At the manufacturing level it largely isn't, no, though as others have pointed out Apple at least still has the ability to explore options outside China. But Apple represents a lack of vertical integration for its big Chinese suppliers like Foxconn, an American middleman taking a big slice of the revenues and profits which come from the customer. One thing to note is that Android isn't all that different, as phone makers still have to tithe to Google.
One factor (mentioned at https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3mqubnh... for instance) is Western distrust of the Chinese government and the regulatory barriers erected from both sides. TikTok's probably a good case study. There was a conspicuous lack of Chinese software companies having success in the Western consumer market before TikTok. Building TikTok involved creating a new product aimed at RoW which was separate from its original Chinese model, Douyin. And then after TikTok Western success was still elusive, to some extent, as the US government snatched away Bytedance's toy.
Though even beyond tech and other politically sensitive areas China's generally been pretty slow at generating RoW-consumer-facing products and brands. There's also the slightly remarkable fact that historically (and even to some extent still today) GUIs have been extremely, mysteriously hard for large companies worldwide to do well. The main exception have tended to either be called "Apple" or have dedicated themselves to copying Apple's homework:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 .
I owned only EVs and PHEVs since 2012. The GR Corolla was so compelling that it pulled me back to an ICE. I had forgotten what it felt like to have FUN while driving. The biggest feature for me is that I could pull the DCM fuse and not get constantly spied on. The next-best feature is that I can disable the center screen. And I love my physical buttons.
The GR Corolla is definitely on my extended list of "cars I'd put in my oversized garage if I won the lottery." That and a Fiesta ST. I love tossable cars, even though I also love being able to rip a 0-60 in 2.9s on a whim and never having to wait in line for gas.
The Corolla bangs. I had a 1990 model that got me through years of zero problems, it was fully mechanical. We're still a Toyota family and same reliability: I took our current non-electric car to a new mechanic for the yearly check last week and asked him how much life it has left, he says until the rest of my life (city emissions will cancel it well before).
Still, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.
I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.
For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.
Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).
With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.
The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.
Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.
The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works".
I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
That’s the “diets don’t work” line. I’m not denying that most people use AI for the path of least resistance, but I am saying that there’s more potential than just that, and it’s almost entirely overlooked in the broad debate.
Bad counterexample, c.f. the current obesity epidemic and the popularity of GLP-1s.
I get what you're saying, it's just that I think what you're saying is not overlooked, it's simply insignificant to the debate about the effect of these tools on society. Your argument comes off to me like someone saying "everyone is complaining about how these cigarettes cause cancer, but you can just as easily use lit cigarettes to warm your hands on a cold day. This is what everyone's missing in this debate."
I don't think we can change each others' minds with talk, we'll just have to see how it plays out in the coming decades.
That's precisely why it's a good example. It's always taken work to lose weight, just because it's not common doesn't mean it's impossible. The common rhetoric loses that nuance, that's my point.
I didn't say anything else, you're reworking what I'm saying here and distorting my message.
The book/written word is also a technology that has preferences on how it’s used and transformations that it imposes on its users, and they’re much different than those of TV or computers.
> I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing
I'm not even sure losing this method is such a bad thing. Tooling, build scripts, home networking -- any learning you gain from stumbling through man pages and trial-and-error at best results in some hard-won, single-purpose scripts, the knowledge will evaporate instantly b/c everything is so bespoke, "fix once and forget" until you have new gear and have to solve new problems years later.
Presenting a well-specified problem thoroughly to an LLM, then analyzing results and testing the output, is valid problem solving.
My friend's dad got a 1200 baud modem when they first came out for some obscene amount of money. Back then Compuserve used to charge by your connection speed. I was mowing lawns to pay $6.25 (~$20) an hour to play British Legends at 300 baud and he was paying ~$12 (~$38!!) an hour to connect at 1200. Plus phone bill fees, which weren't negligible back then, even for local calls!
This isn't really news to many people with multiple sclerosis (MS). In fact, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is often misdiagnosed as MS. I think it was 10 or so years ago that a movement swept over the MS community where people were flying overseas to get allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplants (HSCT). Medical clinics in Israel, India, and Russia (among others) were actively treating foreign patients with MS with HSCT. The Multiple Sclerosis Society has had an info page on it for years now. The main reason you don't see people with MS lining up for HSCT these days is because of how effective the drugs released around the year 2020 that target B-cells have been. Clinical and symptomatic results from the new FDA-approved drugs tend to be about as good, and they're much, much safer. And you don't have to fly to some sketch practice in Moscow to get your bone marrow chemically burnt to a crisp followed by an attempt to re-seed it with your stem cells harvested before the chemo. All the while you're praying you don't get an infection while you wait to see if your immune system successfully reboots from the stem cells.
