Seriously why are investors so quick to forget about Zuckerberg's all-in bet on the Metaverse? He spent billions on it, and I believe it was part of the reason for the whole renaming/restructuring of FaceBook as Meta.

I guess it's the same with Musk and his endless promises, and now even Apple with their iPhone 16 debacle. It's like markets just reward making huge claims, not delivering, and then declaring that 'oh but don't worry about that previous mistake - i've found an even bigger next big thing'. Capitalism needs discipline in the form of a market beat down when you get things wrong. Without this it just rewards stupidity. At a minimum there may be much more talented entrepreneurs getting starved of capital because whatever idea a FAANG gets sucks up all the money.

Yeah this is basically it. I think the existing car companies really have no idea how to compete with China though. They thought they'd just be doing the Tesla playbook - make a bunch of high end premium cars that are EVs, do that until volumes ramp up, and then use that to slowly move down into cheaper cost tiers. They likely thought they had at least a decade of this, with big fat margins from the premium line to pay for it.

China is speed running this whole process, and Korean isn't doing too badly either. If western govts didn't put up barriers to trade (tariffs and quotas) the reality is that western manufacturers are likely all done. But trade barriers are giving them a lifeline, but the work required to catch up is just insane and they don't seem to be taking it seriously - even Tesla with their needless distractions like the CyberTruck.

I think this is really a hangover from the post COVID financial craziness. If you look at the numbers, basically there was a massive shortage due to supply chain issues, combined with people having lots of money from the free COVID money. So automakers quickly figured out that there was no point selling the budget versions because they couldn't make enough of their high margin versions to keep up with demand. They kept focussing on these high end, high margin versions and kept putting up the prices - and people paid them.

It's been nearly five years now of this dynamic. It looks like it might be coming to an end, in which case the car manufacturers will have to rediscover the econo-box. But this is going to crater their profit margins, which should tank their stocks, which is a huge crisis for them, so you can imagine why none of their leadership wants to accept that the party is coming to an end.

This. Before they started putting stupid glass backs on iPhones, they were pretty robust. I had a 5 and 7 and abused them without a case. The aluminium got extremely scratched up, but they didn't break. One month into having a 13 without a case and the rear glass shattered. I don't even know how, I just noticed a big crack in it one day. It probably came from just sitting with it in my back pocket.

So now I use a case. And, frankly, at that point I don't care about the industrial design anymore. I actually quite like the ID of the iPhone, but I can't see it because it has to live in a case so it could be anything for all I care. The only reasons I would consider the air is so that it isn't so bulky once I've put the dumb case on the thing - and it's not worth the premium for that since it will still be really thick and bulky.

The reality is that it would be way better if the iPhone just had an ABS sheet on the back instead of the stupid glass. It would be basically indestructible, dirt cheap, and lighter. It could be made to look cool, but who cares since everyone puts their phones in cases anyway. But no, they keep with the stupid glass panel. I must be galling being on the ID team and spending all this effort designing the phone knowing that even people like me who really really don't want to have to use a case will have to put their work into an ugly case.

I'd imagine labels will suddenly get behind 'artists' once they realise that 90% of music consumption can be AI dross and nobody is going to care. Just think of all the savings across the world's restaurants and shops if you can have background music that is AI good enough, and not have to pay royalties to the music labels.

And at this point I'm not sure there's a problem. Most pop music is pretty rubbish. On the other hand, there is an absolute wealth of great indie bands now in every genre you can imagine, and you can easily access them. If you just want pop filler then that will always be available, and AI will eventually do it very well, but now there is lots of really great high quality content if you're prepared to put the effort in. Perhaps the only thing we could improve with this model is somehow reducing the cost of touring so that smaller bands can profitably tour. There are a lot of indie bands I'd love to see, but I can see why it's not viable for them to visit my city.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

Sure that is exactly what he did, but do you actually work with engineers? Engineers are terrible at connecting technology with people. We are the ones who spend 2 years learning about the intricacies of the 12000 page Bluetooth spec, and then design the control panel for it with EVERY feature option, because, well, what if someone needs to use that thing on page 3943. The result is technology that nobody can use - not even the same engineer - because six months later they've forgotten what half the stuff does.

Engineers geek out like this all the time and produce terrible user experience. I think I'm a really design conscious engineer and I do this all the time as well.

Finding someone who can 'repackage' this stuff in a way that gets to the heart of what a user actually needs is very difficult and rare. Most manager types can't do it because they don't understand the tech itself - they just start demanding things that can't be done until everyone who knows what they're doing leaves.

Love him or hate him, Jobs seemed to be able to grasp technical concepts, and figure out how they related to normal users, and then lean on his engineers but still within the bounds of possibility.

