We are doing something about it, but it's not very good. Look at what is happening to the economy - there is a proliferation of low wage (minimum wage if your country has it) jobs that do not generate enough income to support the worker. The state then taxes the remaining middle class workers to top up the wages of those workers so that they can survive on those low wages. Everyone is getting smushed into a barely surviving precariat group - it's the death of the middle class.

The thing you have to remember is that robots will never drop to zero cost. All that has to happen is for wages to fall enough that a human worker is still cheaper than the robot. Once you start subsidising wages, this price clearing level can fall well below subsistence. If you continue to do this then you can keep humans in jobs as long as you want.

But think about that world - you have humans doing jobs that robots could do, because you are artificially trying to keep them busy doing shitty jobs. Meanwhile you are destroying the middle class to enable this.

This is essentially what we are doing. You can see the results playing out already.

I don't even think this is some grand conspiracy from the 'elites'. It's just what happens when you build a whole society where everyone is expected to work until they drop, and then you automate away all the work. I don't know how you fix this without some completely new social structure. UBI might be it but, honestly, I have no idea. Ideological shifts are never simple nor painless.

The issue is that China understood how to automate things like assembling phones, because they are making all the phones. In the West, there was a lot of steady progress towards automation before we started moving everything to China in the early 2000s. Then all that institutional knowledge got lost because it was cheaper to just get some Chinese workers to make it for us.

IMHO this is such a huge problem for the west. I have tried to make things in the west and you quickly run in to issue where some part can only be purchased from a Chiense company. You then realise that the Chinese company has people who speak perfectly good English, will actually get back to you (unlike many Western companies unless you are from a big name brand), and that they can do quality (if you're prepared to pay for it). You then just think, well, if I have to get some of the stuff made in China, then I might as well just do the whole thing.

I mean, Shenzhen is insane. If you are buying and LCD display, and you need a custom flex cable, you can get in touch with the company that is making the raw polyamide tape and visit their factory if you need too. In the west you used to be able to do that, now all roads lead to 'we need to talk to our supplier in the far east'.

I don't know how the west fixes this. I've talked to people in governance and they are stuck in the 'oh China will build the robots but we will make the software', which is nothing more than a colonialist attitude towards what the Chinese are capable of.

Imagine telling someone back in the 80/90s that in 2025 we'd have driverless taxis that could run from renewable electricity, but people would be bitching and trying to get them shutdown because of the noise from their backup sensors.

We truely live in the age of stupidity.

I honestly think dynamic pricing is just the dumbest MBA think that has ever been dreamed up. We used to have dynamic pricing at markets, and you had to spend ages haggling over everything. The development of the 'price tag' - particularly in western countries - was a massive efficiency increase for the average consumer.

Now we a heading back to the haggling era - when booking flights I have to regularly mess around with user-agents and switching to mobile to check I'm not being scammed by the algorithms. It's just painful, and the biggest effect is that it puts me off bothering to buy anything. Especially for low cost providers, the whole thing was that you could buy from them knowing they had the best price.

It's the same thing with the 'pricing ladder'. It's just dumb. If you don't have a decent enough feature to distinguish between your 'premium' product and your normal one then stop confusing your customers with made up upgrade tiers. Many times I've been dragged up the pricing ladder to the point I decide that it's too much to spend and I just don't buy anything. I mean, dragging people up a pricing ladder by telling them the model they were looking at isn't quite good enough is going to do that.

I still remember the glory days of Apple when you went and bought the 'iPhone' and it was the one you'd seen on the keynote, and you didn't have to know all the specs because it would do everything they'd shown you.

Money. There was that AI guy who went to Meta and got something like a $100million sign on bonus a few months back.

I would imagine the payout this guy is getting is absolutely stratospheric.

You're absolutely right, but the reality is that most people really don't care. I mean, I'm in the tech world, and I gave up caring about privacy a long time ago. I don't do anything particularly dodgy, so if Google wants to know what I had for lunch good for them.

I'm not saying this should be acceptable, but the writing was on the wall for privacy a decade ago when we all started readily carrying around personal trackers and giving our data to Google in exchange for not having to pay.

I admire Apple for holding the line on this (though they had commercial reasons to do so), but my guess is they will water it all down now that it is affecting their ability to compete.

I've given trying to explain this to anyone. I mean, I'm pretty sure I learnt it in high school statistics. Yet it is incredible how much advice and even government policy comes from correlative studies alone.

My biggest bug bear is around second hand mattresses for infants. AFAIK there is one study that showed a small correlation between households that used second hand mattresses and an increase in sudden-infant-death syndrome.

Now, the obvious cause there is that second hand mattress use will be correlated with household income, and low income house holds have all sorts of material disadvantages that could explain an increase in SIDs. Yet if you ignore that and say it's something physically associated with the mattress, then you start getting lots of weird explanations around micro-biome exposure. This is just grasping at straws, especially when you consider that a LOT of people reuse baby clothes. Even in rich households it's not unreasonable to reuse clothes between siblings or pass them on to friends.

But anyway, there are millions of children's mattresses thrown out every year because of that study, and obviously nobody involved in the mattress industry is interested in doing further studies.

This sort of thing pops up all the time. I just have to ignore it because it drives me crazy.

I mean a country is by definition sovereign, so the idea of 'legal precedent' is meaningless. You probably mean that it's not in keeping with the 'rules based global trading order' which is true, but that was/is simply a post-war construct that is getting pretty shaky these days. You're not supposed to be able to slap tariffs on whoever you feel like to strong arm them into doing your bidding either, but here we are.

Ultimately the government of India can fine Apple, or whoever they want, whatever they feel like if their voters don't kick up a fuss. I imagine that Apple has tried to appeal to the government and hasn't made any progress, so they're going for a constitutional ruling since this has authority over the legislature.

