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cyd

@cyd@lemmy.world

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cyd ,

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

cyd ,

"The wealthy and corporations" have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they'll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain't nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.

cyd ,

My phone is better at navigation etc anyways.

You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that's not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like... being good at navigation.

This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the "car" aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.

cyd ,

If you pay $1 for Gmail, and Google pays you $1 for your data, isn't that equivalent to where we are today?

cyd , (edited )

I'm pretty skeptical about how much fundamental change is possible on this issue. So long as we give consumers a choice, the overwhelming evidence is that most people dgaf about their data, and are willing to trade it away.

This is a totally free exchange. Even when you plant the choice in front of users as an obnoxious and intrusive accept-cookies prompt, they'll happily click Accept All even for sketchy websites (let alone something like Gmail). So you end up wasting everyone's time for little benefit.

A common response to this is to mull heavy-handed centralized government controls, like how China regulates its internet giants. But this would be a decisive move away from the entire idea of a decentralized internet. People pushing such legislation often retort that it's possible to pick off the internet giants while leaving smaller operators alone, but this seems like a forlorn hope. Google and Meta already signalled that they are not concerned about EU data laws, because they have so much internal data, and the regulations could even entrench their dominance by preventing other players from catching up.

cyd ,

Source? Or is it just a matter of "it has the same shape as a western car, and a steering wheel = omfg IP theft"?

cyd ,

So you're just talking about the look of the car? Because BYD has been doing EVs far longer than Porsche, so if anyone is doing a rip-off of the tech, it would be Porsche.

As far as design goes, BYD's aesthetics in recent years has a lot to do with them hiring big-shot European designers like Wolfgang Egger. If they're pulling from the same talent pool as other top carmakers, it's not so obvious why you'd accuse BYD of copying others, and not vice versa.

cyd ,

If you're referring to the BYD U7 vs the Porsche Taycan, they both look like car. Beyond that, eh.

cyd ,

Funny thing is, those Chinese drones are being heavily used by Ukraine, because they're more reliable than US-made drones. In 2023, Ukraine bought about 60% of the global supply of DJI's Mavic quadcopters.

cyd ,

It's gonna get pulled from app stores for "promoting antisemitism". You don't need to be the Kwisatz Haderach to foresee this.

cyd ,

There are valid commercial reasons not to go through a forced sale with a ticking time limit, which will inevitably carry a steeply discounted price. Rather than getting robbed, it makes sense to hang on to the company and take profits from the rest of the world.

cyd ,

As I understand, using VPNs to access will be illegal in principle, and the VPNs can be on the hook for stiff penalties.

In practice, it will depend on how zealously the government plays the cat and mouse game. Kind of the same situation as with China and VPNs that bypass the Great Firewall (ironic!).

cyd ,

I mean, you can use that approach to denigrate pretty much any activity people spend time on.

cyd ,

How much of the coal in a blast furnace is actually necessary for the carbon impregnation, as opposed to supplying the heat via combustion? Steel contains only a few percent carbon by weight, so it doesn't seem like much carbon is needed (not to mention that the carbon in steel is essentially sequestered).

cyd , (edited )

This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven't been able to find applications.

We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they're not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.

On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don't really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).

So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I'm sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.

Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.

cyd ,

I think those use normal VCSELs. To justify using PCSELs, maybe it would be lidars for long range sensing, like range finding over dozens of meters or something.

cyd ,

Armed offensive against the illegal Myanmar junta.

cyd ,

He's more mRNA than man now.

cyd ,

Based Gemini.

cyd ,

There's a tidal wave of "cheap and good enough" Chinese EVs starting to sweep the global market, fulfilling pretty much what you said. The new BYD Qin retails for $15,000.

