I heard Linus of Linus Tech Tips talking about being required to buy 3 Chromebooks for his 3 kids. He lives in Canada.

On the other hand, they decided no more wood burning stoves around Bejing, and overnight they all went away.

Courts so have a lot of power in China, and rulings are generally not interfered with by the government unless there is a very specific reason to. An example I've been following is copyright, specifically the GPL. A court ruled that it was an enforceable contract, and more than one company had to scramble to come into compliance. Many seem to have taken the opportunity to leverage open source by publishing their own code, with some success stories.

I have not personally tried it, but I hear that if you just decline the EULA on LG TVs they work pretty well as dumb TVs. When it comes time to replace my Panasonic I'll have to do some research. Current one has some smart features but is not connected to the network, and behaves like a dumb TV.

I'm not saying it's acceptable or anything, but most countries are at least a bit like that. Look at how we treat travellers, or participate in the Israeli genocide.

What I'm saying is that it's not good just complaining about all the bad stuff China does, we can only win by proving ourselves and our ideology to be better. Also hoping that the Chinese people will wake up and overthrow their oppressors isn't going to work either. Not accusing you of either, just explaining the point I was making.

I have used it once. The main issue is that some events only allow you to apply if you have an address in Japan, a common issue with things like loyalty cards too. Fortunately I can get around that, but most people can't.

At this point Masayoshi seems to be the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit. Every time he invests in something, it's a warning to get out of it while you can.

Now excuse me, I'm off to sell my AI investments.

Indeed, most oversubscribed events are by lottery in Japan. You sign up, and if you are lucky you get the opportunity to buy a ticket. The prices are flat, there is no demand pricing or any of that bullshit.

A lot of kids already have a Chromebook for school though. If they want to play Roblox their parents can spend an extra hundred or two on a premium model. It's going to be hard for Apple to break into that.

They published a paper, you can reproduce their results yourself if you want. Probably on a smaller scale if you aren't willing to able to throw that kind of money at it, but it's not really clear what more they could do to prove their claim. Except for not being Chinese, of course.

The US, like many strongly capitalist countries, needs cheap food to maintain the supply of cheap labour for other industries. When food prices rise, people either need to be paid more or are too malnourished to work efficiently.

High calorie junk food offsets it a bit, but also leads to other health problems. Someone who is obese is not going to make an ideal Amazon warehouse worker.

This is all ignoring things like quality of life that tend not to matter in such societies.

As TFS points out, courts have ruled in their favour and you can expect that it won't be long before the government steps in to assist if the employers don't.

That's the secret to the Chinese government's success - they give a shit about the citizens and work to improve their lives, instead of trying to maintain the supply of cheap labour for corporations. As such Chinese citizens are mostly happy with how their lives keep improving, and feel that the government is on their side. I know it's hard to imagine.

That sort of thing can be done with Matter, local only, no cloud or internet needed. You can even DIY it with a little effort.

If it can't get ads from the internet it will show built in ads, probably for Samsung stuff.

But that's crippling the product. You don't buy a fridge with a screen if you don't want that functionality, and it's bound to only work when online.

This is an attempt to get into the Chromebook market, particularly education. Schools aren't going to tell parents that they need to buy a $1,500 Macbook, but a $250 Chromebook isn't out of the question.

It will be interesting to see how badly crippled it is by software lockdowns. Mac App Store only? Or even iPad OS.

Either way it shows just how far ahead they are, and how ineffective the export ban on Nvidia chips is. Even if a domestic chip is only half as efficient as an Nvidia one, it's not going to raise the cost of training AI models enough to matter.

This also makes the Chinese tech much more attractive to other countries as it's not such a huge environmental disaster.