new299

Right, I absolutely agree. It's interesting to compare, in fact I've written about the startup environment comparing the US to Japan before:

https://41j.com/blog/2022/05/startups-and-japan/

But when people make broad statements based on single events it doesn't come off as a thoughtful comparison but something else entirely...

> i think this sort of demonstrates just how far behind and backwards Japan is. It's like the country is stuck in late 90s.

I've lived in Japan for the last 10 years, in no way does it seem "stuck in late 90s". And this single incident in no way demonstrates this.

For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".

You could if you wanted say "wow the US/UK are stuck in the 1990s" because copper broadband is still common in the US/UK. In Japan you often have 4G fiber to the home in rural locations, and 10G connections available in some locations... it's not a super helpful comment though, because countries are complex and you can't point to single issues and make general statements about the countries stage of development.

Honestly I think these kinds of calculations should also include all the VAT you pay out over the course of a year, which I imagine is also reasonably substantial.

Also, you're not paying 45% income tax on the total amount right (that's the highest bracket in the UK).

In this case it seems like he didn't have any full-time employees, so there isn't the employee issue.

But I'm curious as to how this might effect investors generally. I assume it could make them look bad, and cause issues with the fund LPs?

I.e. you announced an investment, did a capital call and then suddenly the money gets returned. LPs might get annoyed that money is now sitting in the fund accounts collecting interest? or I guess it just makes the fund look bad generally?

The author (Tim Romero) also runs disruptingjapan. So it's more like he's just replicating content he originally wrote for another publication to his personal/professional site...

Wouldn't they also potentially have copyright issues exactly replicating the original design?

The strangest thing about this list for me is that it contains multiple .onion addresses. It also seems to have been at least somewhat filtered for "objectionable" content (porn etc.).

I assume it must have come from user searches at some point?

It's so confusing to me as a piece of art using engineering principals to express something.

How would it even work? Hydraulic fluid would need to be under pressure. It just scooping it back in wouldn't keep going. Perhaps if it was a lubricant, without which the mechanical system would overheat... but this wouldn't quite tell the same story...

Then anyway we find out the robot is purely electrical, there's no hydraulics. Rather than contributing to the story as the post suggests, this feels like failure in execution. It was clearly just easier to build this way and then have a pool of fluid.

I guess for me the execution matters in this instance. The idea that's the artist is trying to express gets confused by the inconsistent engineering, for me at least.

I feel more pathos for those boxes that switch themselves off (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTilOsXBmU). While going for a completely different emotion, they seem to express it using engineering quite well.

They appear to have used commercial equipment for some of their tests, but they appear to have diluted sample until the results were no longer valid.

Here's one report on an invalid pregnancy test:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

In the Lucira test is a bit more justifiable it's a full molecular test, with built in controls, better accuracy than lateral flow. The optics is pretty neat too:

https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid

The Lucira test is in my opinion a bit more interesting:

https://aseq.substack.com/p/inside-the-lucira-check-it-covid

They include an STM32, but the instrument is performing an Isothermal PCR molecular test which makes the inclusion of a microcontroller a requirement.

Obviously throwing out electronics like this seems quite wasteful. But overall our society is fairly wasteful when it comes to disposable electronics.

This is probably something that varies a lot by area but based on my observations of elementary school students (who I’ve seen the most of) and others. The situations you describe sound like pretty strong outliers.

I would want to see pretty strong (non anecdotal) evidence to think otherwise.

The best numbers I could find for the US were these:

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide

Which looks like 5 per 100000 for 10 to 14 year olds?

The Japanese population in this age range is ~5M:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

So at the US rate we’d except ~250 suicides in Japan if the rate was the same as the US.

Over the 12 to 15 range in Japan the article states there were 103 suicides.

The rates seem roughly comparable therefore?

It terrible that this is increasing, but it would be interesting to understand if this is unique to Japan or not.

Probably not in a public forum. But if anyone wants to reach out, it’s always fun to chat (contact info in profile).

Yep, they weren’t directly assembling prototypes but still… probably using on a daily basis.

It’s interesting though. Watching this video you see the CNC mill and think wow that was probably expensive and likely didn’t get a lot of use, but would have been fun (which they confirmed). But the relatively inexpensive drawer of screws really was something you look at and say:

a) oh wow, I want and would use that.

b) this person really had a use for this, thought and cared about what they were doing.

All these little things, and the stories they tell are fascinating to me.

One of the things that’s interesting about looking at workshops is the “shop-smell” and how it seems to tell you a lot about a project/company.

I remember walking into the workshop at one well funded startup , and seeing they were using dollar store screwdrivers. Practically speaking, for what they were doing you could say it didn’t really matter. But it was also sitting next to a piece of equipment that was never used, and cost $50000.

I wouldn’t say it’s always the case, but it left me with a poor impression and a feeling that something was off.

Later this did indeed turn out to be the case.

Lots of Biotech companies have made billions based on their patent portfolios (and the monopoly this gives them on their technological approach).

I think software patents are a bad idea.

But in many industries patents benefit the small developer because they help you gain investment. If an investor sees you have reasonable patent coverage they’re more likely to give you money. Eventually if Apple sues you an investor might give you more money to fight the patent battle (if there’s a reasonable chance of a payout).

In the US patent maintenance fees are due at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after issuance.

They are increasingly expensive, with the 11.5 year fee being $7700.

