runako

9,192 karmajoined 17 lat temu

@ProjectLockerHQ alum working on the next thing.

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14 godzin temudiscuss

I will go out on a limb and say that's not going to be an Apple product, period. It doesn't fit anywhere in the value envelope.

The relevant questions here are: will the person using this machine also conceivably be wearing a pair of $549 AirPod Max? Or a $399 base Apple Watch? Does that person expect to pay more or less for their largest-screen computing device than their headphones?

Framing that way points toward a $350 price point being a laptop for young children (younger than Apple Watch age, so lower elementary). That's a whole different software experience beyond just the hardware.

14 godzin temudiscuss

They had Xserve, it didn't sell well enough to survive.

przedwczorajdiscuss

Per the spec of the last 25 years, they will let it run until the party in control of the White House changes. The new party will be responsible for the exit & cleanup phase.

przedwczorajdiscuss

> And the proposed "defense" budget for 2027 is $1.5T, a roughly 50% increase

Yeah, this is mind-boggling. The requested increase is roughly the size of the entire 2004 military budget. 2004, when we were fighting two separate ground wars.

There were close to 200k US troops on the ground in combat theaters in 2004. We're proposing to add a "2004 US military" to our military. The unnecessary wars we will start with this capacity[1] will cause havoc in unpredictable places.

przedwczorajdiscuss

I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?

4 dni temudiscuss

If Microsoft didn't want to use IP of existing studios, they should not have bought those studios. Why buy id if not to get more id?

Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)

4 dni temudiscuss

> ... prevent access to information. ... or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas

Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.

Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)

For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in the author's home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.

4 dni temudiscuss

Whether that person is talking their book or not, there absolutely has been an app explosion. Github & the app stores have all reported as much over the last year.

I also have repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of nontechnical people having built custom software to run their businesses. A lawyer friend was first, sending me a link to his GitHub(!), where he has built a custom client intake/practice-management application to work as the firm works. He's not the only non-technical lawyer I know who has shared vibe coded apps with me.

I personally build many, many single-use apps than I ever would have before. Gnarly debugging sessions can be greatly simplified by inserting a custom piece of disposable tooling/etc. I am not a Mac programmer, but I now have custom Mac apps to solve problems that only I want solved. Do these count?

Honestly, I would be a little surprised if anyone posting on HN did not have some personal exposure to the explosion of apps.

5 dni temudiscuss

> impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans

Because fireworks are not usually homemade, enforcing bans is pretty easily done by cracking down on retailers who illegally sell them. They are easy to find (have to advertise) and have a lot to lose by breaking commerce laws. Notably, cannabis grows naturally in many climates in the US (so retail not strictly necessary) and we still ban it.

IIRC our state long prohibited the kind of fireworks that go into the air (roman candles, etc.) and only allowed sparklers and similar ground-effect pyrotechnics. Of course, the odd person would drive hundreds of miles with fireworks in their trunk, but overall the ban was fairly effective.

> No one is motivated to actually enforce it.

All that said, I am a fan of removing laws that continue to exist only as a pretext for targeting disfavored groups. A lot of the rot in the country is downstream of us not really being a nation of laws.

8 dni temudiscuss

I laid out a set of scenarios, and it's impossible to know what would have happened had US laws been enforced.

Bankruptcy is a legitimate option -- many companies with productive assets survive and thrive after restructuring. Even a liquidation tends to preserve functioning assets.

Regardless, the larger point stands that it's bad, actually, for the US to selectively enforce laws. In particular, anticompetition enforcement has been notoriously lax for a generation. Hard to make an affirmative case that regulators should continue to ignore existing laws the way they have been doing.

9 dni temudiscuss

Even so, mergers foreclose options to promote competitiveness. For example: no well-capitalized companies from outside the immediate industry could buy MDD to enter the space (as RocketLab bought Iridium). A failing MDD could have limped along for a decade or more until a tech billionaire (say) decided to buy in and reinvigorate it. It could have been split up, allowing smaller entrants to buy parts of it. It could have been allowed to fail, so any of these types of transactions could have happened at smaller dollar amounts.

