Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
> we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world
What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?
This would be a world where the top talent and training capability for that talent lives there. Our universities would have deteriorated, our professional class at this top level would have died off or relocated over there. Probably an example I can think of is the once great textile industry of Britain that is now in Asia.
I can only speak to corporate use, but the most common issues I saw were battery life, charging port issues, and speaker failures, in that order. I managed about 1200 for about 2 years and I'd get 1-3 of those issues a week. I'd say 25% of the time it required a replacement. Average age 2.5 years.
That’s repairable for cheaper that buying a new one, isn’t it? Perhaps the rationale is that it’s cheaper because the resell price offset the repair price?
Yeah you get a few bucks back from recyclers or your carrier but also having to inventory phones and track them is a pain in the ass and requires staff to manage. Much easier to just toss it and send em a new one next day.
I share your pain. You might enjoy Plotnine for python, helps ease the pain. The only bad thing about ggplot is that once you learn it you start to hate every other plotting system. Iteration is so fast, and it is so easy to go from scrappy EDA plot to publication-quality plotting, it just blows everything else out of the water.
Depends a lot on the task demands. "Got 95% of the way to designing a successful drug" and "Got 100% of the way" is a huge difference in terms of value, and that small bump in intelligence would justify a few orders of magnitude more in cost.
But that objective measure is exactly what we’re lacking in programming: There is often many ways to skin a cat, but the model only takes one. Without knowing about those it didn’t take, how do you judge the quality of a new model?
I agree with you, but my gut tells me that a lot of people don’t know what a good outcome should/could look like and are accepting whatever it delivers.
Honestly that was the cherry on top for me -- the employee confident enough to just decide "this is my work computer, I need it to do work, I can't do work with my hands being irritated, so I will sand down the edge." Pure gold.
>Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor
This reasoning is flawed. Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate; for reference developmental success India is at 6.5%. Ghana's GDP in 2000 was $5B, today it's $82.B. Its per-capita GDP has more than doubled in the same time period.
Thank you, TIL about the parable of the broken window.
I was thinking the same thing when reading the comments, surely that money would still benefit the economy if say it was invested in the education of a child, but it would also act as a economic multiplier as the child can now contribute more to the economy.
But I never knew there was a term for it.
Especially this line really highlights it:
> by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
Surely those resources are better spent healing the living.
> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
If the local businesses were instead being hired to dig holes and fill them up again... oh wait, they literally are, except they're also instructed to make very elaborate artworks and put them in the holes before shoveling in the dirt. Anyway: Can you please examine the movement of real resources rather than pieces of paper? No society gets rich by making art which is immediately destroyed.
There's no good way to measure wealth creation. If people are getting what they want - if there's no extra government tax them to pay for the digging and re-filling of holes, but it's all done freely, out of desire to have it done - then it might be of some value, because they think it is.
We can say "but it plainly isn't purposeful", but the same applies to pets, vacations, every kind of art and craft, fancy cuisine, pure mathematics, dance music festivals, religion and all associated economic activity, all sports ... I'll stop there, but the two main points are: firstly, the value in life is about a lot more than moving real resources, or paper, or food and shelter; secondly, nobody knows what it is all about, man. It's hugely a matter of opinion, what's good and worthwhile. Economic activity is perhaps the ongoing process of making guesses about the answers.
It appears (from this article, I haven't done any exhaustive research) that when the Ghanaians have the option of hiding money from their families and from the funeral expenses, they exercise that option with flair and alacrity. That suggests that they are not getting what they want out of this whole digging activity. And while we cannot read off what is best in life from the stars or the mountains, we can have a look at what people do when they are free to choose without social pressure. It does rather appear that most humans who are free to choose would rather have washing machines and cars than elaborate funerals. Were it not so, then presumably the funerals of the West, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, would drastically outshine what the poverty-stricken Ghanaians can manage. Where are our burials IN SPACE? Our cremation rockets fired into the Sun, "from stardust you came, to stardust your return"? Why do we not hold weeks of elaborate mourning, with professional poets (or rappers if you prefer) hired to extol the virtues of the deceased and laws about "funeral leave" allowing us to sit idle?
It would be mean of me to link to the Wikipedia article "Space burial" at this point. I think you make some valid points, mainly in the first few sentences.
Ghana's GDP per capita is around $2000. It's only a success story because the baseline is so low, and because most of its neighbors are doing even worse.
Additionally, this is pretty much the paradigmatic case of that criticism frequently heard on the left in any other context, that GDP is not the same as quality of life. Indeed in this case it's apparently measuring the quality of death.
Sure there is a solution, you are just looking at it the wrong way. Make non-AI images provably unaltered with signed keys from the device (e.g. the camera) that took it.
