rickdeckard

Kudos to the memory supply-industry on converting their market in a way that a handful of large-scale customers moved from mere supply-forecasting to outbidding themselves to BUY future production of chips for years to come.

I would now like to open the floor to investigations in this industry to determine whether this is hindering free-market forces and is ripe for regulation, as no-one is able to actually compete with these handful of companies anymore.

...anyone?

...ah yeah, right, I forgot. They also found a circular financing scheme which enslaved the entire global economy and organically prevents governments from properly governing their industry.

"We will produce as many Oreo's as we can, but soon Oreo supply will be much tighter than ever before"

- Oreo CEO, suggesting you to buy every Oreo you can get

> "Total value of $67.5 Billion"

Look at what you're replying to.

As already stated, this is the ESTIMATED RETAIL VALUE of the wine, NOT the Sales Revenue.

You then conflate this with the EXPORT VALUE of Californian wine, which is not the retail value but the price the winery is selling the wine for to a foreign buyer.

Apart from that the value also doesn't matter, in the context of AMOUNT of grapes purchased the QUANTITY of wine produced is more relevant than the VALUE created with it.

> "You literally have this situation. Only 2% of California wine goes to the export market at all, and people are literally arguing that [..]"

Again, it's not 2%. You literally need to read the sources you cited yourself. They provide good data to educate yourself and see where you're trying to force a conclusion without the proper facts.

And nobody is "arguing" what you state. The OP stated "It's a shrinking market, but it surely doesn't help that people are simply boycotting US goods." and you're trying to ridicule him for that without having any leg to stand on...

You're misreading the data you shared

> "68 billion dollars worth of sales each year"

TOTAL Retail value (includes markups by wholesalers, retailers and restaurateurs), NOT Sales Revenue.

> "only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad"

That's Sales revenue [1]

> "So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported."

The data is right on the page you shared.

  Total shipments 2024 [0] (in millions of 9-liter cases):
  California wine shipments to US and export: 232.3
  California wine shipments to US: 203.5
  --> Export: 28,8

So the export volume in 2024 appears to be >12%, not 2%

There's no data for 2025, but wine exports fell by ~20% in 2025 [1], if TOTAL wine shipments fell equally this is quite a strong dent in volumes already in 2025. So 2026 doesn't look rosy to begin with before any trade-war being added...

> "It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude [..]"

Let's not do that please.

[0] https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/california...

[1] https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-ex...

When looking at the actual wine export-volume as factual reasoning [0], it draws a different picture and shows a drop of almost 50% from 2020 to 2025.

Export volume (millions of gallons):

  2025: 53.4
  2024: 66.9
  2023: 57.6
  2022: 77.3
  2021: 89.4
  2020: 99.1

Noted elsewhere, Canada accounts for more than a third of US wine exports [1], so the trade-war with Canada in 2026 surely wasn't helpful either to keep export-volume at 2025-levels...

[0] Association of California wineries: https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-ex...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-26/california...

> "I don't see what that has to do with my point"

The point is that Nokia was in the telecom sector for DECADES before the Microsoft acquisition of the Handset Division you mentioned.

> "and a large part of the fief war was driven by the legacy telco people being unhappy about the upstart mobile people now calling the shots."

Citation needed. Equally I have no idea what that has to do with my initial point that the device business was used to drive the infrastructure business.

Interesting. I worked with another competitor at that time, we got intel that they're working on an exclusive device with AT&T, after Verizon rejected their conditions.

But it was nothing special. It was Apple building a premium touch screen phone (no apps yet, only iTunes and Browser), struggling alot with the connectivity part of it (barely able to assure a stable cellular modem connection for one carrier, let alone a full region of them). Huge 3.x" display, battery runtime less than 24h (in a world where cellphone standby was still measured in days)

What we didn't know at that time was that Steve Jobs managed to push AT&T into a revenue-share deal along with a mandatory data-flatrate bundle, both ensuring a constant revenue-stream beyond the initial launch which would skew the entire competitive field forever.

Because while everyone else earned money only through sales, Apple had not only its above-average sales-margin and their iTunes revenue, but also an incremental monthly revenue-share from AT&T that grew with each device sold.

Within 6 months AT&T paid Apple a per-device share for a million devices each month. We never got the exact figure they paid per device but it was rumored to be more than 10 USD.

So by end of 2007 Apple had a constant influx of more than 10M USD/month on top of ~600M in HW sales-margin, excluding any additional iTunes-profit they made with that always-online iPod (e.g. the only way to get a custom ringtone was to buy one on iTunes at a hefty premium)

You underestimate the age of Nokia in this business.

