jacobsimon

Not sure why the article is calling it a podcast, I think they’re referring to his TV show on Apple TV.

In fact, I’m almost convinced that this regulatory framework was suggested by Apple themselves, because it doesn’t really accomplish anything. No one wanted to use third party app stores, they just want Apple to stop charging them so much. It’s fundamentally a payment processing issue, and they’ve spun it into a user freedom issue.

I think you’re right, but my take is that the user freedom bit is a regulatory overreach. Couldn’t Apple literally turn off the App Store tomorrow, or replace everything with first party applications? There’s no law saying they have to support all these developers, though the DMA may require this indirectly. It feels like a slippery slope to “you need to be able to run Android on your iPhone hardware” or something like that.

It just seems really far fetched to me if you were to apply this logic to other industries- eg “movie theaters must let you play any movie, not just the movies they want!” Or “movie theaters must allow you to bring your own popcorn or allow competing concessions vendors!”

What I think is within regulatory oversight is the fees people charge within certain jurisdictions, because governments should regulate commerce. Similar to how they regulate bank fees, real estate transactions, VAT, etc. They could set a maximum, prevent charging fees for free software, or all sorts of other things that would help developers and consumers without forcing Apple to support weird 3rd party app distributors.

Yeah I see what you mean, I just think these regulatory frameworks are themselves somewhat draconian, indirect, and lead to obnoxious and bad user experiences despite their good intentions, like cookie consent popups.

Obviously my opinion doesn’t matter, but wouldn’t it be easier if the EU simply said, “We have the power to regulate commerce in the EU, including software marketplaces. We have decided X.” That would be pretty similar to how many governments set maximum credit card interest rates (as someone mentioned below) as well as other transaction fees in industries that are vulnerable to cartel-like behavior like real estate.

That’s kinda my point though, by having such generic and wide ranging laws, it opens up room for loopholes and confusion. They should just say specifically what the desired impact of the law is.

This might sound like a dumb question - but why do lawmakers write such roundabout legislation in the first place?

They could have passed a law that says “In the EU, app stores including Apple’s App Store on iOS will not be allowed to charge a fee greater than x% on developers.” And the whole thing would be solved. We can argue about what X should be, but then we wouldn’t have to jump through all these hoops.

Seems likely that they would move into the voice generation platform arena like elevenlabs before competing with Siri/Alexa, but they’d likely add this functionality to ChatGPT at the same time as a demonstration.

Yeah we should stop calling it dark matter and call it “missing matter” or “the unexplained matter issue” or something that is more obviously a placeholder.

Why not? The device has a very similar form factor and the use case is the same, except they’re missing the partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. The Walkman was also an incredibly popular device for years. Not to undersell the iPod, either, but I think the innovation was as much in the distribution channel (iTunes) as the product design.

Interesting - isn't this just a matter of indexing/caching the file names, though? Surely S3 must store the files somewhere and index them. There's a Unix command called `locate` that does the same thing by maintaining a local database of keys and lets you search with prefixes.[1]

Anyway, I guess this is beyond the point of the original commenter above. I would disagree that listing files efficiently is the most useful part of S3. The main value prop is the fact that you can easily upload and download files from a distributed store. Most use cases involve uploading and downloading known files, not efficiently listing millions of files.

[1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/05/how-the-locate-command-works...

What is it about S3 that enables this speed, and why can’t traditional Unix file systems do the same?

This is exactly what the article is saying - low interest rates set by the fed and corporate tax rates in the last decade led to higher corporate profits, and higher multiples, which was also probably fueled by investors with more cash and corporate buybacks.

There’s a lot of businesses like this that rely on “complexity” or “fragmentation” of existing systems, particularly in the US where laws and standards differ across all states. Another example is a business like Segment—-they profit off of the complexity and incompatibility of other companies’ products, and would likely oppose or delay an open standard.

Is this actually true though? KFC is able to trademark their name and acronym (I believe their trademark is for the acronym officially), even though they’re selling Kentucky-style fried chicken?

This is a compelling perspective. But putting sales or import restrictions in place right now would be damaging in the short term both for the manufacturing partners and the US. They’ve already put some export restrictions in place (ie preventing nvidia from selling their most powerful chips to china).

