He does have a reason to criticise Apple though. Netflix would love it if you could just get a subscription by clicking the 'BUY' button in the app store. But they can't do that without having to give Apple their big cut.

I bet you that when Tim rings around Netflix, Spotify etc to ask them if they can do an app for the Vision Pro, the first thing they'll say is, 'well sure, but what can you do for us about the subscription issue?'. Apple wants these guys to push their new product right now, and I can bet you they're using that position to generate as much leverage against Apple as they can.

Do you have an example of these 'many' people?

Sure but most other comparable western countries have similar public education outcomes as the US. The outlier is Finland which spends about 50% more per pupil. Here in the UK, the govt pays about £6k per student but private school fees are about 3x that.

There is an exactly parallel here with all the endless 'innovations' around agile/new software languages/frameworks etc. The basic idea is that you can take a bunch of cheap crappy developers, and end up with the same outcome as a bunch of top tier developers. This has never worked, and intuition would suggest it will never work, but you can understand the incentive for pointy heads to keep trying. I just feel the same thing has been happening in education - you just need very good teachers and more of them if you want top outcomes, but nobody wants to spend money on this so we will forever hear about new innovations in teaching.

Are they saying that reading the same thing on digital vs print makes a difference, or is it the quality/style of the text presented on digital vs traditional books? It sounds like the latter, but that is quite different from saying dead trees have a magical quality.

As for the education system, I just find all these arguments tiresome. Public education systems in most western countries suck for one very simple reason - nobody wants to pay for more teachers with higher qualifications. We know this works because the few countries that incentivise their top grads to get into teaching and/or reduce class ratios have the best outcomes. Or closer to home, just look at what private schools do differently, which beyond being able to select for the smartest children, is the same.

We have been educating children for over 100 years. If there was some magical formula that would avoid investing in teachers we would have found it by now.

Yeah but there's a difference between 'something unexpected happened' and 'politicians have buried heads for decades to avoid dealing with this'. The UK is remarkable in its ability to shove difficult issues into the future to get quick profits now. Outside of London it repeatedly avoids investing in things that would provide long term benefits, and it then wonders why there has been practically zero productivity growth outside of London for decades. I rode the new Crossrail train a few weeks back, and it is phenomenal. The UK can produce amazing infrastructure - and it could most certainly deal with the Sellafield issues - but it has a completely visionless investment culture, where the only place it will risk investment is to serve already wealthy people. You cannot build a nation by believing that 90% of the country is economically hopeless.

The one I like the best is how the owners of Subway named the holding company 'doctors associates'. Where I used to live, they would promote their meals as an alternative to junk food and add a line to the bottom of their adverts saying 'endorsed by doctors associates'. Most people thought this meant some kind of medical professional group was endorsing their products, when it was actually just the corporate name for subway.

Nitrogen oxides cause 265x more warming effect than CO2. The big problem with jet aircraft is high altitude N2O emissions, and these are a direct result of trying to achieve higher thermodynamic efficiency by increasing the turbine inlet temperature. If you want to reduce them you have to reduce thermodynamic efficiency.

This is basically why they want to get fuel cells working, along with the potential to recover more energy from the fuel (though gas turbines at high altitudes are surprisingly efficient). If you're not going fuel cell or battery, then there is little climate benefit from switching to burning H2, and it would probably be easier to just attach a carbon atom to your hydrogen (synthetic fuel) rather than having to rebuild all the aircraft and infrastructure.

I really doubt this. It's a huge existential risk to their program knowingly allowing stolen code into their system. Also, it's highly doubtful this is code that is so magical that they couldn't replicate it - so what you're really talking about is risking massive lawsuits and injunctions to avoid hiring a couple more developers. Also, developers don't get paid enough to be involved in career ending activities, so the likelihood of them being able to keep it a secret is very low. Companies can be dumb but not that dumb.

The most likely sequence is that the employee took the code and was using it as a reference to make their new job easier.

It's not written in stone though - they can change all that with an agreement. And that's what Altman is doing - he's negotiating, and he used a big lever to do so, which will now result in him getting everything he wants. If the non-profit doesn't want to agree, they're faced with the same problem again - losing all their employees and basically becoming irrelevant. They have zero options, and nobody will want to touch the board positions with a barge pole, which means Altman and MS will be able to put in people who are 'sympathetic' and will negotiate the required changes, while getting a few symbolic concessions, like a commitment to maintain an AI safety committee or something.