Having said all that, I think he would have gone full Elon mode if he had lived long enough to buy his own social media company and expose his inner raving sociopath to the world.

Absolutely. Sadly, Georgism is over 150 years old and it still has little chance of ever being adopted. People have some kind of weird quasi-religious connection to land ownership. They just seem to want their own little fiefdom of dirt, no matter how meaningless that is.

This whole narrative is because the neoliberals NEED to get everyone to believe that the 'country is like a household' again. You know, where they pretend the GDP is the same as income and the debt is like having a mortgage, and if you don't pay the mortgage of the big scary bank manager will come and see you. It was the most effective economic narrative we have had since likely forever, because every mom and pop goes 'oh dear, debt is bad!!!'. It meant governments could beat their populations while telling them it was good for them.

The reality is that if you had no assets, then the post COVID economy was the best thing you've probably ever experienced in your working life. Anyone could wonder into a new job the same day if they wanted. Companies were climbing over themselves to get workers. Pay rises were insane. Economic growth was stratospheric. The result was inflation going crazy, but if you had no savings then it didn't matter. One month prices go up, later that month your pay goes up.

I'm not saying that it was cost free from an economics point of view, but it showed that the the moribund perma-crisis economy we have had since 2008 has been a deliberate choice. Governments choose not to use fiscal stimulus powers which depressed the economy to the point where the central banks were pouring money upon rich people in the hope that some of it might keep the economy from contracting.

Now they are trying to take us back to that place.

If this model for running your economy had produced historically record levels of growth for the 20 years we have been doing it, then sure, I'd happily admit that it's a price worth paying. But growth has been rubbish. Things just grind along and the dynamism has fallen out of our economy.

We saw a way forward - just use fiscal stimulus. As for the debt, most of the debt is because they kept bailing out asset holders though ZIRP and QE. If we had let asset holders lose all their shirts, then done a COVID like fiscal stimulus after 2008, we would have been able to restart the economy without the debt, and all the people who speculated wouldn't have been bailed out. A whole lot of the rich people who now tell us what to do would have lost everything and have had to go get a regular job.

Well there is a reason. Our western economies are so geared up towards rentier type income that you have to be a sadist to do the sort of businesses China is doing. Where I live, the floor space cost of the workshop area (uninsulated tin shed in a faceless industrial park that is clogged with traffic) required to place a 3-axis CNC machine is worth about the same as the machine itself. Basically the cost issue is no longer the machine, it's the space to put the machine.

The machine also depreciates in value and requires skilled labour to generate a return. Yet any idiot can get a loan to buy the workshop, sit on it doing nothing but collecting rent from the losers who try to run a business out of it, and wait for prices to appreciate so they can flog it off for a profit that is taxed less than the loser's profit who is trying to run a business.

I could also go work on the sort of automation stuff that the Chinese are doing. I'd love to. But the pay for those jobs is atrocious. It would be roughly what I'd pay in tax working for a finance shop writing some internal benchmarking application. Doing automation/robotics work is hard and the salaries being offered will not pay for the people who can do it well.

When I was in my 20s and starting a business, older people would always say to me 'oh starting a business is hard and risky'. I didn't really understand why they were stating the obvious - I always though, 'yeah sure, but how else do you make money?'. Twenty years later, I now realise that they were just all sitting around on a couple of property investments and raking in the tax sheltered gains while doing stuff all. None of this is going to change because the alternative - building actual productive businesses - is damn hard work, and enough people are still benefitting from the easy money of rentierism that why would they want to stop the party?

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

I agree that there is likely a lot of correlation going on here.

The people who watch Love Island tiktoks and the people who watch 2hr Asionometry documentaries on semiconductor fabrication are not the same group. You're not going to turn one group into the other by simply exposing them to the material from childhood.

Yeah but avoiding complexity takes a lot of time. It's like the saying 'I didn't have time to write a short letter...'. Especially with powerful high level languages, I can just bash out something that works extremely quickly. Things like JavaScript where what they call 'dynamic programming features' could also be construed as 'no respect for any sort of useful scoping rules' means you can pull assets around your project like globals on steroids. This is damn fast if you just want to mock something, but it's teh worst sort of code. To then break the problem down into modular and orthogonal components, design the interfaces for those components, specify them, code them, document them and test them is massively time consuming in comparison.

In many commercial environments management won't let you do that effectively.

I feel like part of the problem is that modern languages are designed to do so many different paradigms that you are not forced to think about good design earlier on. Even in C, I find you can't get anywhere unless you really plan out what you're doing with memory and other resources from very early on.