In terms of nearshoring - that’s a good idea too but I think the workforce training would be even more difficult than it has been in the US and it would be less popular politically as you said. (Side note: PR is part of the US - maybe you meant Costa Rica)

I thought OpenAI was the first to develop and use the term GPT[1]. So maybe a more apt comparison than RNA would be PCR, which was a technique developed in a private lab and patented, even though it was published in scientific journals etc.

1. https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...

My understanding is that the US factory is underway and going to start producing chips next year and that they have plans to construct a second factory already. I’ve been seeing this negative narrative a lot around the US factory, but I’m curious if there’s any evidence that they’ve actually stopped progress. I feel like that would be a huge political loss for Biden and the CHIPS act at this point.

And apparently breast cancer and several others. I also drink regularly but I just finished reading Drink[1] and it goes pretty in depth on the health effects.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Drink-New-Science-Alcohol-Health/dp/B...

Yeah true, but a player piano requires inventing the piano ;)

It’s definitely possible to make a recording without electricity, it just requires steady source of rotation for engraving, so maybe a spring or motor was a necessary precursor to make it useful.

It’s a funny comment because I think you could also argue that the government misappropriated a huge amount of public money to put a man on the moon in the 1960s, when it should have invested that into medical research or better transportation infrastructure in America. The fact that the private sector hasn’t developed moon travel yet is a sign that it’s just not that important to most people, not a lack of productivity.

I think patents are better overall for society as it encourages rapid disclosure of new ideas and applications, instead of people withholding information because they are worried of being copied after they go to market.

As an aside, there are plenty of inventions that were developed or rediscovered long after they were technologically feasible. The whole Middle Ages occurred because we forgot how to do things they knew how to do in ancient times and never documented, like how to use concrete. Other things were just never thought of until much later, like the analog phonograph could have been created in ancient times but no one tried running a pin over a grooved surface.

I wonder if that is part of the story here - seems like that company has come along and shown it’s possible to bring a solution to market faster.

Very relevant thanks!

This might sound like nonsense to someone who actually understands neural networks, but I had a similar idea recently that perhaps we could use LLMs or diffusion models to generate the weights for a new network, e.g. if you think of a layer of a network as an image where each pixel represents the strength of a connection, then perhaps you could generate all the initial weights for a specialized network from a more general/powerful network. Curious if that’s been tried or if there are fundamental limitations that would prevent it.

Believe it or not - it was actually meant to be an exclusive for Mac before Microsoft acquired it. Here’s Steve Jobs kicking off the demo in 1999: https://youtu.be/6eZ2yvWl9nQ?feature=shared

Curious what other people think but I’d bet it has more to do with the prices that the market will bear rather than competition between products, and there’s a huge difference between consumer and business prices generally for this reason. This is reflected in consumer vs business SaaS tools, e.g. compare pricing of Apple’s iCloud vs Box pricing. Another factor is that for many services, there isn’t a clear marketplace as there is for consumer apps, and SaaS tools often grow via outbound sales, so the market is less efficient essentially.

Hah actually yeah didn’t realize the full history here, it’s actually tied back to x.com in a full circle way:

> In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing. Musk and Bill Harris, then-president and CEO of X.com, disagreed about the potential future success of the money transfer business and Harris left the company in May 2000. In October of that year, Musk decided that X.com would terminate its other internet banking operations and focus on payments. That same month, Elon Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of X.com, which was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and went public in 2002.

Anyway, my comment was more about Square and Twitter and how I wish they’d formed a partnership of some sort.

It’s remarkable to me that this would not only lead to competition with PayPal (founded by Musk) but also with Cash App, founded by Dorsey. The article does not even mention this second point, which in my opinion represents a huge lost opportunity for Square and Twitter, who could have had the same partnership when they were both doing well and run by the same CEO.

You might find this book interesting! This is essentially the theory put forward. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Consciousness_and_the_S...

This is a profound question but I also wonder if this non-thinking “awareness” you’re referring to is largely defined by quieting the thinking mind and listening to the senses more directly. A lot of meditation is about tuning out thoughts and focusing on proprioception like breathing, the feelings of the body, etc.