Matl

> How can business leaders and shareholders spend money on long term R&D and still be accused of focusing on the short term and next quarter?

Because these two groups are not the same? My argument is, if a company overperforms to the point that some of the profits can be allocated to longer-term development without upsetting shareholders because the QbyQ profits are great, (like Apple did with the iPod), but if you can either only increase quarterly profits and not do long-term R&D or keep profits the same but do the R&D then no R&D it is.

In other words, Apple had to start with the iPod because that didn't require massive long-term R&D and then once that became such a success that Apple could not only satisfy shareholders on a short term basis, but also set money aside for long-term R&D was the iPhone possible.

> Is your claim that businesses that have to spend billions or tens of billions of dollars and years to bring facilities online to make the products they sell are owned (and influenced) by shareholders focused on quarterly numbers?

Yes? That doesn't mean they can't spend billions on R&D. If Apple didn't sell iPods like hotcakes, they wouldn't be able to R&D the iPhone. That doesn't mean nobody at Apple had long-term vision, quite the opposite.

If I can sell my things at a higher volume for longer vs higher price and less volume now, I'll go with the first, but not shareholders focused on quarterly numbers.

> a new chip solves nothing

It does allow Nvidia to sell more chips. This is no genuine attempt to solve anything, imo.

What a sleek way of positioning your comment as something that can't reasonably be disagreed with whereas it's nothing more than a pure opinion of yours. I am in awe.

You seem to not understand, among other things, what a duopoly is.

Why are you pretending anyone uses them? These phones ship with Google Play and that's what people use.

> Xioami, Huawei and Samsung all have the points I mentioned, with Android forks

If I buy a Samsung phone in North America or Europe today I get Google Play as the main app store, Google services etc. and if I want to develop an app for a Samsung Android phone, I use the official Google SDK and Kotlin like for every other Android phone.

They have their own skin and store, but nobody really uses that. Google Play it is, be it Samsung or Xioami. They're very far from offering any kind of genuine alternative to Google Play, Google or Android. Their stores are junkware no different than ASUS preinstalling some antivirus nobody wants.

> Harmony NEXT is no longer based on Android.

That's my point. Huawei is the only OEM offering something different, but not easy to get in Western markets and thus doesn't have app mindshare.

Or maybe not everyone's codebases are another TODO web app.

> They all have app stores disconnected from Google's app store

No they don't. Certainly not ones where my bank app or Netflix is. This is being obtuse on purpose.

Obviously a bad businessman.

Android OEMs largely don't do that either except for some specific markets where Google isn't a thing. Google does have rules for when you want to be certified and have Google Play and Google services on board, which you mostly do in the West and so OEMs comply.

Sure, they may ship a Samsung skin or preload some of their own junk, same as on Windows. That doesn't make what they ship a different OS.

The one exception would be HarmonyOS, but that's somewhat China specific.

> there are other companies: Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor,

Tell me about the different OSes each of Samsung, Huawei, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Honor etc. run then that we can choose from.

It's like saying Windows doesn't have a monopoly in the PC space because HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS.

Bloat is real. The point is if there's a regulation that should stop glass contamination in food and it doesn't then the answer isn't 'too much red tape, see?'.

It's that there's clearly been industry capture and the regulations no longer work. It doesn't mean the regulations themselves are automatically the problem.

It also doesn't mean every regulation is good or should exist, but that's not an argument I see anyone actually making. Only some people like to pretend like someone is making that argument, because the actual argument is harder to argue against.

> Valued by whom? The market?

No. The people. You know, the Shown HN: I wrote a cool thing. Here's the thing on GitHub.

It's not about selling, it's about sharing and people appreciating it, using it, sharing tips to improve it. Most people who write FLOSS in their free time do it to solve their own problem first, but they also do it to share with others a cool thing they did etc.

> Most people who craft as a hobby never sell a thing

Sure. But they do craft for SOMEONE. Initially for themselves but at some point they want to show their skills to someone, even if only to family and friends. People are social animals.

I don't know that hand crafted software has the same appreciation as say woodworking.

I guess it's pretty much one of the best ways to see multiple things at the same time?

I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.

Sure. Ultimately it's still you who is responsible for the code you ship I assume, no matter how it came about.

> but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate

Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.

I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.

This is the Ayn Rand trick; let's make government not work == government can never work well == let's cut all customer protections and end up with unfit for consumption beef and glass in your food == somehow it's still not the fault of the free market since after enough people get sick I guess they'll leave one star reviews on Google from their hospital beds == companies will self regulate to produce healthier food?

Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).

In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.

I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.

Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.

Yeah, it's pretty standard for an occupation. I wouldn't call occupation standard.

> they are the same entity

I am not aware of a country where that's not true to some extent. But I can't see i.e. [1] happening in the West.

1 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/china-tax-crackd...

> they're using it to scan for illegal construction

It's nice that an occupying army gets to decide what's illegal, am sure.

> Walmart

> Amazon

I guess customers yeah, Employees? not so much

> I wonder how Jolla is gong these days

I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.

IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.

Multiple things can be true at the same time, there's more repression in China still than in the West at the moment, yes. At the same time it's all rather vague. There's more state control there and more corporate control here. So naturally there's more state repression there. There's also things that China does better than we do. It's not as clear cut as it should be.

If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.

What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.

The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing not being authoritarian.

Except for where Western governments pearl clutch about freedom and how free and open they are unlike big, bad China and all that.

Yes, but the US ones are still around, mostly.