kristianc

Nearly all of the things you describe there aside from the camera are software/services based and don’t require improved hardware year-on-year at all. This is a problem for a company that makes its money selling expensive hardware.

The strategy that worked for the ozone layer crisis might not be as effective for other issues. Obviously for one problems like climate change are way more complex than the ozone issue, which had a pretty straightforward solution.

Also, climate change more broadly is going to affect also big sectors like energy and transportation, so there’s a lot more resistance and economic implications. The ozone issue was more direct – people got it because it had immediate effects like increased skin cancer risk.

So, yeah, while the ozone strategy was a big win, we can't expect the same playbook to work for everything else.

I had this problem with their TV as well. They sold this Samsung One box with it which completely replaced the HDMI out on the TV. Of course the software on the box then failed leaving the TV functionally useless for anything that didn’t use WiFi.

I'm fascinated by this as well. There's a lot of conjecture around what if, but I'm yet to really hear much about the how.

Yes, but the “candid” part carries the additional implication that he lied to make them think that.

> ‘Schedule UberX for today at 3 pm, pickup at my place, drop off at the airport'

I guess one reason is that you can literally do this yourself within the Uber app in 30 seconds without the need for an intermediary.

If that’s the killer app for VR, then all I can say is god help VR.

Fond memories of working on the Georgia Coffee account when I was in Japan at the start of my career - insanely profitable drink for Coke as there’s very little distribution cost, simply strike a deal with the bottlers and boom you have 200m units in front of people.

This means that you can have insane variety - 20/30 different types of this canned coffee are not uncommon at all and the Japanese consumers are absolutely hooked on it.

One of the biggest features of ChatGPT, for me, is that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" when you ask it a question.

This narrative just about washed when Musk hadn’t had time to get his feet under the table, and all we could speak about is “Elon could!”

The data is in now!

That’s exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he’s telling us they’re all content-scrapers. The very concept of truth is eroded.

Great, write a blog post on him then and post it here for us all to read.

Possibly - but this thread is about Turing, because of an article about Alan Turing, which was posted by the Alan Turing institute on the anniversary of the birthday of, you guessed it, Alan Turing.

Why the need to play one up?

Turing’s work wasn’t fully understood or appreciated until the the 1980s specifically because many of the documents which revealed the extent of his contributions were classified by the UK government until then, and yes because of the social attitudes of the time, particularly regarding his sexuality. Without those two things he would have got far more credit than he actually did.

The declassification, and a thawing of social attitudes toward LGBT people enabled Turing to be recognized as the figure he is today. So yes, file it under equality, diversity and inclusion all you want.

Sure, not everything’s economic growth. But without some concrete examples of where things have actually improved in tangible terms over the last decade you leave yourself open to the claim that what this is _actually_ about is seeing people and institutions you dislike taking a decline in status regardless of the objective consequences.

This is a pretty common misconception. Nearly all economics agree that free markets are good, immigration is a net benefit, rent controls are bad, congestion pricing is good, lowering corporate tax rates are good, the gold standard is a bad idea. Politicians disagree on all or most of these things, but nearly all economists are in consensus about this stuff.

I'm curious what metric you're assessing 'better off' there - by many conventional economic measures such as real wage growth, productivity, GDP, the British economy has either flatlined or gone backwards over the last decade.

Under the previous 'bloated' administration there were 40 consecutive quarters of economic growth at one point.

The problem is that it could also happen at any time in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years.

In Britain we've had over a decade of political leaders questioning "Hmm is this political institution / job role / arm of government / publicly funded service really necessary" and most here are of the consensus that it's essentially gutted the place.

Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other people's jobs to be worthless...

Tyler Cowen’s review at the time nails it I think:

> He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.

> A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us.

> At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

Again, not a million miles from other real world founder decks you could care to mention…

It's been kind of interesting to see this play out in real time: it's clearly a board level reaction at these companies to OpenAI essentially scraping these companies, running a model over their content, and then essentially disintermediating them.

And when you ask ChatGPT you're (marginally) less likely to be chided by someone telling you you're an idiot for asking the question in the first place.

It’s a fair point but 1/ Apple for the most part didn’t start it’s product journey for any of the other products you’ve mentioned with the ‘Pro’ version - its strategy has generally been to get people to fall in love with the regular version and convince them they want more of it, doubly true when they’re introducing a new category product and 2/ It’s strange because I own many of those fully specced out things you mention, and this leaves me utterly cold. Fwiw, I also own a Kindle.

If the strategy is fully about content (which would make this device about selling services on top of the Vision Pro), why is the Vision Pro specced as it is, and why is the price point so high?

The specification of the device seems to be complete overkill for the kind of strategy you are describing, which frankly does not need extreme hardware power, and makes it cost prohibitive to many of the people who would otherwise buy the content.

All I can think of is that there are lower specced and lower priced devices coming, but I am sort of at a loss as to why they didn’t start with those - as if this fails, they aren’t going to get off the ground.

How’s that going?

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/china-el-...

People don’t owe crypto a ‘good attitude’. The only justifiable attitude toward it is a healthy scepticism until it proves to be anything more than a glorified pump and dump scheme. So far, it hasn’t cleared that bar in over a decade of trying.

No, the objective is to add value by making it a better business. Not to pump it up full of hype so you can palm it off on a greater fool.

I guess using a VPN to spoof your location to another country is also an excellent way to spend your afternoon on the phone to your bank getting your card unlocked as well..

I understand that anything I buy is backed by ownership in an institution, that there are onerous regulatory and reporting requirements, centralized institutions managing it, ample liquidity if I want to get out at any point at that people get sent to prison if they try to manipulate it…

I’m not sure why there is such fascination with this tech when it’s complex to understand and implement, prone to break in a thousand different ways, and has an ecosystem which is absolutely crammed with bad actors. This requires a deep understanding of cryptography to even understand if you’re safe. Why do people take the risk? Is it because they like to feel smart?