It didn’t impact that small island inhabited only by penguins, so it’s not technically a “global” recession, ok?

“it drove right through my kitchen wall. And I hadn’t even ordered one!”

I like it a lot but I need two physical SIM slots so it doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. But great idea and love the price drop

Thanks, I understand better now.

On a related note, I wish I had known of the “just because I said it and I did it, doesn’t mean I succeeded” line of defense when I was a kid

Meta argued that “the FTC’s case rests almost entirely on emails (many more than a decade old) allegedly expressing competitive concerns” but suggested that this is only “intent” evidence, “without any evidence of anticompetitive effects.”

Not sure I understand the argument. if I write that I’m going to buy another company instead of competing with them, then I go ahead and I do buy that exact company, are they arguing that the two things are not necessarily related?

That’s true but at least one of these things needs to happen:

1. the forklift costs billions and consumes tons of energy, but it can lift a whole mountain, which no group of humans can do

2. the forklift helps a team of 10 do the work of 50 and, while still relatively expensive, it costs less than the 40 people it’s replacing

3. the forklift becomes an inexpensive commodity and it augments human capabilities and creates new possibilities for society as a whole

This is roughly what happened with mainframes to personal computers to mobile devices. LLMs are stuck between 1 and 2, they are not good enough forklifts to lift a mountain and not cheap enough to replace 40 people and save money. There are some hints that they could at one point move to 3 but the large players that could make it happen are starting to be scared by the amount of investment to get there.

On a related note, lot of people are being fooled by this hype machine mixing GenAI with good “old” machine learning and you now read about all these “AI wins” like “student discovers new galaxies with AI” or “scientist discover new medicines with AI” that make it sound like these people just asked ChatGPT “how would you go about discovering a new galaxy?” or “could you make up a new drug for me pretty please?”.

yes, but with at least $100M of additional VC funding

“organic AI”

seems like he learned his negotiation skills from the scene in Blazing Saddles where the black sheriff points a gun to his own head. “Do what he says! Do what he says!”

Apple is going to become a US company? This is yuuge!

Brain damage,just moves hands and can barely speak coherently… Wait, did he acrually have a stroke?

More likely, they have been discussing about maybe starting official talks about what it would take to prepare, hypothetically.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives to most big tech services that could be setup quickly. I personally ditched Amazon (shop and video… AWS doesn’t depend on me personally) Meta and most of Google without sweating too much. Also, while convenient, none of their consumer tech is critical; we’ve lived without any of it until recently enough, so we could probably adapt to do without it for a while if we had to.

The parts I think (and I’m not an expert by any means) where Europe is completely vulnerable are payment/banking systems and advanced electronics.

On electronics, there’s also China, which isn’t a great alternative to depend on… But if Trump decided to weaponize SWIFT or the major credit cards, could he switch most of our banking system off?

Haven’t you heard? China are already on the phone with Trump saying they are going to move the production of terbium to the US. Basically they’ll use these very big drills to mine Chinese minerals right from Wyoming.

Two comments:

1. If you and Elon Musk are playing bad-cop-good-cop, how shitty of a person do you have to be for Musk to play the good cop?

2. This sound a lot like Russia saying they want peace. You know the argument that"if Ukraine just gave up their territory, government and freedom there would be no war, it’s their fault!". Same here, if Europe removed all their social security and pesky regulations so that US companies could do everything they wanted there would be no tariffs!

yes, there are clearly unfair trade practices here. EU has been making money for Google and Amazon, but the US are not using our services. I hear the best solution to this are tariffs: EU users have to pay to use gmail until enough US users start using EU email providers and we rebalance the services trade!

the “logic” is pretty much as you described it. Only, after charging yourself with the extra tax on Walmart purchases, you obviously can’t afford Walmart any longer, so you learn to make your own soap with ash and the fats of animals that you have started breeding in your own flat.

and see how well that turned out?

but Putin’s invasion wouldn’t have looked like an invasion at all, if it had gone according to his plan. He infiltrates territories, creates areas heavily inhabited by Russians, assumes more and more direct control of them through puppets and only then eventually moves in with the army to “liberate them”.

And then we all collectively pretend to look the other way and resume doing business with him as soon as possible. That’s how it mainly worked with Crimea, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, so not a new thing. This time NATO didn’t play ball (and Trump is trying to go back to the usual routine).

When the “move in with the army” phase happened with Ukraine, the way I remember that last part, it was pretty abrupt as far as invasions go; “drills” was a brief excuse when they couldn’t hide all the troops that were amassing near the border, not a continuous flexing of military muscle.

Not saying that “Putin did it better” here; in fact I hope he’s going to get the right comeuppance for what he’s doing to millions of people (Ukrainians and his own). Just saying that whatever China is doing with Taiwan looks different to just-a-schmuck-on-the-internet me…

That’s probably true… Still looks a bit ridiculous though. It’s like somebody is planning to steal your wallet but instead of jumping you in a dark alley, they start showing up in front of your house every day, do 100 push ups on the sidewalk, then glare at you and leave.

Maybe Putin didn’t do enough drills before trying to invade Ukraine and that’s why he’s not done great, I don’t know. My expertise invading countries (or mugging people for that matter) is pretty low, so don’t mind me.

You make a great point. But just to stay on the example of cars: besides the innovation on EVs, there’s this horrible tendency to consider cars as tablets on wheels, both in the sense that you can forget about repairing them by yourself and in the sense that they are now increasingly becoming low-margin hardware to run higher margin subscription services. If anything warrants high valuation for a car company it would arguably be the innovation on EVs, rather than the SaaS model.

I hope the idea of Car Software As a Service dies before becoming too widespread. But if it doesn’t, maybe car companies wouldn’t become “Tech” companies, just more shitty subscription vendors. And their stock should be valued as such, not for the largely unwanted “Tech innovation”.