cyd

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (5 children)

The US can make them, they'll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Years later, after untold exaflops of computing, the AI's answer appears on the screen: "Dunno".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the information! It's pretty distressing that the EU, in its zeal to do the right thing, seems to be protecting the big AI companies from FOSS competition.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Any word on the final legislation's treatment of free and open source models? At the drafting stage, there were warnings that the requirements would basically shut out FOSS projects, thereby entrenching proprietary models from tech giants. Later on, there was talk about possibly adding carve-outs to protect FOSS, but I couldn't find the details.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

"Businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves." -- Milton Friedman

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

My phone is better at navigation etc anyways.

You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that's not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like... being good at navigation.

This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the "car" aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (10 children)

"The wealthy and corporations" have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they'll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain't nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 4 months ago (16 children)

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm pretty skeptical about how much fundamental change is possible on this issue. So long as we give consumers a choice, the overwhelming evidence is that most people dgaf about their data, and are willing to trade it away.

This is a totally free exchange. Even when you plant the choice in front of users as an obnoxious and intrusive accept-cookies prompt, they'll happily click Accept All even for sketchy websites (let alone something like Gmail). So you end up wasting everyone's time for little benefit.

A common response to this is to mull heavy-handed centralized government controls, like how China regulates its internet giants. But this would be a decisive move away from the entire idea of a decentralized internet. People pushing such legislation often retort that it's possible to pick off the internet giants while leaving smaller operators alone, but this seems like a forlorn hope. Google and Meta already signalled that they are not concerned about EU data laws, because they have so much internal data, and the regulations could even entrench their dominance by preventing other players from catching up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

If you pay $1 for Gmail, and Google pays you $1 for your data, isn't that equivalent to where we are today?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

If you're referring to the BYD U7 vs the Porsche Taycan, they both look like car. Beyond that, eh.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (7 children)

So you're just talking about the look of the car? Because BYD has been doing EVs far longer than Porsche, so if anyone is doing a rip-off of the tech, it would be Porsche.

As far as design goes, BYD's aesthetics in recent years has a lot to do with them hiring big-shot European designers like Wolfgang Egger. If they're pulling from the same talent pool as other top carmakers, it's not so obvious why you'd accuse BYD of copying others, and not vice versa.

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