costs of college, cost of healthcare insurance, the reason so many uninsured people use the ER as their primary medical usage, tax policy prioritization of capital reinvestment over wage earnings, caring for the environment over affordable housing, etc are all problematic policy outcomes which make the average person poorer.

They are also unsustainable.

This is written like an American who is both ignorant of cybersecurity, American politics, and of the advantages that the US has benefitted from since at least WW2.

The core points are:

  - we can't trust a connected GoPro device any more than a connected DJI device

  - Just because a device is developed in China doesn't make it a vulnerability.

  - Just because a device is made in the US doesn't make it resistant to vulnerabilities.

  - US politicians don't have any incentive to tell us the truth. Because of the nature of national security, they could completely lie about any accusations of Chinese involvement and we would never know, especially now that the US president fired anyone who resists his demands for fealty.

  - GoPro was first to market but stopped adding value once they IPOed. US public companies depending on IP protections / rent seeking rather than cutthroat competition is the core reason DJI is beating GoPro, not Chinese government subsidies to the sector.

  - China's middle and upper classes are far larger than the US's. Similarly, they are training more college grads. China also has more companies being created and more creative destruction than the US. It doesn't matter if we build a better v1.0 product because their innovation engine is moving at least as fast as ours.

  - the US has had a 70 year head start on "a near zero cost of capital". Being the west's financier after WW2 and later the world's reserve currency.

Risk mitigation is not "for no reason". It is actually one of the larger revenue generators in the economy.

That said, I wouldn't bet (if I were you) on something without clearly defining the terms. If Stripe simply homogenizes contractual rules that match their contracts with Mastercard, etc, which side of the bet would that fall on?

It's not only about morals.

No, chargeback rates are not the only reason banking companies like Mastercard are dubious about adult content. In 2021 they added contractual terms to ensure that adult content uses age verification, has the consent of the participants, and to remove illegal content before it is published at soon after it is reported.

But also, the financial industry has a history of discriminating against their customers based in moral reasons (or at minimum bowing to regulatory pressure which stemmed from upstream morality decisions).[1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing-ba...

There are many bank and bank-adjacent companies who contractually enforce morals standards. It doesn't matter if the underlying reason for the morality is profit maximization, the effect is the same.

You seem to care more about the aesthetics of the sentence than the meaning behind it. We know that a company is not a person. It doesn't have a consciousness. It doesn't have a singular morality to work with. It borrows the decision making of its employees and contractors. We know that the "morality" of a bank or credit card company is really just a layer of abstraction for a group of decisions it makes to avoid bad press/sentiment/oversight/regulation. But if you analyze why people have morality, it's not that different; there are LOTS of things people would do that they currently don't if there was no underlying consequence.

“Just link it” is like telling an intern to “use this program”. It will take a while (and each LLM user will burn tokens while learning).

This is the perfect use case for a skill: one person takes the hit to create the skill and then anyone else who wants the tool can use the skill.

I commented because my father has an iPhone 8 and vision/cognitive issues. He could very much benefit from this accessibility feature, but he hasn’t been eligible for iOS upgrades for years.

The underlying demand for massive RAM builds is coming from AI hyperscalers.

There are lots of signals that the sector has been overinvested and that corporate customers are pulling back on spending as the cost of the APIs is revealed.

Once the hyperscalers start struggling to bay their debts (it will happen, just a question of time), there will be a supply glut.

So the only question is: do we share the same definition of “short term”.

Do you honestly think that’s families buying them?

My money is on small companies or affluent programmers experimenting with some new hobby / business model.

It’s an ocean-going row boat with 2 cabins. Most row boats you’ve seen are probably hyper-light and designed for still water.

The model of this boat:

https://www.rannochadventure.com/boats-2/r25

I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device.

It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.

But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.

Also, FWIW I couldn’t get delivery to my residence when I lived in a ski resort town. I was forced to use a PO Box, which put the burden of the last mile on the user and took that burden off of the postal service. I’m guessing lots of farmers who don’t live on main roads/routes have to similarly use PO Boxes.

I agree to the extent that this is about tradeoffs, hence my last paragraph about “moving the slider”.

USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.

Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.

This iOS feature isn’t only about locking out users from some features/apps.

It turns a complicated phone into a much more simple one. Both kids and the elderly can benefit from it.

My only issue is that the was only introduced in 2024, so older iPhones can’t benefit.

