2 weeks before the mid terms might be the right time they’re waiting for.

So generally, in the PRC, the central government will put out a request or state a problem, and then provinces will attempt to implement a solution independently. If the central government likes the out come of one of the trialed system they might make it national policy.

That’s basically what social credit was. The central government gave a vague cryptic request for potential solutions about low trust in modern society, and a bunch of different provinces implemented various ideas, some via contract to private companies. Some provinces didn’t trial anything, some trialed systems that were basically just credit scores, some trialed a system of ranking “how good of a citizen you are” and gave gift cards and stuff to people who scored high.

Ultimately, the central government choose not to adopt any of them and the various trials were spun down. So, social credit was a lot of things, and thus multiple different ideas of what it was are correct, although a lot of reports on it mixed and matched different parts form different trials to make it sound as bad as possible, and some will just talk about one particularly benign system to make it seem like others are being hysterical. Ether way it wasn’t ever a nation wide thing and is largely defunct now.

There are way more people who can attempt a hack than can attempt to break in.

To an extent, institutional inertia. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Adopting new systems brings in a layer of uncertainty, sure maybe there is some upside to the new system, but does it outweigh the risk and cost of overhauling all the dependencies of the old system? Can you be sure that all the relevant stakeholders and partners will be onboard with the new system, or will some reject it and insist on the old system, thus requiring everyone to maintain two standards.

It’s much easier to adopt a new system when the old system is clearly non-functional and untrustworthy, or when there just wasn’t an earlier system that did that function in a given economic environment. The more important the institution, the more issue it causes if it fails, the more this applies.

I’ve tried a few of those, I always get a buzzing or it gets weirdly hot, one just blew out my headphones. So I don’t really trust them at this point.

The big problem for me is that there is only one port, so you can ether listen to something, or, charge the phone, not both. Just having two ports would solve this.

Also, not something I really care about but a lot of people do, the headphone jack is an analog output, where as the USB-C is a digital output, and you need an analog signal to run a speaker. So they need to have their own DACs (Digital-Analog converter), and many of the USB-C headphones have poor quality DACs that loose detail. Used to be the DAC was just in the phone, and was generally of good quality.

The US was the first place smartphones took off and in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone, so the initial set of adopters got iPhones because android wasn’t really a consideration. Then the network effect, people got what their friends or family had. Also, since a lot of people get their phones payed for through their cellular carrier contract, they not super price sensitive since the cost was buried in a monthly bill.

So lots of people are used to IOS, and don’t see a reason to switch. Especially now with the one major differentiator, walled garden vs open platform, is disappearing with Google locking down their platform.

The HP obsessive are also littering that sensitive sight with a bunch of socks.

Also the cable was for sharing load between grids to account for variability in power generation in renewables. It was literally being built to support further decarbonization of the grid.

Oh and now the cable might have to go through a Bronze Age burial site.

Like, this is not a win, this is idiots making a good project more expensive and difficult and potentially causing the destruction of an archeological site.

It was a … power cable. To connect the Irish grid to the welsh/English grid. To allow for more efficient transfer of power between renewable generation to the respective grids based on availability and need.

It was actually a good project? Like unironically. It was going to allow for further decarbonization. Now it’s been delayed and going to cost a lot more, and may have to go through a Bronze Age burial site now.

The people who blocked the project were also disturbing the local environment by leaving huge amounts of synthetic fiber socks at the beach.

They rebranded “Economic rent” to make it trendy. Adam smith is creating a vortex in his grave.

most people are generally not ok with being tracked and surveilled. It’s only the fact that they aren’t aware of how wide spread a given system is that lets these things grow.

With computers, phones and the internet, the surveillance is not super visible, or the implications of it are not so visceral. People always have this idea that they can just choose not interact with it. So it’s much less prominent of a worry for most people.

But with a networked camera in a public space recording everything, able to easily map every trip someone makes by car (which is basically all trips in much of America). That sets off alarm bells. That’s an immediate “what the fuck? Who said you could do that?” From most people.

Flock was betting no one would notice, or that no one would care. They’re so chronically online, tech business brained, that they failed to understand that most people see a meaningful distinction between the internet and the real world. This was inevitable, and now it’s a huge boondoggle and their company is probably cooked long term.

I mean, I see it all the time in like, military history books. But like, not in casual conversation or company statements.

Yes, but an over confident person will take a while to do so.

The real trick is taking a cube, swapping the placement of some of the bits, then mixing it up and handing it to someone who’s confident in their ability to solve a cube.

Honestly, it’s extremely funny, because of how shocked he was that a giant steel ball damaged the “bullet proof glass”.

Bullet proof glass doesn’t just… shrug off bullets, it cracks and breaks without shattering and the bullets embed in it rather than passing through. The glass on the demonstration could very well have been “bullet proof glass”. The fact that he thought that meant “will shrug off getting hit with a shot put” showed how surface level his understanding of things are.

Like he pretends to understand the businesses he owns, like he’s some how involved in the design and conceptualization of products. But’s he’s just a business idiot claiming credit for the work his employees do, and making everything worse when he does get involved.

Just saying a vague buzz word without committing to specific policy position is not progress.

They’re offering a 5 seat SUV body as well. Not a minivan, but, closer.

Yah, given that “training models” doesn’t stop when the model is finished and released. Like, a released model needs to be continuously tweaked to keep it up to date or to deal with problems that have occurred. Even if that’s not literally tokens used by customers, it is compute being used to provide service to customers.

And that’s just assuming that they’re not just hiding some compute costs used to service customer demand inside the R&D budget. “Oh, you see, this pool of customers are being served with an experimental version, so any compute here is actually R&D, any API fees or subscription payments made by them of course get counted towards normal revenue.”

So the the operating expense was greater than their revenue from operations by about 2, but it seems like they’re minimizing it by hiding the cost of some of the compute inside marketing and training costs. This is something that a few AI companies in China have been caught doing to make it seem like they’re doing better than they are. So they could be incinerating money at an even faster rate than they just admitted.

Yes I am an American and I know what he did, but I also know that the Breton woods agreement was only a small part of the financial system, and that realistically, the economic downturn of the 70s was far more heavily impacted by several oil shocks and the hangover from massive spending on Vietnam.