cyclecount

A great book on exactly that subject:

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto

Building tools for one side for everything from bomb targeting systems to “moderation” tools is not picking sides?

Google and Amazon are actively involved in the largest man-made famine since WWII, and we’re not even allowed to discuss it on HN (you know the conflict I’m talking about, every post about the genocide gets flagged immediately).

And the people of Nepal supply the raw labor used by many of the Gulf states

Yes, it would be unethical to to force conscious beings to work for us, but why would we treat machines any better than we treat our fellow humans?

This is corruption of the highest level. This is what the western leaders are doing with our carbon budget and the last few decades of high-energy society.

Capitalism killing people, nothing new or out of the ordinary here. Companies are innovative when growing and competing, but if they win they’ll reach the final form for a successful firm: monopoly. From then on, the only innovation will be in new ways to rebrand corruption and avoid regulation.

Higher education in the US is hardly about learning the skills for a particular discipline or trade. The American university system is a class differentiation mechanism, and students are paying for access to the managerial professional class, often the highest class one can achieve without family connections.

Even if tuition costs more than can be earned back in wages, it’s still a good investment because the alternative is lower class jobs or unemployment. (There are a few counter examples of professions which pay well and don’t require a university degree).

Has there been any update on the whistleblower who died under suspicious circumstances?

The economy and where you live / are willing to work will play a much larger role in how easy or hard it will be for you to find a job. Right now, the job market for software engineers is shit. Maybe 8 years ago, when tons of money was slushing around and both big tech and startups were paying well even for new grad hires, you could take career risks much worse than trying to start your own company.

the Emirates boss is Emirati, not Saudi

Or, both Apple and Google did see this coming years ago, have been smart about supporting politicians in both major US political parties, and calculated that the amount of money they could make by maintaining their monopoly positions — even if only for a few more years — was likely far greater than any fine or other regulatory headache it might cause down the line.

This is obviously Apple being stubborn because they can, but it does raise the question are you really an EU user if you no longer live in the EU?

>> “.. we’ll go as weird as possible and input: AI, Taylor Swift, McDonald's, beach volleyball.”

wow, the author has a pretty basic limited imagination

iMessage can be disabled in Settings > Messages

Apple has a very strong track record of building high-end hardware that is expensive at first targeting pro user early adopters, then iterating and reducing cost over 3-5 years, eventually becoming the dominant player in a hardware category.

iPhone for mobile phones, iPad for tablets, Apple Watch for wearables, AirPods for fully wireless headphones. They have few failed product lines so this seems like a pretty safe bet.

Probably not because this product will be culturally relevant still 5 years after launch

> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.

Did you read the linked article?

> Google sells its own phones which could be configured to have a conversation UI by default (or with Google’s Pixel Buds). This removes the friction of opening an app and setting a mode. Google also has a fleet of home devices already designed for voice interaction. Google has massive amounts of infrastructure all over the globe, with the lowest latency and fastest response. This undergirds search today, but it could undergird a new generative AI assistant tomorrow. Google has access to gobs of data specifically tied to human vocal communication, thanks to YouTube in particular. In short, the Gemini demo may have been faked, but Google is by far the company best positioned to make it real.

How does he square any of that with the rest of the preceding article? Google having a technical advantage on paper and still fumbling the ball is their M.O. for a decade. Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products.

Google is by far the best company positioned for AI assistants? Is this guy forgetting about Apple, the company that has a much stronger hardware ecosystem and that will demonstrate this in the coming months with a huge hardware launch that only they could do, leveraging a huge base of iOS apps, AirPod users, etc. Apple is building a network of personal hardware devices with a weak but well-integrated personal assistant. In 1-2 years, Siri will get a massive improvement based on recent advances in LLMs and it will be 80% as good as Google’s then probably thrice rebranded AI, but it will be 300% more polished and install automatically on hardware people actually like to use.

Google is number 1 at launching also-rans and marketing sites with feature lists that show how their unused products are better than the competition. Someday maybe they’ll learn why nobody uses their shit.

This is the exact kind of crap I remember from TV ads for trucks in the 90s. This is cheesy garbage.

Is there any chance this had to do with the rape allegations from Sam Altman’s sister?

That list of reasons is a mess with tons that overlap. Sexual misconduct is there like three different ways, plus one that’s explicitly abuse of his sister.

You can easily donate once a month via the in-app purchase subscription on iOS. Shows a nice little badge on your profile

You can’t be neutral on a moving train

The biggest potential outcome of this trial is that the Google-Apple deal is deemed illegal and maybe that forces Apple to buy or build their own search engine. There is clearly no real competition in search, and just because Google’s stagnant product is currently the “best” doesn’t excuse the ways in which it continues to degrade in quality and become more user-hostile.

>> it's actually crazy we figured out how to grow real diamonds that are cheaper and better quality than the real thing and so many people are still like, no thanks the suffering is what makes it special.

https://twitter.com/missmayn/status/1612892354624786444

A survivor of this attack claims that IDF open-fired on the hostages https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-t...

Windows is still 100x shittier than macOS. Try to do anything like the repro demo from the command line on Windows as you'll immediately realise how terrible the OS is for simple tasks.

But is the Wireguard app leaking data and just less secure than Mullvad's app?