I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?
Europe has no competitors to the US/Chinese tech giants and their citizens want to use technology like anybody else without a layer of bureaucracy preventing them from doing basic stuff.
I don't think European citizens have been forced to use Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Android, Facebook , WhatsApp and so on.
The main food deliverers (Uber Eats clones) here are Dutch and Swedish. The place you can find someone's apartment to stay in temporarily is German. The Fediverse was invented here, in Germany. Ride-sharing companies are Estonian, German, and some others I don't remember.
There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it).
You conveniently left our everything else I mention and those companies aren't really leading. Bolt for example has an edge because everywhere in Europe they're been killing Uber or limiting it hardly, and in some countries it's still the case.
In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly)
P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)
If you're arguing that Europe killed Uber by making it follow common-sense regulations, you could just ask well argue that the USA killed Bolt by not.
Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.
It's not common sense regulation. It's anticompetitive regulations. You're happy to ride a taxi that often times takes a longer route to steal you a few extra euro? Are you happy that a taxi driver earn 500-600-700 euro a day when the avg salary in some EU countries is 1.5k a month? Are you happy that they don't take credit card payments and accept (often time) only cash? Are you happy that they evade taxes? Are you happy to go inside a car and don't know how long and how much your ride is going to cost? Are you happy that often times in touristic cities they refuse to use the meter?
You seem to know well what Europeans want but I bet you never got scammed by a taxi driver. Europeans like everybody want to simply pay less by having an open market that allows the best players to offer services without artificially inflating the price because that specific category some privilege.
If you claiming that Europe is not decaying probably you're living in the wrong Europe.
You seem to be listing a bunch of things that are illegal in Europe. Yes, that was my point. Do you want to suffer from all these things that are legal in the USA and not in Europe?
That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities…
It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang.
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The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead.
What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment.
It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
Ironic. The "right to express discontent against the government" seems to be being curtailed in the UK, and all of London is under CCTV surveillance, so maybe the EU should label its exports "unfair" as well?
And in any case, if your citizens fought for rights for themselves, and won those rights in their own country from their own government, why does that mean it is "unfair" that others in other countries leverage their lack of such rights or privileges for an advantage? Perhaps it is much MORE "unfair" that you are trying to impose your own framework and guarantees on others, who may not have the same per-capita wealth, or the same cultural values!
For example, the "third world" is complaining that you "first world people" cut down all your trees over centuries, used a lot of fossil fuels and built up your economies, and now you've put in place standards that you expect them to follow, so they can't build up their own economies. You want Brazil to preserve its rainforest, but you didn't preserve your own forests. This concept of "unfair" that you're espousing is quite dubious and hypocritical!
If you don't think it's a good thing to recognize your own mistakes and try to warn others about them, then I don't think I have anything else to discuss.
Okay, you cut down all the forests in your country, and you "recognized your mistake", and try to warn others about them.
But you don't just try to warn, you try to impose rules on them which pull up the ladder behind you. It's like the big cartels of corporations that lobby the government for licenses and regulations, because they "recognized the mistakes" that can happen in an unregulated environment which allowed them to grow so quickly, and lo and behold, it becomes far more costly for anyone to disrupt them.
How convenient. Something might be a "good thing" but not an "unmitigated good". You can wax poetic cherrypicking only your good motives, but it turns out that your rhetoric also hides ulterior motives. Well, if we don't have anything to discuss, I guess you won't answer me on that point.
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Or somewhat similar: When the USA bombed Laos, we were doing them and Vietnam a favor of course, because we recognized the mistakes of Communism and didn't want them to become Communist. Because the "Domino Theory" stated that allowing communism to spread would make mankind more miserable. So we had to nip it in the bud, even if it meant killing a lot of people. Same in South America etc. In this case, we hadn't even "realized the mistakes", but we were so sure we didn't want others to have a different economic system, that we were willing to kill them to prevent it.
Btw, they resisted, we withdrew, and to this day Vietnam has a Communist government, and is relatively prosperous. But in Cuba and North Korea we still keep crippling sanctions on them, to "prove" that their system is harming their people. Even if Cuba presents zero threat to us, we will continue total sanctions on the entire country. And we will welcome Cuban refugees with open arms, while refugees from Colombia etc are turned back, because the former can spread the word about what a terrible system they have in Cuba.