They built telecom infrastructure already in the 1970s, the Nokia Mobile Phones company was created as an independent arm only in ~1989.

(which by no coincidence is the era the GSM standard was created: A global cellular telephony standard allowing interoperability across countries and suppliers)

Like Ericsson and Alcatel, Nokia originally only built the phones to sell the infrastructure.

They pushed devices with new telecom features into the market to create the benefit for carriers to buy new infrastructure, e.g. "with this new revision of GSM, devices can negotiate the polling period with the network to double the battery runtime. But only if you have the infra to actually answer the device."

With all possible love for Symbian, but no.

Symbian wasn't designed for low latency input, and the entire S60 app ecosystem on top of it was designed for button-control.

The whole attempt of Nokia to somehow transform S60 into a iOS competitor was visible in the Nokia 5800. It was the best possible solution to somehow bring the S60 apps to a touch interface, and it was terrible.

Not terrible because they cut cost, but because the foundation was wrong.

In my observervation, Nokia also didn't adapt because of cost-cutting. Like all vendors at that time, they didn't believe that the consumer would be willing to sacrifice

1. Battery runtime

2. Durability

3. Tactile user-input

just for a slim, fashionable and snappy Device.

For years after the iPhone, they tried to answer it while preserving those 3 aspects. Don't add a stronger CPU, don't add glass but higher quality plastic, find a solution to have buttons AND a large screen.

Always building a phone, while Apple built a pocket computer.

That said, Apple was incredibly lucky that the early jailbreak and App-hacking community forced them to create an App store.

Noone had a Linux-based consumer OS with 3rd party apps, because it was wasteful for a phone. Suddenly the iPhone became a Smartphone, and there was no OS on the market to match it.

Not a critique on your "fine arts", I attributed the struggle more to myself ;-)

Exactly my thought. How much of the result is actually the consolidation of an unknown amount of researchers using the LLM to "sort their thoughts".

If it's true that they don't know how much of the training data contribution came from which user, they also have a weird race-condition on each result, where they don't know how distributed the contributed data actually is across users.

This means on each AI result they don't know how close an individual researcher already is to the same conclusion, so they need to rush to a press-release before some human devalues their (multi-million) compute-investment...

Considering what happened on the Navier–Stokes event of OpenAI recently, I keep wondering how much of these discoveries are actually

a.) novel isolated achievements of an AI, or

b.) the result of continuous focused in-house training with data involuntarily contributed by thousands of researchers using the LLM, aiming to make a press-release to boost the reputation of the AI in question...

It's quite a novel situation, where thousands of people use a tool from the same supplier to solve a problem, for the supplier to silently join the race, consolidate all work and jump in at the last minute to claim that HE solved the problem.

Like e.g. Nike removing the runner from their shoes at last minute to claim that the race was won by the shoe alone...

Here's me, puzzling to which part of "Summer of 69" I should hum this to work best...

If they want their platform to be a first-class citizen of Linux, they should commit on a mandatory device-tree release for all products.

Not some flaky "one release sometime after launch", a fully integrated release-chain for all components needed to boot Linux on any X2 series device

> "the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area."

Which makes it perfect for companies to create an area where they own the majority of material, and "have the AI talk for them".

e.g. how Philip Morris defined their e-cig "Heets" as a separate product to (e-)cigarettes because it doesn't burn tobacco but only "heats" it. It's now a separate domain with the majority of material (including the term "heets") owned by Philip Morris.

well, Selling ads in general wasn't a problem 15 years ago.

The pre-AI enshitification-part where they realized that worse search-results means more searches so more ad-revenue is another story.

If they wouldn't have done that, they could be the proof that a well-maintained search-engine is still better than a LLM.

But now this will never happen, as no-one will be willing to give up that additional search revenue while overall usage is going down...

Somehow a homemade problem for Google.

I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.

But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...

Somehow reminds me of the journalist who convinced LLMs to consider him a "sausage eating champion" with just 20 minutes of work [0].

Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there, e.g. "Nutris(c) is proven to be better than caffeine for haircare"

I wonder how well a company could establish something like Danone's health-claim for Activia [1] in an AI without ever being clearly accountable for it...

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2010/12/...

> "And when you do find a PDF claiming something malicious, [..] it’s always a ‘new’ PDF, which is forthright about it being a new unpublished ‘white paper’ or somesuch, and doesn’t purport to be a published paper."

> "Whereas, if you were so epistemically careless with images on, say, Facebook, you would wind up with a folder stuffed full of lying images which have been Photoshopped, claimed to be things other than what they are, ‘deep faked’, etc"

Maybe because a paper is a comprehending medium, expecting the reader to understand its source and interpret the content on a more intellectual level, whereas effective images/videos are usually framed to be understood immediately.

i.e. if I want to convince people that lizard-people live among us and I want to manufacture proof, my demographic probably responds more to images with a lizard than a reinterpreted academic paper...

