Disattention is happening because the user isn't actually in control of the smartphone, the smartphone is in control of the user, because that control is a commodity upon which a grand economy has been built. That control is only possible because the smartphone itself represents an extraordinary degree of managed control in the way it works, a fact which is used to obviate the users own agency over the product they supposedly own.
So I think the biggest problem with smartphones is that significant parts of the smartphone product no longer belong to the user, but they are in fact rented and leased out to other third parties for the exclusive use of attention-gathering.
We wouldn't have third party applications stealing our social media property as individuals - indeed they wouldn't be necessary anyway, in a functioning operating system - if the operating system of the smartphone was designed to make the user able to do social media without requiring a third party.
But smartphones are, literally, sanctuaries for third party economics, against a captive user. They have been designed, as such. Third-party social media is necessary because the operating system vendors are no longer designing operating systems for the users - but for themselves, and others, for which they are handsomely rewarded ..
Iranians despise their government in about the same way that Americans despise their government - which is to say, both peoples got the government they deserve...
hmm .. imho .. the supply chain between Iran, Russia, and China is .. radically .. under-estimated in the equation by those states who have lost control over the worlds energy supplies.
It is more like the Western nations which cannot withstand another month of all this 'posturing' .. But there is some resilience to the idea that the Iran/Russia/China corridor is going to keep those nations relatively buffered from total disaster.
There's a thing in writing where you can make bold claims in order to give the reader an idea about what the rest of the article is going to be about - that's whats happening here, a bit of editorializing .. but do you know of a more complex machine than the ASML/TSMC production line, in terms of inputs/outputs?
I think, if one were used to calculating cyclomatic complexity, such a headline is not only amusing, but also fascinating even if it is 'wrong' by .. some value system .. because the thought exercise to come up with a more cyclomatically complex machine, is rather a fruitful challenge. And that is why writers should be allowed to editorialize, because .. after all .. this is a thought-provoking article, isn't it ..
As the the comment you're replying to just said, A) it's qualitative and B) it's perfectly fine to glaze the subject a bit in journalistic writing. It gives the article a quick hook to get readers interested, and if you actually read the article it becomes the least interesting thing about it.
And now that I've said that: I'd argue that if you consider the full "embodied complexity" of this machine's product lifecycle, it's hard to think of much else that compares to it. E.g., consider not just the machine itself, but also all of the R&D needed to get it to this point, and the amount of field experience necessary to make maintainable and reliable, and the engineering and supply-chain work necessary so that you can reliably ship them to customers around the world? While still being far, far ahead of all your competitors?
For this thought experiment I would welcome you to contribute another measure besides cyclomatic complexity as a means of ascertaining the truth of the matter, because after all complexity is multi-dimensional, but on the basis of number of actual things that have to be qualitatively measured in order for the machine to function as intended, I can think of a few other big machines that would be in scope, but - as a person who does complex systems work professionally - I'm pretty sure that the editorializing was a way to kick off some neurons in the intended audience, and not much more than that.
However, let us continue to postulate there are other forms of complexity that can be measured - what would you suggest are the other 3 or 4 contenders for the title?
"no reward" is weak, because of course you wouldn't make a wheel, say, unless you intended to roll somewhere.
You're basically saying "ASML's entire production line is worthless unless it is rare and coveted", which is .. obviously not true .. because of course the output is immensely useful.
The world needs more chipfabs, not less. A properly scaled chipfab in places like Broome or Santiago, or .. indeed in orbit .. would go a long way to sorting out the worlds fires.
The thing stopping us, is the international, imperial system of patents and intellectual 'property', which make nation states subservient to each other on the basis of ideas.
The ideas could be spreading far and wide, but we humans are keeping them in our cage, in which the only reward is having other cages to extract wealth from ..
ASML's supply chain is deep and complex - and secret. But if it were F/OSS (just imagine it) from sand to chip, that complexity would have a wider scope of human attention applied to it.
What is happening with ASML now, once happened with the wheel.