You could raise these fees, but how are you going to set them? Based on industry? Ultimately just feels like you’d end up making things harder for individual inventors and easier for big businesses and patent trolls.

Personally I think there are a few reforms that might work. Firstly, software patents do not seem to be useful. They don’t seem to have been required for the development of the software industry, and in general they’ve not been allowed in the past.

Secondly, patents should never prevent the sale or incorporation of a technology into a product. Courts should always demand royalties be paid to the patent holder, based on the profit the infringing party receives.

That’s much more problematic. But it feels like there should be a way to incentivize the continued sale of products so that a company can’t just sit on a patent.

Then why not cars, airplanes, radio transmitters?

All those things require costly government mandated testing.

But it feels like the same arguments could apply to many things. Many deep tech projects require 100M+ to develop, and it’s difficult for me to see how these projects might get funded.

It's kind of clear that entertainment would still get made without copyright. But the videos thesis around drug discovery is much less well thought through.

I'd be interested in seeing someone think these issues through more deeply. For example I know a reasonable amount about the development of next-gen DNA sequencers. How would developments like this have played out in a world without patents?

It doesn't seem feasible to say that academics would be willing to prepay to fund the development of a life science tool that might help their research and appear in 10 years time or might just fail and not get developed at all. Research markets were the initial markets for these instruments.

Same goes for drug discovery, perhaps they need some new analytical tool. So do they directly fund multiple high risk approaches to develop this tool? In our current scenario VCs/startups take on this risk, in exchange for a time limited monopoly.

It doesn't seem reasonable to expect individual drug development companies to take on this risk. Do they ask prospective users of the drug to pay these downstream development costs? Do they take out a loan to cover the development costs?

Do you have a public reference for this?

If they weren't doing any scanning why would they find any to report? The data is encrypted as rest so... why would they find any to report. This clearly doesn't include search requests [1].

iCloud has perhaps 25% of the users of Facebook. Of that 25% it's not clear how many actively use the platform of backups/photos. iCloud is not a platform for sharing content like Facebook. So how many reports should we expect to see from Apple? It's unclear to me.

So, I'm not saying the number isn't suspiciously low. But it doesn't really clarify what's going on to me...

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/pdf/requests-2018-H...

If you have references to also help me piece this together I'd find that really helpful.

Right, and in the interview linked [1] above they state:

> The voucher generation is actually exactly what enables us not to have to begin processing all users’ content on our servers, which we’ve never done for iCloud Photos.

But they do appear to do "something" server-side. It's possible that all data in scanned as it is ingested for example. I dislike this statement, because it's probably technically correct but doesn't help clarify the situation in a helpful way. It makes me trust Apple less.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...

> The voucher generation is actually exactly what enables us not to have to begin processing all users’ content on our servers, which we’ve never done for iCloud Photos.

I really dislike this statement. It's likely designed to be "technically true". But it's been reported elsewhere that they do scan iCloud content:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...

Perhaps they scan as the data is being ingested. Perhaps it's scanned on a third party server. But it seems clear that it is being scanned.

> there's a legitimate "slippery slope" argument

The slippery slope argument is the only useful argument here.

The fundamental issue with their PSI/CSAM system is that they already were scanning iCloud content [1] and that they're seemingly not removing the ability to do that. If the PSI/CSAM system had been announced along side E2E encryption for iCloud backups, it would be clear that they were attempting to act in their users best interests.

But it wasn't, so as it stands there's no obvious user benefit. It then becomes a question of trust. Apple are clearly willing to add functionality at the request of governments, on device. By doing this they lose user trust (in my opinion).

> In the long run, we solve this, at least in liberal democracies, by voting people into office who understand technology, understand the value of personal encryption

But this is clearly not the way it happens in practice. At least in part, we vote with our wallets and give money to companies willing to push back on governmental over-reach. Until now, Apple was one such company [2].

I realize that Apple likely don't "care" about privacy (it's a company, not a individual human). But in a purely cynical sense, positioning themselves as caring about privacy, and pushing back against governmental over-reach on users behalf was useful. And while it's "just marketing" it benefits users.

By implementing this functionality, they've lost this "marketing benefit". Users can't buy devices believing they're supporting a company willing to defend their privacy.

[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...

[2] https://epic.org/amicus/crypto/apple/

Best I can find so far is this, which seems very similar to the method described, but is quite a bit later (1982):

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/3d/d5/b4/5beda28...

> An anti-copy system which prevents copying of tapes and records and other source material by placing a degrade signal on an analog source signal to be recorded on a recording device. One embodiment of the system includes a pulse width modulation (PWM) circuit that generates a pulsed signal in a frequency range from near the upper end to well above the range of hearing.

> However, attempts to make taped copies of the original recordings cause the degrade signal to beat against the bias oscillator frequency of the tape recording head, thereby creating harmonic signals that result in distortion and noticeable alteration of the reproduced source signal that are unpleasant and objectionable to the listener.

Apple have already been doing this for sometime:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...

This is about the new PSI system:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

In which photos are scanned on the users device. This appears to be a report of a new press conference after the initial announcement? Does anyone have a transcript of this press conference?

There's also an audiobook version, which I found pretty enjoyable (and generally well made considering it's free):

https://unsong.libsyn.com

I enjoyed all the interludes, the main plot seem mostly like a story on which to hang various ideas (but that might reflect my own limited ability to keep the whole story in my head).