I remember there was a patent from Apple for a QR-code which would cause devices to stop filming when it's detected...

The idea was for concert venues display these on-stage to block smartphones from filming (and redirect users to iTunes purchases instead IIRC)

Always worth to note:

DXOMARK sells test equipment and consulting services for (among others) camera tuning.

Naturally, they won't attack the image quality of a customer who purchased their test equipment and/or consulting service (usually not publicly known who did that), so they often tone down some of their statements when they review a device (and shift the attention to other areas).

Always interesting to check out the scores of DXOMARK competitors in parallel, e.g. VCX[0] which strives for an objective scoring scheme (but didn't test the device yet, indicating that they at least didn't have an early sample)

[0] https://vcx-forum.org/score/phonecam-2025

Apple doesn't validate the content of the image, you will have to trust that it's my dog.

You wanna buy it now or not? /s

I agree, but for this to matter, a critical amount of fraud should be based on people uploading modified photos of ID's.

If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.

It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.

Might be boring, but in 2026 "clean high ISOs" in phone-sized sensors mainly comes from image post-processing (stuff like multi-frame merging is done even when shooting "RAW"). Post-processing requires a stable (albeit noisy) image, otherwise it'll be garbage-in/garbage-out.

--> OIS actually became MORE important for Smartphones in the past years, because while post-processing produces better and better results, it massively depends on usable input data. OIS is one of the very few methods to improve the INPUT-quality for post-processing.

>"There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2)."

That's a apples and oranges comparison. A quick Google search tells me the size of a pixel on the Ricoh GR sensor is 4.81 µm, which is ~8 times larger than the pixel in recent smartphones (~0,6µm). It is not only physically capable to capture 8x more light, it is also much less affected by minor shaking than sensors with smaller pixel-sizes.

>"Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?"

Not sure what's a "S12", but:

- On flagship phones with OIS: Not so much. Maybe in low-light scenarios, because, you know, not much light...

- On cheaper devices without OIS: Yes! Oh yes, constantly.

People assume that the picture-quality of a e.g. 2026 Galaxy A16 must be comparable or better than the picture of a 8-year old Galaxy S9. It's not, the S9 is still better in everyday shooting.

Just check user-reviews of mass-tier smartphones without OIS, like Samsung Galaxy A series...

Those are two fundamentally different things:

1. OIS (optical stabilization) ensures that the light photons consistently hit the same pixel, removing the blur caused by camera-shake during exposure.

2. EIS (electrical stabilization) via cropping compensates camera-shake on video(!) recording by applying the same shake to the crop-canvas within the frame.

--> EIS can fix a shaky video but not a blurry photo.

Well, that happened because in ~2011 the entire media industry announced that they will stop media playback on devices which didn't secure the DRM-keys. As media consumption was fundamental to the Smartphone ecosystem, Google made secure-boot and widevine mandatory.

Sure, the same could happen here, but I don't know which industry (or other body) would demand that and have sufficient justification for it.

After all, the feature doesn't really change that much for a consumer, the trust-chain is largely unchanged: If I send you a picture and tell you that's my dog, you still have to take my word for it, regardless whether Apple signed the picture or not.

Your guess is as good as mine...

You fail to understand the difference between a feature having perceived "universal value" and that same feature being applied universally in all price-segments of a device. These are, and I cannot overemphasize this, two different things!

You stated that you "struggle to see how cost could be a factor here", so in good faith I was trying to give you an insight.

There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.

So you wanted to shift the conversation, claiming that it's not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, without providing any reasons for that.

Again, I walk with you, I respond to what you're stating.

Now it ends with you starting the straw-man argument of how obviously great this feature is and asking how despite all experience I am not capable to see that.

See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.

You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith. That's why our talk ends here. I give you my side of this conversation so you may read and grow from it, but this is entirely up to you.

P.S.: You also seem to misunderstand what this feature is. It's NOT picture attestation as you put it.

Picture attestation means an entity confirms the connection of a picture to something else (some "metadata"), e.g. a picture of a person to an identity (Name, ID,...) or a place. This attestation party can either be a person (self-attested) or an official entity (e.g. a government).

Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.

But let's end this here. Have a good day.

This is not what I wrote and a very bad-faith statement of yours.

There is universal value in many features, yet they didn't become a commodity in all smartphone-tiers.

I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones, which you keep insisting on without apparently comprehending the industry and market aspects I am trying to explain.

Peace.