> The vast majority of people who buy a gun out of fear go to the range once and then put the gun in the top of the closet never to be seen again.
I'm close to that, but I put its potential benefits similar to that of my fire extinguishers, and with no kids around the cost/risk is low. I am happy to be part of the statistics that raise the costs for intruders, and I like being ready to defend my dogs from the local coyotes, wolves and cougars. My guns and fire extinguishers are downstream of the same kind of fear.
When AI is a more effective capital allocator than NI it will drive capital into the accounts of whoever controls the AI, gaining them increasing decision making power over the economy and culture. Maybe those controllers will be human at first.
All that's needed is a tight feedback loop between learning and applying those skills ... the thing that Google Translate helped you evade. AI can be a tool for evading or optimizing that loop, like a knife can cut your sandwich or your throat. Your choice.
When I was six or seven my older brother untied my shoelaces when I wasn't looking, and I tripped on them and almost fell down. This was apparently a traumatic event for me since it has affected my behavior ever since. I've double-knotted my shoelaces every time since then, usually remembering why. For about the last 57 years. When I was about 12 the same brother tried it again and failed due to the double knot. It was a moment of triumph.
But the double knot still sometimes comes untied somehow so I've never been entirely happy with it. Maybe if I take the effort to overcome my muscle memory and learn Ian's knot, it will quell the PTSD from being victimized at a young age and I can find inner peace.
I'm excited for you - this knot works incredibly well at staying tied, but what's even better is that compared to the standard "double knot" this is much, much easier for you to purposely untie - simply pull the string like the "traditional" knot.
Now, maybe that would have been a flaw with that pesky prankster brother of yours around, but I bet it'll be a positive now. Try it!
I worked with a guy once that liked to do stuff like untie peoples' shoes -- while they were standing on a ladder, working with their head inside of a ceiling.
One time, he even managed to re-tie the laces of my boot to a rung on that ladder. I almost fell down and ate shit due to this nonsense, and he found the whole thing to be particularly hilarious.
I don't think I was a victim here, nor do believe that I have PTSD, but I can definitely say that I learned that this dude was a fucking asshole.
Am I better for having learned that? Does my past tolerance for his dumb shit make me a better person today? Am I better off where I am today than I might be if I had responded by beating him with a Crescent wrench until he was unrecognizable?
Anyway, he didn't last at that job. The last I heard about him was several years later; he was in some kind of recovery house a couple of hours away after he pissed someone off to such an extent that they became motivated to try to saw his foot off with a broken coffee pot.
I thought that was pretty funny.
(To answer my own rhetorical questions: I'd probably be a better person today if I hadn't been forced to learn to be so detached in the first place.)
Because we don't have a right to a continuing service that requires their labor unless they agreed to it. A buyer should discount the value of products that rely on ongoing services accordingly.
If a software requires a server component that is costly to run, then I would expect the software developer to charge a subscription in order to use it, rather than offering it as a one-time charge and then destroying it when they realize letting me continue to use it is costly.
You also pay for expansions in WoW which are a one time fee, for each expansion. The latest one includes previous ones so you don't need to pay for all eleven of the, but if you're an active player you would absolutely pay for all of them.
Then switch to a subscription model. nobody is forcing you to operating your service indefinitely. Just don't sell something, the say you are not supporting it any longer and remove the ability to use a purchased product.
So it's ok for companies to misrepresent their subscription services as a "single-payment" acquisition and pull the brought product away form their customers when they want?
No, if they materially misrepresent their product like this it is fraud and a crime. A new law isn't needed if a prosecutor or plaintiff can show the misrepresentation.
For most engineers a mathemetician is a machine for producing correct algorithms, like a chef is a machine for producing tasty food. In both cases that overlooks the human element, but that's a critical skill for a limited mind with finite resources to grok infinite complexity. You can read that as permission to be an asshole or a neccesary compromise.
> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port.
Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.
Yes, Ford claimed up to 90% in the 1930s when they were producing up to 1.4M cars and trucks per year. (Down to less than 400K in the worst of the depression.)
I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff
The original Model T plant (the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit proper) was not vertically integrated, and in fact most of the "running gear" (all the complicated stuff, basically everything but the coachwork) was purchased as parts from the Dodge brothers (who owned a plant at what is now Detroit/Hammtramck Assembly -- formerly Dodge Main and then GM Poletown -- a GM plant making EVs like the Sierra and Hummer EVs) and merely assembled by Ford employees (albeit in an admittedly revolutionary assembly line process that changed capitalism forever).
The Highland Park plant was Ford's play to cut the Dodge Brothers out of the process by machining most of his own parts. The peak of vertical integration would be the River Rouge plant which, as you say, machined all its own parts from iron and steel made on-site from raw ore (but never made the Model T).
So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards).
In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display.
What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?
While I could have sworn RIM put out their own modems (which Qualcomm used to make life difficult for them, especially as the world transitioned from 3G to 4G), and did their own hardware and software, I can't currently find a source
They are "more" vertical, but they too have vital suppliers that they could not do without. The semiconductor supply chain is deep. Everybody knows ASML, but there are countless others that produce raw wafers, etching machines, special chemicals and so forth.
IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?
I am still amazed that IBM is pushing their POWER processors forwards for things like their System Z Mainframes. From what I have heard they are still really fast with I/O and general shifting of data but I'm not sure how much better than is than the alternatives.
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
POWER still exists? That's kind of neat. I had a POWER 1 rs6k way back. Almost wish I'd had room to keep it just as a sort of museum piece. The processor was several chips on one or two large PCBs IIRC.
I know, they are up to the POWER 11 spec now. It is the definition of a brilliant architecture that was simply out run by others (x86) that could push their mediocre setups far better than they could.
Precisely. IBM paid them to take their fabs away (yes, they paid them, not the opposite, they were so obsolete that it was basically a waste disposal operation)
was there some regulation preventing them from just shutting the plants down and selling off the real estate and equipment? severance payments too high?
IIRC they had an agreement that Globalfoundries were to take the fabs and further develop them to shrink to better nodes. I think it was less than a "take this crap off of us" and more of a "we still need fabs, so here's some money and please continue running them for a while". GloFo then utterly failed at competing with TSMC, Samsung and Intel which was quite a problem for IBM. In general if you have a certain design you can't immediately port it to a different fab, you need to engineer it around the constraints of the fab node and process
If they were just recording and it required human labor to interpret it would merely be a traditional regime of totalitarian repression. But this tech allows real time interpretation. Imagine that a stalwart ideologue gets to decide what behavior constitutes hate, and to dispatch enforcement before you can finish rolling your eyes. This is what makes me fear Ilya Sutskever's warning of an infinitely stable dictatorship. It's not clear that gravity well can be escaped.
> I know this line of commentary is getting tiring, but…
It's beyond that and into obsession. I don't care whether a piece of information is written by a human, an AI or a talking dog. I care about if it is surprising and true. That feeling seems to put me in a small minority.
I'm close to that, but I put its potential benefits similar to that of my fire extinguishers, and with no kids around the cost/risk is low. I am happy to be part of the statistics that raise the costs for intruders, and I like being ready to defend my dogs from the local coyotes, wolves and cougars. My guns and fire extinguishers are downstream of the same kind of fear.
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