But I think Apple still has a lot of leverage here. They probably can't pull out of the country, though I imagine they could threaten it and see if the government calls their bluff. But they have large factory investments there (through Foxconn), people like their products, and I imagine lots of Indians work on products tied to the Apple ecosystem. Closing all of that out would not be good for the Indian economy. There is also wider leverage from the US government. I'm sure Tim Apple can find an even bigger piece of gold to gift to the administration.

Oh there will be plenty. You can imagine a one-hit-wonder type pop-star will jump on this to become the first 'AI artist' and then a bunch of tik-tok artists will jump on that bandwagon as well. Or a 90s pop star trying to get back into the limelight. I could easily see something like the estate of Michael Jackson, Dolores O'Riordan or Amy Winehouse jumping on the bandwagon if it brings in the $$$ - it just depends on who owns their rights in the end. Of course when it gets good enough, you bet that a record label will release a new Elvis single using it.

In the end this AI stuff is going to become the backing track at the supermarket, cafe and airport. Honestly, I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. There is only so much Robbie Williams and Spice Girls I can handle when I'm shopping. If they just have some generic bland backing music that removes the awkwardness of silence then so be it. Realistically, playing something like Animals as Leaders, or some free jazz in those settings would be entirely inappropriate anyway.

The UK has become so slow at developing infrastructure that it's now at the point where if you are in your late 30s you will NEVER benefit from anything they have not already put shovels in the ground for. They can literally talk about whatever they want - its takes so long you'll be on your way to the care home before it ever happens. I moved here 15 years ago when they were talking about 'making a decision on the third runway at Heathrow'. Today they announce that they are about to 'make a decision' on it again. There are things like the electrification of the Great Western line - which would benefit people for the next 100 years if they did it - and they still haven't done. The first electric trains on the underground happened nearly 130 years ago.

That might be the immediate cause, but it's really the apathetic middle class that allows it. They could easily out vote the extremists but they are just don't care. It means that these sorts of issues become captured by those who care the most - which is typically going to be people at the extremes.

It's like at my kids school - everyone bitched about how the people who ran the PTA were bossy and controlling. We then had that old guard move on, and we needed new people to lead it and, lo-and-behold, suddenly all the people who had complained became extremely busy and unable to get involved. Eventually those who did step up just got sick of trying to gently prod people into helping so just became...bossy and controlling.

Honestly the biggest enemy to the west is the abject apathy of the comfortable middle classes.

It's also cultural. Chinese/Japanese/Korean culture values academic results over pretty much anything else. If you want to be the most popular person at school in Asia then get the best grades.

Compare to the West where when I was at school lots of the smart kids pretended to be dumb because they didn't want to call attention to themselves and get bullied.

Asian culture is massively supportive of working hard and studying so it's not a surprise that they excel in the knowledge economy.

Note while there are aspects of this I very much admire, it is not all sunshine and roses. If you cannot perform academically in these cultures you are basically thrown no the trash heap of life very early on. Children are under immense pressure in a way that sets many up to fail. Many people find the cultures very stifling as well if you have grown up in them and don't have the 'white privaledge' of being a tourist/expat there. Japanese and Korean performative work culture is also insane.

I agree. To do C well you have to be very disciplined and add a lot of design patterns that are unnecessary if your main going is just making something work. It's exactly the same with JS (hence why Typescript and endless libraries are so popular).

As you move into application level code it all becomes quite tiresome. Doing basic things requires dealing with clunky designed object models which slow you down at best, and can trip up the inexperienced at worst.

C++ at least provides better tools for structuring code, but it also doesn't really enforce any canonical methods but instead throws a whole lot of different methods at you (because that's really the aim of the language). The end result is extremely dangerous.

I don't like the fanaticism around rust, but i can see the point of the language. It does appear to be a better option than C++ at least, and ultimately nobody is ever going to replace C for where it is really needed as it does this job so well.

Pretty much. Open AI doing an IPO will be the canary. Unfortunately for them it's taking a while as they have to shake off the whole non-profit thing first.

It's like during one of the earlier bitcoin bubble, where the financial services industry was busy trying to get a crypto options market up and running. Like clockwork, once you could short BTC then it had an almighty crash.

There are a lot of people who want to exit Open AI to make a lot of money. They will exit, then make money on the crash, then make money when the Fed predictably starts pouring cheap money into the markets to try to prevent a wider crash.

It's hard to see how this is even fun for them anymore. They have more money than you can spend in a lifetime, and have rigged so much of the financial system that it's like playing a slot machine where you're choosing when it should pay out. Surely these guys are bored out of their minds by now.

I think Starlink just really messed up their roadmap with the satellite stuff. I know lots of people who do backcountry trails, and when the iPhone 14 came out with the satellite connectivity, a lot of them were quite excited. My guess is that after proving out the SoS functionality, they would have extended it to a paid service for messaging and then started upgrading it to handle more and more data. In the end you'd have a phone you could use anywhere for a hefty subscription fee. Combined with the whole rugged line (Ultra watches etc) they would have had another revenue earning service to lock in a lucrative customer group.

Starlink and their ability to do direct to cell basically destroys that model, so the satellite stuff ended up not being a key feature they could push.

Apple is in such a tricky place now. They have to drip feed features into the iPhone because they don't exactly have any block-buster things to add to it. It's a mature technology and people are just buying them on upgrade cycles now - which is absurdly lucrative for them, but won't generate massive growth.

I think Cook has been relatively at peace with this strategy - he's near the end of his tenure, and got to overseas massive growth as the market developed - but whoever takes over is unlikely to want to just drip feed out features to keep sales bouncing along. So it will be interesting to see what they do from a strategic point of view when that happens.