We can export the costs of our war on drugs, our industrial waste, etc. to Mexico and other countries, and "fairness" somehow is not mentioned. Anglophone countries can occupy India for centuries, cause famines and repress opportunities, but then say it's "unfair" that Indians with H1B visas are taking our jobs for lower wages. European empires could establish protectorates and extract resources, and then lament about the "immigrants" from those territories polluting their culture. There is no "fairness" in geopolitics, is my point. At bottom it's all self-interest and hypocrisy, dressed up in crude attempts at some kind of moralizing language that any decently-informed person would have massive cognitive dissonance swallowing.
Many people who blame Putin for annexing Crimea would then applaud Trump for annexing Canada or Greenland. They'd look past USA's invasions and occupations halfway around the world as "mistakes were made", but hyperfocus on another country's invasions of a neighbor or putting pressure on their neighbor. All I can say is, don't have a double standard. Every superpower pressures their neighbors, but since the 50s, only one country goes halfway around the world to bomb, invade and occupy faraway countries that present zero threat to it. And the government of that country is also the one moralizing to everyone else to stop doing what they're doing. So yeah, I take the moral arguments with a massive grain of salt.
It's unfair that in your country you decide nobody should have to work more than a certain amount, and then you make other people work more than that amount in a different country instead, yes.
So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?
Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.
Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.
It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.
What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.
Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.
While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.
But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike.
As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents.
There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle.
The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments.
Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership.
On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers.
Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation.
If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding.
Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
Number 2 is already possible with open models. You can do distillation using Llama, which could likely be doing #1 to build their models (I'm not sure it's the case though)
Realistically that's the actual headline. Only another AI can replace AI, pretty much like LLMs / Transformers have replaced "old" AI models in certain task (NLP, Sentiment Analysis, Translation etc) and research is in progress for other tasks as well performed by traditional models (personalization, forecasting, anomaly detection etc).
If there's a better AI, old AI will lose the job first.
As somebody who got to work adjacent to some of these things for a long time, I've been wondering about this. Are LLMs and transformers actually better than these "old" models or is it more of an 80/20 thing where for a lot less work (on developers' behalf) LLMs can get 80% of the efficacy of these old models?
I ask because I worked for a company that had a related content engine back in 2008. It was a simple vector database with some bells and whistles. It didn't need a ton of compute, and GPUs certainly weren't what they are today, but it was pretty fast and worked pretty well too. Now it seems like you can get the same thing with a simple query but it takes a lot more coal to make it go. Is it better?
This will kill almost all new investments immediately. Investors will balk at ~50% of the shares of a brand new company being owned by an ex-founder no longer involved.
How does it matter if it’s going to be diluted anyway? Investors will get their post-money 30% equity, or whatever it is, and rest of the shareholders will keep their proportion of the 70% (and ~50% pre-money gets diluted to ~35% post-money).
Yeah, I think it will be better if OP can reach an agreement somewhere in the middle where they retain just enough shares not to interfere with future investment. 5-10% of something is better than 49% of nothing. Plus they can collect some cash while the other founder and/or company still has money left, which again is strictly better than shares of an uninvestable company.
From an investors point it's very unattractive to invest in a early-stage startup where half of the shares are in the hands of a person not working there anymore.
The US has actually pretty good train infrastructure, it's just almost entirely dedicated to freight. The US moves far more goods by rail, farther and cheaper than just about any other country in the world.
We did, and then when airplanes came around, it turned out that people/other interests found air travel better than train travel for most intercity travel.
Even on the East Coast, there used to be way more rail lines that took passengers -- if this were a hundred years ago, I could have walked a mile or two to a spur which would take me to one of the mid-sized cities connected to The Big City by commuter rail; now they're mostly rail trails.
The railroads deliberately killed the passenger business because it has worse operating ratios and needs more capex. Investors and execs believed (and still believe) railroads are in long-term managed decline so capex and labor costs must be avoided wherever possible.
To give an example: Caltrain used to run all the way to LA. It was a profitable line the day Southern Pacific killed it. They used shills to buy up all the tickets for phantom riders then used the low passenger boarding numbers to justify to the US Railroad Commission that they should be allowed to close the route.
This strategy or variations of it were used all across the USA to deliberately kill profitable passenger service because it made the company financials look better: no need to buy or refurbish passenger cars nor pay stewards and conductors. Operating ratio looks better? Mission accomplished! Making less money doesn't make sense but profit is almost irrelevant if you think the whole business is in long-term decline. Better to kill anything that might require future capex or labor and instead optimize to get the most juice with the least squeeze of existing fruits.
Much like the shutdown of public transit across the USA. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a semi-documentary for which the real-life villain General Motors was convicted of monopoly action in federal court! But the judge only fined them $1 because all the movers and shakers thought cars and airplanes were the future so who gives a crap about public transit, trains or the lot?
Passenger train service and public transit were systematically dismantled on purpose by elites who thought they knew better.