If the US puts up protectionist trade barriers, the US auto market will turn into an enclave of gas guzzling SUVs, totally divorced from the rest of the world.

cyd ,

The crazy thing is, they had a nascent social network going with Google Reader, populated by people who were engaged and interested in the content. And they threw it all away to chase a Facebook clone, which was doomed anyway.

cyd ,

they would've never invested in moderation, so it probably would've turned into a shitheap.

i.e., basically Reddit!

cyd ,

Because it looks bad if your text is peppered with quotes joined by little strips of connecting material. It gives (rightly) the impression that you don't know how to digest information and put things in your own words.

cyd ,

Some of the prior cases described in this article, as precedents that could spell trouble for OpenAI, frankly sound like miscarriages of justice. Using copyright to prevent organizations from photocopying articles for internal use? What the heck?

If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.

cyd ,

These complaints about EVs being too expensive are way out of date, now that China is pumping out hordes of cheap EVs that consumers like.

Even if the US doesn't want to let in Chinese auto imports, the question remains: why are Chinese automakers able to bring down prices, but not US automakers? You can point to Chinese government subsidies, but the US also does industrial policy these days. One of Biden's favourite talking points is how much money his government is putting into supporting US green manufacturing through the IRA.

cyd ,

Here's the story as I understand it. US automakers want to make expensive premium cars because those sell for high margins. The big breakthrough in the EV market over the past few years has been China EV makers figuring out how to make cheap and "good-enough" EVs, which are catching on in many places across the world. This is clearly the direction in which the market has to move (whether via Chinese or non-Chinese automakers) to spur mass EV adoption. In the US, however, the established automakers can rely on protectionism to block imports, this keeping the US market limited to big expensive cars that remain using ICEs.

cyd ,

NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input

Worth noting that the 2 MJ of input only counts the heat directly absorbed by the pellet. It ignores the part of the laser beam that doesn't hit the pellet, the part that gets reflected, etc., not to mention the energy needed to power all the rest of the apparatus. The lasers alone consume over 300 MJ of energy to operate.

cyd ,

Big oil didn't stop solar panels from becoming a working technology. Sometimes a technology is just hard, there's no need for a conspiracy.

cyd ,

Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.

cyd ,

In this context, the "energy that they put in" only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that's barely been scratched so far).

So yeah, it's nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.

cyd ,

blames American venture capitalists

Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.

How can open source hardware be a movement if the raw materials still have to be mined and factory produced?

Am I not understanding FOSH (free and open source hardware)? I have always dreamed of open source hardware but it has always seemed unshakeably and fundamentally reliant on for instance massive open pit mines mining all over the world in finite dwindling supply wrecking local ecosystems every element necessary for computer...

cyd ,

Also, most of the people in this movement aren't even vegan. Isn't that completely disqualifying?!?

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

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    cyd ,

    “China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”

    -- Lee Kuan Yew

    If anything, the repressed and defensive China of Xi Jinping is falling ever further behind.

    cyd ,

    Agreed. I would also argue that trained model weights are not copyrightable.

    cyd ,

    I didn't know it was already settled law. But in that case, why are models like llama still released under licenses? If they are non-copyrightable, licenses should be unenforceable and therefore irrelevant.

    cyd ,

    Liability. Imagine an AI girlfriend who slowly earns your affection, then at some point manipulates you into sending bitcoins to a prespecified wallet set up by the model maker. Because models are black boxes, there is no way to verify by direct inspection that an AI hasn't been trained with an ulterior agenda (the "execute order 66" problem).

    cyd ,

    Problem is, there isn't a way to open up the black boxes. It's the AI explainability problem. Even if you have the model weights, you can't predict what they will do without running the model, and you can't definitively verify that the model was trained as the model maker claimed.

    cyd ,

    Thought this was about Valve's Artifact TCG, and was like "wait, didn't they already shut that down?"

    cyd ,

    Given that Europe hosts a negligible amount of global AI R&D and tech startups, the most likely outcome is that the rest of the world will keep going what they are doing, with most R&D done in the US and China, then companies will offer EU-specific products narrowly tailored to obey the letter of the law. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, just the likely outcome.

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