vannevar

9 ms·

121.
by vannevar 7mo ago
And if they actually constructed the deal that way, it would be fine. But by essentially creating a sham sale where they return the cash back to the customer in return for equity, Nvidia can book revenue and claim non-existent cash flow. Th
122.
by vannevar 7mo ago
In the US, since the 1970s virtually all technologically-driven productivity gains have been captured by the top 10% (who own 90% of all public equity). (See, e.g., https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ .) So no, l
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by vannevar 7mo ago
I'd highly recommend working top down, getting it to outline a sane architecture before it starts coding. Then if one of the modules starts getting fouled up, start with a clean sheet context (for that module) incorporating any caution
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by vannevar 7mo ago
>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? The social media companies gave their services for
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by vannevar 8mo ago
The enormous difference between vibe-coding and 3D printing is that vibe-coding is improving exponentially at a rapid rate, while 3D printing is improving linearly at a slow rate. Very little that we say about vibe-coding today is likely to
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by vannevar 8mo ago
"Lobbying" is a very polite term for it.
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by vannevar 8mo ago
"Here again it is important to note that 'controversial subjects' should be taught if they are germane to the topic but taught without bias. To take the subject of 'anthropogenic climate change' I mentioned above i
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by vannevar 8mo ago
To some extent, yes. Government in particular. Both of them "close the loop" in the sense that they are self-sustaining (corporations through revenue, governments through taxes). Some institutions can be self-sustaining, but many
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by vannevar 8mo ago
A bigger issue: what is the role of open source in a world where any binary can be trivially decompiled and modified by AI?
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by vannevar 8mo ago
If you substitute the word "corporation" for OpenClaw, you'll see many of these same problems have plagued us for decades. We've had artificial intelligence that makes critical decisions without specific human accountabi
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Tesla's sales started declining before the subsidies expired.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Another 10 years and maybe they will have sold as many as Sony sold Aibo robot dogs. You're making my point---it's not a significant market, and won't be for many years.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
I'm sure China can. But nobody is producing consumer humanoid robots at any scale yet, so Tesla can at least make the argument that they'll make better robots when people actually start buying robots. People are buying cars at sca
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by vannevar 9mo ago
The people he generated goodwill with don't buy a lot of EVs, apparently.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Fair point. It's hard to support Tesla's valuation as a car company, it may be even harder to support as a robot company. You have to wonder what might have been if they'd spent that Cybertruck money on battery research.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
The problem with being a car company is that they'd have to compete with China. It's possible, but they'd have to make additional capital investments to keep up. They've just wasted a ton of money on a failed Musk vanity
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by vannevar 9mo ago
The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybertruck will be canceled. None of the Tesla plants will be making robots at an
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Agreed, the low code dream has been around a long time. Douglas Copeland, the novelist who named Generation X, wrote a book called Microserfs in 1995 about a startup building a low code platform.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
I think we all understand how tariffs are intended to work. The problem is that we also know from experience that this is not how they work in practice, and historically are associated with negative economic outcomes overall. The findings
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by vannevar 9mo ago
The incumbents had the same time the Chinese did, and more. They still couldn't do it. Now the Trump administration has effectively forced them out of the EV business. If you're not making EVs, you're not getting any better a
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by vannevar 9mo ago
The trade deficit argument is mostly nonsense, but it's being made disingenuously anyway so the actual merit doesn't really matter to the people making it. Trump is a big fan of tariffs because they give him negotiating leverage t
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by vannevar 9mo ago
For starters they can sell EVs at a profit, a feat which I believe only Tesla has managed among the US manufacturers.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Trump is binding US automakers tightly to the fossil fuel industry, which at this point in history is like tying a boat anchor to a drowning man.
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by vannevar 9mo ago
>...LLMs are very unlikely to write malicious code for the user. Do you have any idea what the actual probability is? Because if millions of people start using the system, 'very unlikely' can turn into 'virtual certainty&#
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Through the flawed primary system. Relatively few people vote in the primaries, which means they skew towards extremists. Trump can motivate MAGAns to vote in Republican primaries, which makes MAGA essentially a gatekeeper to Republican sea
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by vannevar 9mo ago
Yes, I think people mistakenly believe that if chargers aren't as ubiquitous as gas stations, there must not be enough of them. Range anxiety can still happen on a cross country trip, but not for the vast majority of daily driving. Now
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by vannevar 10mo ago
Right, they work a job to pay for their tuition. But they still pay, even if it's bartered.
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by vannevar 10mo ago
This is manifestly not true. What leads you to believe this? Certainly there are some who don't, just as with undergraduate education. But there's no blanket program in the US to pay for all STEM PhDs.
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by vannevar 10mo ago
"...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development" That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't t
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by vannevar 11mo ago
Don't be fooled by the scaling due to the covid spike, 2025 looks quite a bit worse than pre-covid. It looks more like pre-2008.

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