vannevar

26 ms·

361.
by vannevar 3y ago
It doesn't have to be a startup, no. But GM is discontinuing the Bolt, which I assume is the car you're referring to. And as far as I know, most EVs are evolving in the direction of more software complexity, not less. When I say a
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by vannevar 3y ago
The first EV startup that emerges with a dumb EV (minimal software to actually operate) for around $30K will have a best-seller. Nobody actually wants the subscription-based car, it's gradually being forced on consumers via industry co
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by vannevar 3y ago
I'm not saying everyone he met with was a shining star of virtue. Only that you can't assume they met with him to have sex with underage girls. He was still an incredibly wealthy man after his conviction, that didn't change.
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by vannevar 3y ago
Aside from being a pedophile, Jeffery Epstein was an incredibly wealthy man. He met with thousands of people. They weren't all pedophiles. That was part of his scam, to forge relationships with a lot of important people so they'd
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by vannevar 4y ago
A "stablecoin", as far as I can tell, is just a cryptocurrency backed by an unenforceable promise by some entity that they will always buy the currency at a fixed price. If SG says "April Fool's!" in two weeks and d
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by vannevar 4y ago
>That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was not an expected possibility. Interestingly, this post predicting exactly this kind of damage was flagged on HN just days ago: https://news.ycombin
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by vannevar 4y ago
Yeah, I think it would have to be handled in the player. Similar to https, it would warn you if the stream isn't verifiable with a known key. You'll still be able to consumer unencrypted streams, or streams whose key isn't fr
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by vannevar 4y ago
I think we'll see media personalities move to a public key encryption model, where authentic streams are encrypted in some manner with a private key to verify their origin.
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by vannevar 4y ago
It's not mentioned in the article, but this could also be a sampling issue. Samples from previous decades might've been more limited or self-selected. The internet may mean that a broader, more representative sample of the populat
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by vannevar 4y ago
Fair. Crazy expensive may be an overstatement. There were more expensive phones, but it was more expensive than the typical smart phone (eg, Blackberry Pearl was around $200, iPhone was $395). But it was definitely on the high end.
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by vannevar 4y ago
Agreed. Licensing is much more powerful leverage, because there's no alternative. At least PBS stations can appeal to private sources for funding. Licensing power is exclusive to the government.
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by vannevar 4y ago
I did misremember the popularity of Nokia smartphones, which were more popular than I recall (looked it up here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271539/worldwide-shipmen... ). But they were, spec-wise, more pow
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by vannevar 4y ago
>It’s also not totally clear why we need an Apple headset right now. It's worth noting that in 2008 it wasn't clear why we needed an Apple smartphone. Web-browsing smartphones were a niche market, and wireless bandwidth limitat
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by vannevar 4y ago
By this same logic, all television networks are "state-affiliated media", because they all depend on local stations that hold federally-granted broadcast licenses. So add Fox Broadcasting, NBC, CBS, etc., etc. to your list.
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by vannevar 4y ago
>Their matchmaking is already often based off of what will be marketable. Sure, but the concern is that they will start following the WWE practice of basing the winners on what is more marketable. Given that the practice of fight-fixin
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by vannevar 4y ago
The dream of "Legos for code" has been around practically as long as code itself. It's such a ubiquitous meme that back in the Nineties Douglas Coupland wrote a popular novel about it, Microserfs ( https://www.goo
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by vannevar 4y ago
Correct, AI has obviously been making money for a long time. But it wasn't described as a bubble until recent developments fired up a rapid rise in startups/investment.
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by vannevar 4y ago
Agreed, the two are virtual opposites: no one is making money from AI (yet), but everyone is using it, while in crypto, a bunch of people were making money from it and no one was actually using it.
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by vannevar 4y ago
I think the gist of it is that real estate prices are driven by the average, while homelessness is driven by the median. In a static system where everyone's level of wealth is frozen, then increasing housing supply would trickle down a
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by vannevar 4y ago
>Even if the low income families can't buy the new units, the people who do vacate their old units and there is less demand for the unit those low income families currently occupy. You're making the mistake I mentioned, confusi
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by vannevar 4y ago
It is a supply/demand issue, but it is not simple. Demand for housing in the sense of people needing housing is not the same as economic demand for housing. And in order to have economic demand for housing, you have to have people with
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by vannevar 4y ago
>The desire to sanitize language 1984 style is baffling... If you go back to my original comment, you'll see that I wasn't making a judgement on whether such sanitization was a good idea, but described the perfectly rational re
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by vannevar 4y ago
The argument has nothing to do with the definitions, but whether the term should be used. The N-word had a definition, too, but that doesn't mean it should have continued in common usage. I understand the reluctance to make these chang
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by vannevar 4y ago
By your logic, then, we are all children, because at one time we all experienced childhood. While "felon" may be useful in some cases, like describing someone who is currently serving time for a felony, it's a lot less useful
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by vannevar 4y ago
While I think a lot of these efforts are over-zealous, so is the response overblown. Take one example, the term felon . The San Francisco Board of Supervisors apparently recommended using the term "justice-involved person" instea
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by vannevar 4y ago
While many of the proposed explanations (anchoring, lack of discretionary time, etc) may be valid, I think the biggest factor is probably the social network: we are exposed to new music when we spend time with new people in a setting where
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by vannevar 4y ago
Tulips were not one of the greatest scientific advances in human history. AI that can write and converse intelligently on virtually any subject is. When the chief complaint about AI is that it lies too much, that's a massive breakthrou
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by vannevar 4y ago
This is a good point. While fan fiction authors generally don't have a legal right to make derivative works, the copyright owner isn't obligated to sue them, either. This article is a good overview of the copyright issues around f
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by vannevar 4y ago
>Be angry at copyright... Yes---while it's tempting to think of a particularly popular and beloved work of art or literature as part of some shared communal heritage, the reality of our legal system is that such works are private pr
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by vannevar 4y ago
The question was whether a corporation is legally obligated to maximize profit. I was pointing out that, as you also note, the actual purpose of the limited liability of a corporation is to promote the public interest. Economic growth is on

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