One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

https://greekreporter.com/2024...
https://arkeonews.net/italian-...
https://www.heritagedaily.com/...
https://www.sciencetimes.com/a...

It is funny how you think that it is the red states that will kill this. Noncompetes are already not enforceable in many right-to-work states. It's the blue states where noncompete clauses had weight.

I actually believe that. Probably because that's what Hasan Ibraheem is quoted as saying in this article. He was already part of an organization No Tech For Apartheid. Here's the requisite quote from the article in case you don't feel like clicking on a link.

I don't see why this should be a surprising take. There are quite a few people that have become professional protestors. Nine people sat for a while in an office building with some very nice banners and somehow this has been in the national news for a week. These people came prepared, they were well-funded, and they clearly were plugged into the media well beforehand. He's done it once. I am sure that he has a long career ahead of him in this profession.

I want to make this very clear. I actually applaud this guy for his work. I am quite sure that he is genuine in his regard for Palestine, and it is hard to argue that it isn't an important topic. I just don't believe, even for a second, that any of this was a surprise to him. Hasan used his job at Google to catapult himself into this role.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Apple's only advantage is that they are seen as a status symbol by certain people. Apple has gone out of its way to make sure that you can tell if someone you are talking to is using an iPhone. If they aren't using an iPhone then the experience is degraded significantly. There are a million video chat programs, and they all work great, but the cool kids all want to Facetime. In group chats they care what colors bubbles they have.

That works great in places where there are a lot of Apple users, but it works against Apple in places where there is not. In China there are replacements for all of Apple's software that everyone uses, even if you have a fancy phone you aren't really in Apple's ecosystem. In essence you are buying an iPhone to become a second class citizen in all of the software you actually want to use. Everyone else is running Android.

Throw in major financial issues in China and all of a sudden Apple's phones look like a very poor choice, even without throwing politics in the mix.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

I read an interview with one of the main protestors that got fired in the first wave. Their plan is to become a professional protestor. I suspect that pays better than being an average Googler.