This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.

(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.

You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.

(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.

(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.

(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).

If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.

He has been politically active trying to roll back CDA Section 230 protections for social media companies because he conflates social media algorithms being “editorial” with what actions are actually protected by CDA 230.

He made an pinned Instagram post about his association with this group (link to his account, not to the post):

https://www.instagram.com/hitrecordjoe/

It’s much more complicated than that.

In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer.

Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would.

Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.

Most likely the vendor will make a judgement call about whether they care to comply. If they do want to comply, they will likely exempt all Virginia data from the collected data set and contractually require and downstream user to indemnify them if a Virginia person is affected by their data set.

It’s important to understand that in the USA, data is owned by the collector (eg. The app or SaaS who generated it), not the person who is described by it.

Until this legal regime changes, we will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with laws like this.

“As an excuse” is a weird way of saying “responding to national supply and demand”. 100% of the suppliers who didn’t have to cull all of their chickens raised their prices.

Those contributed.

But also, the news isn’t privy to an actual price fixing conspiracy while it’s happening. To the extent that a news org reports on it, it’s because someone within the system grows some ethics (very hard to burn a bridge when it means no more revenue in the industry). It took even the regulators years to build a case for it.

People have long complained about the consolidation of the chicken production chain in the US. Only 2-3 major companies control most of the supply via contracts. The farms are required to follow the terms of the contract closely when raising chickens or risk getting locked out of the major distributors. Post-consolidation, the industry is ripe for abuse.

The combination of very strong contract enforcement and weak regulatory enforcement means the industry is effectively rent-seeking by design. This much was known, but without subpoena power, actual price fixing is just a suspicion.

I think he’s saying that if the 10 people witnessed a murder via gunshot that it would be mighty suspicious if the state didn’t bother to bring any forensic evidence of the shooting to court and instead relied solely on those eyewitness testimonies. At some point the absence of forensic evidence might look more like a deliberate attempt to keep exculpatory evidence out of reach of the defendant than a good faith attempt to prosecute.

USDS and Code For America were reasonable, level-headed, modest efforts at improving government for the people using tech experts. They tried to work within the existing orgs and within the existing authorities to improve services via tech projects.

DOGE only existed because voters were convinced to hate the faceless people who work in government instead of hating the rigid legal requirements and checkbox system that every government employee is forced to follow.

It was a social panic. AI PR convinced tech execs that companies who didn’t adopt AI as a significant part of their workforce would fall behind (and in capitalism that means they lost market share and revenue). Investors likely put pressure on execs to do this in addition to the AI PR campaigns. FOMO is chasing the carrot you see everyone else getting, but this was more like chasing the thing that supposedly deters the stick.

It’s also worth mentioning that it still might be the right business strategy for some companies / industries. We are only 3 years into the revolution of AI for business processes and in previous revolutions there were riots, sabotage efforts, factories still being created in the style of the previous revolution, etc.

We tried it. DOGE was a complete failure of tech startup idiots asking models questions as if they were oracles and blindly trusting them to make subjective decisions about which Congressionally-created programs we should kill. Some of the tech were smart enough to realize how much damage they did and got out quickly.

The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking.

Strawman.

Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy

This isn’t true. Voters are occasionally very willing to vote in demagogues, authoritarians, and fascists.

The founding fathers knew that democracy came with it the chance of mob rule.

The solution isn’t to guarantee that nobody has any anonymity online. It’s to make society more resilient by increasing media literacy. Countries which border Russia (notably Finland and Ukraine) are doing an amazing job at resisting the industrial volume of manufactured propaganda. Countries with gullible people just become victims to it.

An individual phone… while targeting a specific crime and a specific suspect. The person could use a different phone and remain anonymous.

The difference is that one is very granular and done in reaction to a crime. The other is a wide scale collection of data which is necessary recorded.

No, an airplane is a physical thing we interact with which has intrinsic value, physical transportation. This is a perfect example of what money is not.

Money is not the token (the coin or paper bill), but the component of the ledger the token represents. Sometimes there is no physical token, only an entry in a ledger (eg. digital transfers after fractional reserve banking). The intrinsic value of the metals in the dime are (usually) worth less than the face value of the denomination, hence the discussion that the _story_ is more important than the physical _token_.

The author of Sapiens is a very famous speaker on many topics HNers like. He’s worth a listen.