Patents are supposed to be the antidote to industrial secrets. Of course, it doesn't really work out that way because in addition to patent writers hiding the ball or strategically layering patents and secrecy, things like tacit knowledge and organization play a huge role in exploring, building, and applying solutions. FOSS doesn't really help with the tacit stuff. It's partly why it's so difficult for projects to survive after the original authors move on. With software that's not necessarily immediately fatal as long as the software works well and is easy enough to tweak around the edges to keep it compiling and interfacing well, qualities which FOSS is meant to foster and preserve. But outside software, and especially in the industrial sphere, the loss of that tacit knowledge and organization is often immediately fatal. You can't just copy stuff, you have to rebuild all that tacit knowledge and process. Often times, like in software, the resulting product that nominally achieves the same results is built around an entirely different technical approach.
If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.
There are so many examples of this out there, already, that I find this specious "no next generation" argument to be either simply coming from bias, or ignorance.
For sure, we only care about Taiwan because there is one Taiwan. End patents: no more Taiwan problem.
> If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.
My post is in violent agreement with this, for this generation of machines.
ASML spends ~$5B annually on R&D with the expectation that they will be able to make ~30% net profit in the future. If you remove patent protection, there will be more competition and obviously profit margins will fall.
I want to rephrase that for emphasis. The point of aa-jv's post was that we would get cheaper chips by invalidating IP. Cheaper chips means lower margins (because you have not lowered input prices). Lower margins was the explicit goal, so to the extent that the changes in IP law work, you will get lower margins for companies like ASML.
At that point, you have a field of companies looking at (say) 10% net returns, still needing to invest billions of new capital into R&D every year. Worse: no patents means that Company A could spend $5B on R&D and Company B could spend $0, and both of them could reap the benefits of that $5B by Company A. So it's not even necessarily clear that the industry would see much net innovation.
Are we even certain there are companies who would enter this capital-intensive business assuming IP was free? Compulsory licensing is a thing, but I am not aware of that even being something that has been requested.
>Also why is everything about LLMs now? Can't we discuss technologies for their face value anymore. It's getting kind of old to me personally.
Fully agree with you, LLM's everywhere is getting churlsome, and trite. Sure, one can generate the code, but can one talk about the code?
Can one move, easily, beyond "but why should I?" into "I should because ..", whenever it comes to some realm, one is supposdely to have "conquered" with AI/ML/etc.?
Sure, we can all write great specs, sit back and watch the prompts rolling in off the horizon...
But seriously: the human reasoning of it is the most important part!
However everyone is busy building things secretly that they don't want anyone to know about with AI/ML (except the operators of course, duh, lol, kthxbai...) because, after all, then anyone else can do it .. and in this secrecy, human literature is transforming - imho - in non-positive ways, for the future.
Kids need to read books, and quick!
>old to me personally
I kind of regret seeing it in one of my favourite realms, retro- computing .. but .. what can we do, it is here and now and the kids are using it even if some don't.
I very much concur with you on the desire to continue being able to discuss technologies at face value, personally. We have to be reviewing the code; the point at which we don't review AI's output, is where we become subjects of it.
This is, probably, like the very early days of porno, or commercial tobacco, or indeed industrialized combustion, wherein it kind of took society a few big leaps and dark tumbles before the tech sort of stabilized. I'm not sure we'll get to the "Toyota" stages of AI, or indeed we're just going to blast right past into having AI control literally every device under the sun, whether we like it or not (and/or, have an impact on the technologically-obsolete curve, -/+'vely...)
Ain't no easily-accessible AI-hookery Typescript in 8-bit land .. I will have my retro- computing without that filthy stinking AI/ML please, mmkay, thanks!!!
Disattention is happening because the user isn't actually in control of the smartphone, the smartphone is in control of the user, because that control is a commodity upon which a grand economy has been built. That control is only possible because the smartphone itself represents an extraordinary degree of managed control in the way it works, a fact which is used to obviate the users own agency over the product they supposedly own.
So I think the biggest problem with smartphones is that significant parts of the smartphone product no longer belong to the user, but they are in fact rented and leased out to other third parties for the exclusive use of attention-gathering.
We wouldn't have third party applications stealing our social media property as individuals - indeed they wouldn't be necessary anyway, in a functioning operating system - if the operating system of the smartphone was designed to make the user able to do social media without requiring a third party.
But smartphones are, literally, sanctuaries for third party economics, against a captive user. They have been designed, as such. Third-party social media is necessary because the operating system vendors are no longer designing operating systems for the users - but for themselves, and others, for which they are handsomely rewarded ..
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