One workflow that some artists use is that they draw with ink on paper, scan, and then digitally color. Nothing prevents someone from generating line art using generative AI, printing it, scanning it, and coloring it.
And what if someone just copy pastes something into Photoshop or imports layers? That's what you'd do for composites that mix multiple images together. Can one copy paste screenshots into a multi layer composition or is that verboten and taints the final image?
And what about multi program workflows? Let's say I import a photo, denoise it in DxO, retouch in affinity photo, resize programmatically using image magick, and use pngcrush to optimize it, what metadata is left at the end?
The camera module sits outside the secure area, meaning it would need to send data in to be signed. How does the phone know that it's getting legitimate data from the camera module, or data someone else is just piping in? Also, you could probably get a fairly high quality image by just taking a photo of something AI generated in the right lighting conditions.
If the premise is that everyone would just agree on the same protocol, I have an even more unbreakable solution: every image has to be upload to a blockchain the moment it is (claimed to be) created. Otherwise it's AI.
You can tell the author went deep into reddit because they fell for the wool meme. Sorry but synthetics (for anything active) are far better: lighter, warmer, better at dealing with moisture.
One pattern I noticed that was missing: the classic reddit experience of saying "I'd like a new shoulder season jacket, and I want to spend less than $100" and having some know-it-all try to convince you that what you really need is an ultra-nano-pore down puffer made by a blind Italian artisan that costs $950, and that anything else is Wal-Mart-tier garbage.
The best warm underlayer garments I've ever owned have been merino Icebreaker brand. They can be worn multiple times without needing a wash. Synthetics stink really, really quickly.
I asked claude to remind me of what Sir Peter Blake had to say about merino underwear:
>> Sir Peter Blake wore Icebreaker merino prototypes during his record-breaking round-the-world yacht race. After returning from the Southern Ocean, he claimed the fabric was "superior in every way to anything I had ever worn before" and revealed he'd worn his Icebreaker for 43 days and 43 nights without changing.
He also reportedly greeted Icebreaker's original merino farmer, Brian Brakenridge, as "the sheep farmer responsible for stopping my undies from smelling."
My carpets are 80% wool (with wool underlay). My base layers are wool. My jumpers are wool. My curtains are wool. Much of my mattress is wool. My next sofa will be wool.
The only thing better than wool in a duvet (comforter?) is down. My duvet is down lol
> sythetics (for anything active) are far better: lighter, warmer, better at dealing with moisture.
Synthetic fibres such as polyester and acrylic absorb little water, as such they are good insulators but poor at thermal buffering. They have minimal heat of sorption (about 5–7 J/g) [7], and are limited to moisture wicking. There are also more likely to develop odors and are much more flammable.
Wool is an excellent fiber for active base layer. Probably in a blend. The bacteria growth on anything poly is brutal, giving me a horrible stink and wrecking my skin once I wear it for more than an hour of activity. Do I want wool as insulation? No, I don't want the weight or time to dry.
> synthetics (for anything active) are far better: lighter, warmer, better at dealing with moisture
True. But I hate synthetics on my skin. Merino base layers and then layered synthetics/more wool works for me for low-activity cold weather. Feels much better. I like wool hats too as they seem to deal with odour better.
I only tolerate a synthetic breathable top for the gym. Though when they misconfigure the A/C I have to wear a heavy cotton tshirt to not freeze!
Synthetic socks can be dangerous too - slippery as hell on a smooth floor! Nearly came a cropper the other day when I forgot I wasn't wearing cotton lol
Modern merino is quite affordable. £20-50 per base layer item. My 100% wool hat was like £15 or something. My modern merino jumpers are £40-50 ish, and they look very posh too
I can walk down a Bangkok street in my suit and be comfortable. Why? Lightweight Italian wool fabric, silk-lined jacket, cotton shirt. Meanwhile the guy next to me in short sleeve polo and jeans is a puddle of sweat.
Synthetics definitely have their place. Uniqlo's Airism is a game-changer in the tropics and lots of outdoors activities like hiking or skiing are much more comfortable with modern technical fabrics, but natural fibres are far from obsolete.
Yeah this one seems absolutely insane, how many Satoshi Nakamotos are there in the world? It's very plausible to see the name on a mailbox (or meet the person) and think "that'd be a cool handle." And it's so wildly improbable that someone else would make up exactly the name of a neighbor of one of a small clique of obscure internet cypherpunks. It's not like the name was "John Smith" or anything.
But I don't know how to square that with the "Finney was running a marathon while satoshi sent emails" claim.
Anthropic had their mythos post (and model) basically ready a few weeks ago, as evidenced by the blog content leaks. Also I highly doubt they just threw together a 250-page PDF model card in a "rush."
reply