Basically, allowing it to merge with its largest competitor was the worst possible outcome for competitiveness and long-term health of the industry.

More to my point, though. There's no real reason our existing anticompetition laws should not have been enforced here. Our culture of selective enforcement of laws is a cancer that manifests in all kinds of negative ways. I strongly advocate that we move towards being a society governed by written laws.

9 dni temudiscuss

> The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem

The market may not for the most capital-intensive businesses, but US laws at least attempt to address the situation. In Boeing's case, for example, the McDonnell-Douglas merger likely could have been blocked under existing anticompetitive laws.

The US's longstanding refusal to apply antiticompetition law causes a number of harms to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the stability of our economy.

14 dni temudiscuss

A $1m machine with (say) $100k of annual operating costs with a 10-year lifespan. Assume low cost of capital, call it $200k/year for those 10 years.

The machine itself covers its cost at only ~84 monthly scans @ $200 each. That says to locate near population centers where the demand exceeds 84 scans. At the global mean of scans/population, said "population centers" only need to be about 15k residents.

Labor costs + junk fees make them appear expensive.

17 dni temudiscuss

> we have observational evidence to answer the question.

Isn't the point that the observational evidence amounts to the companies in question steer clear of illegal behavior?

There are anti-money laundering laws, so banks institute procedures to help them comply. Yes, we expect companies to change their processes so they don't break the law. That's the point of the law.

I am confused with what you think companies should do in this situation. Expose themselves to legal and civil liability? Or change their behaviors so that close scrutiny indicates they are trying to comply with the laws and any bad actors acted against internal procedure?

17 dni temudiscuss

> discriminating on the basis of some factor it found that was correlated with race, like SAT scores

Hypothetical SAT score: 1060

How does that help you predict the race of an individual applicant? It's been a while since I took the SAT, but I didn't realize one's score provided so much information.

17 dni temudiscuss

> selectively adhering to the letter of the law

Are you suggesting that companies should violate the law here? What do you recommend?

Edit: charitably, "adhering to the letter of the law" is sometimes shortened to "law-abiding" and is generally what we want.

19 dni temudiscuss

“We estimate that since its introduction, HPV vaccination has prevented nearly 200 young women from dying from cervical cancer in England.”

Given that the youngest vaccinated women are ~31 now, we would expect rates in that cohort to remain lower than in prior cohorts. But, crucially, we have to wait for this cohort to age to know for sure.

Treat this as a check-in as part of a 50-year longitudinal study that will keep yielding new data for another 40 years or so. (I don't know if it will be the same actual study, but the data will be there.)

21 dni temudiscuss

> indexed on Google/available to AI scrapers

Any fee that is acceptable for "normal use" is not high enough to deter the likes of Google or the big AI developers.

Google, a company that custom develops specialized automobiles to regularly drive ~all the streets in the world for the purposes of having imagery for a mapping app. Google, a company that (before it even got really rich), developed custom book-scanning technology to scan all the books it could acquire.

The big AI providers are in litigation now because even licensing terms that prevent use are no deterrent, they just stole the content they wanted to train their models.

The fee won't deter the cases you want, it will only harm the rest of us.

22 dni temudiscuss

re: censorship & moderation, the folks @ BlackSky have been active in building out an alternative moderation structure (alongside running PDSes & AppViews).

23 dni temudiscuss

> All three bidders waived inspection and appraisal, and they all had healthy financing

> I was transacting in a thriving market, with no special circumstances

Yeah, a hot real estate market is where a seller is likely to derive the least benefit. Although a talented agent in a hot market can drive a more competitive process, potentially generating higher offers. All of which is, to the author's credit, highlighted in the article.

Agents earn their keep in more normal/weak markets.