Altman could have just taken the employees to MS, but OpenAI still has a lot of valuable IP. Though this is becoming outdated quickly, it would have been a big handicap if he'd had to develop it all from scratch again. Hence why we've seen this crazy show played out.

It really does remind me how MS is and has always been a business business, not a software business. They are epically good at this stuff, and that they are still so good at it is both scary and impressive.

It's pretty obvious to me that they want to remove the weird non-corporate-saving-humanity stuff from their corporate structure. It just like how Google had committees on Ai safety etc right up until they realised their search nest egg was under threat from LLMs. Everyone at OpenAi is a multi-millionaire now, and the only thing standing between them and a huge payday is their enlightened corporate structure.

It's not a non-profit anymore. I don't believe it has been since 2019. It has a weird corporate arrangement, but it is able to attract investor funds and reward employees with equity.

If anything, it looks like this whole thing is a power play to get rid of the remnants of its alternative corporate structure, and transition to a standard corporate model. This would make sense since there is now billions of equity value at play. It looks like they've been quite successful, and I assure you the next thing will be a rewriting of the corporate rules to remove all the hippie love stuff, though it will all be dressed up as 'assuring safe development of AI for the good of humanity' or whatever.

The Laffer Curve is a massively flawed model extrapolation. It makes huge assumptions about how the economy would reorganise itself as you move away from current taxation levels, and we know these are not true. For example, you couldn't have a modern industrial society with 0% taxation. Either society would collapse and burn or, more than likely, alternative governance structures funded by public resource pooling would appear meaning you're not at 0% taxation. This would likely happen long before you got to 0%, so that part of the curve is meaningless. Similar massive assumptions are made at the 100% end. So all the Laffer curve is saying is that, within the current economic context, if you move tax rates around, it might be that you don't actually increase revenues - all other things being equal - to which any intelligent person would say 'well duh'.

It then totally ignores that you can move the localised Laffer Curve around through policy changes - e.g. closing tax loopholes or negotiating international tax agreements. So now you've got this little bit of a Laffer Curve, which you can move around anyway through policy changes, and the whole theory becomes pointless.

It's basically massively simplifying a system, then taking that simplified model to the extreme and saying 'haha, this is why you shouldn't make me pay more tax'. There are way better arguments for keeping taxes low than that.

Most people in the UK don't realise how rubbish their housing is. They think you put double glazing in and you are close to a new build, but the reality is that a solid brick wall and suspended timber floors is atrocious for energy efficiency and a cavity wall with uninsulated concrete slab (most more recent construction) isn't much better. I live in a new build, and despite the generally poor build quality, the energy efficiency is astounding. And it's not even that good (EPC C/D). But it's ridiculously better than a victorian terrace which requires a 10kW boiler pumping heat into it to remain habitable in winter.

Exactly, though in the UK, I would argue they should have started a program of Victorian terrace rebuilding in the 80s. At that point in time, many of these properties were very run down and not worth that much. If they hadn't suspended the council housing program, they could have moved people out of the more run down terraces as they built new buildings, and then redeveloped in street sized blocks.

But the thatcher push for private home ownership made houses into investments rather than places to live in. This is why you can spend a crazy amount of money on a property in London that will have little insulation, victorian wiring, and a leaking roof. The value is no longer in the utility of the property but in its use as a store of value. If this hadn't happened, then people would value actual improvements to the property and this would have incentivised investment in upgrades.

Well, these day's I'm not so sure - there does appear to be a certain level of blatant corruption. But I think there are many Tory's who are not involved in that and genuinely believe they're doing the right thing. And that right thing is driven by a core belief (and the same applies to New Labour) that markets always deliver a better outcome than government. This means that they just accept things that could be fixed by proper leadership as 'the way it's meant to be'. It creates a level of apathy in the politics that I think is really poisonous and allows nefarious (corrupt) influences to flourish.

You get situations such as with the energy crisis, where all the highly paid people are sitting around trying to figure out how to bring down energy prices, while the French just realise the absurdity of the situation (that a few shareholders would become fabulously rich while everyone freezes to death) and just suspend the market. A friend of ours has been to the home of one of the energy barons here in the UK. He said they openly acknowledged that their now billionaire status was just down to Putin and blind luck. This is such an absurd situation, but the Tory's won't intervene because of their ideological belief in markets.