That said, for the very few people who don't respond to traditional drugs, HSCT is better than the alternative, which would be a horrific steady loss of function as your immune system chews up your central nervous system.
Much better than I originally expected. Drugs like kesimpta allow patients to self inject on a monthly basis relatively low doses, which limits side effects. Better than Ocrevus in that regard judging by what I’ve been hearing from fellow patients that have been using it for a while, even though equally effective.
There has indeed been an insane amount of progress over the past years. I didn’t know about stem cell therapy as an alternative to MS treatment.
To train people to become researchers. If the definition of what a researcher is changes over time (due to AI or otherwise), then the nature of the PhD will also change over time.
I would say to push frontier of human knowledge forwards. Its not a high school anymore where you learn to learn. PhD is already a place where you should deliver value. (By "value" i don't mean commercial product)
> I would say to push frontier of human knowledge forwards.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but to be clear: pushing human knowledge forward is a practical prerequisite of a PhD (given it's pretty hard to convince people you're adequately trained to do such a thing without actually demonstrating it), but it's not the value of the PhD itself. The value is producing a researcher -- that is, someone who has the skills to continue accomplishing this in the future.
The difference is that if you happen to expand human knowledge by a stroke of dumb luck (or smart AI...) without actually having acquired skills to continue doing so in the future, then you're not really earning a PhD.
Depends on the field. There aren't really all that many research tasks that can be completed in a week. One of my favorite stories from the past few decades was the finding of accelerating expansion of space. It took three decades of scheduling telescope time, looking at exactly the right places in space at exactly the right time, to find enough supernovas to have data to even analyze. Not a whole lot of non-trivial science is just "read existing literature, think hard, and produce text."
But honestly, there's a lot that is (particularly for simulation like stuff which can be implemented in code). We should expect to see a bunch of extra output here, which might improve scientific productivity (even though the real bottlenecks are gonna be the academic publishers and their fixation on holding on to their copyrights).
Volkswagon has no jurisdiction over how I manage my fob, which is the client for the vehicle's unlock and start API. Once you hand a bearer token to me that governs full access to the vehicle, including the accelerator and steering wheel, it's not your job to babysit whether I chose to use it while drunk or hand it over to someone else.
So you don't have a VW employee coming by your house in the evening to check if the key fob is still in you possession? Sometimes he even does a testdrive to make sure it still works with the car.
Except it is their job, that is why certain signals on the car are protected from manipulation. Any attempt to circumvent this and succeeding would require direct action from VW. If they cannot prove that they did everything possible to prevent that, then they are legally liable to the authorities.
Same way that banking apps don’t care if you could screw up your account anyway, they will ban rooted phones just to avoid the risk. Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
> If they cannot prove that they did everything possible to prevent that, then they are legally liable to the authorities.
Laws mostly don't work like that. The seller of gasoline doesn't have to prove they did everything possible to design the product to prevent anyone from using it for arson, nor should they because that's preposterous.
> Because when something happens, what do you think is more likely? That the customer accepts full responsibility for using a rooted device and says that’s on me? Or that they blame the bank for losing all their savings?
You're making the assumption that rooted phones are more likely to be compromised, but it's entirely the opposite. The stock software on phones regularly goes out of support and has known unpatched vulnerabilities (but will still pass Play Protect) and the only way to get a patched system on that device is to install a newer third party ROM. On top of that, GrapheneOS has better security than stock Android even for the same version.
Moreover, that has nothing to do with liability. When the user with the vendor-supplied firmware still gets pwned and has their account drained, they're still going to go to the bank looking to get their money back. All the bank does by going out of their way to block third party firmware is to make that marginally more likely.
Easy: separate the systems into the safety-critical ones required for driving, and the nice-to-have ones used for things like entertainment. You can now give the car's owner full access to the latter via all sorts of weird 3rd-party apps, as there's no way for that access to cause serious issues.
They should be doing this anyways, or else you end up with your Jeep being crashed via wifi [0], and having the blast radius of a corrupt album image [1] restricted to infotainment is probably a really good idea too.
I can't even manually resolve the merge conflicts alone that happen between my code and that of everyone else submitting code at agent speed in my team's repo. So long as I have financial obligations toward my family, I cannot opt out. I must use these things.
The most plausible near-term path is probably micropayments embedded invisibly in AI agents. Your agent that has learned what you value and can make a reasonable decision to allow a micropayment for certain content pays on your behalf without requiring a conscious decision each time, eliminating the mental transaction cost problem entirely. It's the mental transaction cost that arguably led to the failure of the micro payment model back in the early 2000s.
Although the cynical part of me says that this will result in malicious actors trying to trick agents into giving out a bunch of micro payments. There are counter defenses that can help detect and compensate for that, but perhaps the best we will be able to do is prompt user with the default agent recommendation.
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