Unlike in Europe, where rail maintenance is heavily subsidised by the government, in the US it is paid for by the private rail operators to a much greater extent. Thus the rail operators have much more say over how the rail is used and obviously priorities the more profitable traffic, which in the US is cargo.
So if the US government would wanted to build out cross country passenger rail they would either have to build new tracks, or use eminent domain to take back control of the existing tracks. Both options would be very expensive and wildly unpopular.
Which Europe are you talking about? Europe is a collection of independent counties and what you just mention is all wrong.
Most of the European railway companies have been privatized and there are companies that run the rail network and companies that run the train. Subsidies are not a thing in many of the European countries
If you look at the UK for example, the physical network is publicly owned and maintained by National Rail, whilst the ToCs are (currently) mostly private. That said the ToCs are also going to switch to publicly owned over the next few years.
It was, but then all the Class-Ⅰ rail carriers merged until we were left with a west-coast duopoly (UP and BNSF) and an east-coast duopoly (CSX and NS) and they closed all the “redundant” lines they could.
Probably because most cities are so spaced out you'd still need a car to get from home to the train station and from the train station to your office when taking the train to work, for example. So it's easier to just drive there.
You're ignoring how non-dense everything actually is in those places. Americans no longer live in walkable cities and towns like in the early 20th century before cars became popular. After WWII, with the rise of the automobile, the inner cities emptied out and everyone who could afford to moved out to the suburbs. So now, even in a "city" in America (unless it's Manhattan), you absolutely need a car to get anywhere, because nothing is walkable.
It's not like 1905 when you could just walk from your home in Smalltown USA to the local train station, buy a ticket, and get a ride to the nearest city, and get out and walk from that station to interesting places.
Any train trip, even if you look only at the eastern states, is likely to require a car ride on one or both ends to get to/from your source/destination to/from the station. If you have to drive an hour just to get to a train station, and another hour to get from the destination station to your final station, it's probably faster and easier and much cheaper to just drive the whole way. Don't forget dealing with parking, car rental, etc.; you'd probably have to take taxis, and those are quite expensive.
The fundamental problem here is density. America doesn't have it any more.
So it's easier to drive to San Francisco from Seattle instead of parking your car at the train station in Seattle, take a train and then do your business on downtown SF, come back to Seattle and take your car back home?
(It's a figurative example I'm not sure there's a train from Seattle to SF)
Of course not, but even with state of art train technology (let's say 250mph), that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
I'm just saying, this is such a rare use case that it's not as high of a priority as expanding the roads that 80% or more of the residents in a city use daily. Whereas for freight it makes a ton of sense.
(fun fact, there actually is a train route there!)
As some who used to travel for meetings quite a lot to a city 3 hours away by high speed rail, it really isn't. Once you take into account that you can show up for your train 5 mins before it leaves, plus the fact that the train station is almost always much closer to where you want to be, the difference in time between trains and planes pretty much disappears for shorter trips.
Plus the train is just so much nicer and more comfortable. It's quieter. Your seats are much bigger and have more legroom than even the nicest business class seats. You can get up and walk around if you want. You often have a restaurant car where you can sit and grab a drink or something to eat. Train travel is just so much more relaxing compared to flying.
> that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
Even for flights which take 45 minutes in the air, I’d never expect to get to the airport, through security, through all the boarding and unboarding nonsense, and from the destination airport to where I was actually going, in 3 hours.
IIRC last time I was in Seattle airport, after I got off the plane (which was late, of course), I spent half an hour just walking through airport and to the rather inconveniently located light rail. Everything involving flying takes forever.
3 hours is about Osaka to Tokyo, a route that sees a massive volume of business travel on the bullet train in Japan, arguably far more than flying. SF to Seattle would be about 1300 km which is more like Hiroshima to Morioka, around 6.5 hours by train including a connection; I think at that point there'd be a split in favour of flying, but around a third of travellers would probably still opt for the train due to its comfort and convenience.
There's huge differences between the US and Japan. When I travel from my home in Tokyo to Osaka or any other city by shinkansen, I take public transit (Tokyo Metro specifically) to get from my home to Tokyo station or Shinagawa, and then transfer to the shinkansen. At the destination city, I just get off and either walk to wherever I'm going, or transfer to another local rail or subway line.
You just can't do that in the US, outside some very select situations (like going from somewhere inside DC to Manhattan NYC). From SF to Seattle, how do you get to the station in SF? In Seattle, how do you get from the station to your destination? What do you do to get around in Seattle? Generally, you need a car, which means renting a car, which is really expensive. The US is set up to handle this at airports pretty well: you get off your plane and go to the Hertz counter and pick up a car (and then after your trip is over and you've returned the car, get arrested for auto theft when Hertz reports your car as stolen--don't use Hertz). I haven't tried trains on the west coast, but on the east coast, I've never seen train stations set up with rental car counters.
Relative to the current situation or in absolute terms? If there was a Shinkansen style trains between LA and SF with the same quality and timetable as the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, do you not think Americans would flock to it?
A train might make that hour up by not needing to get in and out of SFO/LAX/etc.
In Tokyo, they’re fast partly because you don’t need to trek to the airport (yes, even Haneda) and deal with security etc. You just… get on the train and bam are downtown in the next place.
Sadly, with commercial air travel the time a passenger spends on the plane between say SF and LA represents only a small portion of their total travel time. This is commonly overlooked or not understood by people unfamiliar with traveling by train.
I’ve flown it plenty of times. Get to the airport 60min before flight, and you’re out of LAX in less than 30 min.
How early do you need to get to the train station?
Not to mention if you miss your train how quickly can you jump on another train?
I’m not arguing it’s not a nice alternative, but there is a reason why flying is still highly in demand even with high quality rail systems like in Europe.
You arrive at the station when the train is about to depart, not an hour or more before like you're forced to when flying. But even better, the station is in the center of town, rather than the middle of nowhere, reaching which again significantly lengthens your travel time.
You can jump on another flight faster than you can jump on another train? I rarely fly more than a couple times a month, but for me this is never true.
> When I took the trains in Europe I’d show up early
Why would you do that? Were you worried the train would depart early? Boarding a train is immediate.
> And stations in the middle of cities? Maybe, but unlikely building new infrastructure in existing cities.
1) "Maybe?" 2) The post to which you responded asked about a hypothetical Shinkansen style train from SF to LA, not one connecting El Segundo and Millbrae.
> And sure, if I want to go from SF to LA, there are 20+ flights per day. Are there going to be 20+ trains?
Going from Tokyo to Osaka is like taking the subway in terms of train frequency, so a lot more than that. There also aren't sprawling terminals to traverse on either end, which you quite likely will be forced to do when changing flights.
Let's talk about punctuality. If you think you're content don't look at the numbers for Shinkansen. As for air travel, clearly if you favor flying narrowbodies between cities only a few hundred miles apart you're an extremely patient person, but did you realize your flights between SF and LA will be lucky to break 90% on-time reliability? As a lifelong non-rev I do everything I can to avoid short flights like that.
Yes, but the airport is not in the center of town. What is usually the case is the public transit takes you to the center, and then you take a second trip to the airport. Meanwhile the train station is generally a lot closer. These aren't particularly good examples because they are from the US and also what I have experience with, but if you look at say San Jose the public transit converges on Diridon and from there you can take the light rail to a vaguely airport-ish location. In SF you can take city transit to the BART backbone down market, then you take BART to the actual airport way down near Millbrae. Meanwhile the actual station (again, we're stretching it because San Francisco doesn't actually have long-distance rail) for, say, Caltrain is well-connected and much closer.
We have derailments monthly due to poor track conditions... We have terrible pay and conditions for operators who are exploited by both the companies and then the government. We do not have pretty good infrastructure.
ARM licenses cores for both CPU and GPU, not just the architecture.
There are not “plenty of ARM chips designed by multiple companies”, almost all of them except for Apple (and now Qualcomm) use ARMs off the shelf design.
> Annapurna Labs, Ampere Computing, NVIDIA, Intel, Marvell, Pensando Systems, and others use Arm Neoverse and Arm technologies to create cloud-optimized CPUs and DPUs.
> Companies that have designed cores that implement an ARM architecture include Apple, AppliedMicro (now: Ampere Computing), Broadcom, Cavium (now: Marvell), Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu, and NUVIA Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm in 2021).
The first list is basically what I said: they use licensed core designs and don’t make their own.
The second list is out of date. Intel has completely pulled out of ARM earlier this year and most of the others do not actually design their own ARM cores anymore. It’s become a lot less common in the ARMv8+ era.
I like this project but I don't think I agree on the 3 branches that I see when I open the website.
Science is not a standalone category. In fact science is directly connected to mathematics which is directly connected to philosophy (through logic for example)
We might argue that also art is an extension of philosophy (e.g. finding objective or subjective beauty).
Probably Claude doesn't agree with this definition.
I agree with you. Truth is this was the first branching generation which I generated, and so I kept it for the sake of history. If you manage to create a better "starting branching tree" which looks nice and feels nice then I might take you up on this.
