I gotta call out this comment. I never said 'stop them!' I said I worry about space x being a gatekeeper. This is a valid point since it is obvious that they are building the gate. Please don't put words into my mouth.
That argument doesn't hold for basically any industry on the planet. Early access often, by design, leads to lock-in in critical areas. SpaceX has a massive advantage (rightfully deserved) in an industry which takes massive effort to break into. It isn't hard for them to out compete any competitor into oblivion making it very hard for realistic alternatives to space. Do you know how much they took to orbit last year compared to everyone else? It is easily possible that it will be SpaceX and a few government providers and nobody else for a long while.
NASA and the federal government would trip all over themselves to hand a reasonable competitor huge amounts of money as a second source of launches. The fact that the second source doesn’t exist isn’t because SpaceX has some natural monopoly on space.
There are plenty of other space companies building launch capability, even projectile/kinetic based methods where you accelerate as much as possible on the ground, IE Spin Launch.
The only gate is 28,000 km/hr and you can thank mother nature for that.
Will future tech companies bother making their products available in the EU? Will it be worth it, or is just too big of a risk with uncertain outcomes?
It's funny that there are two common and opposite narratives in HN comments for EU fines on tech companies. The is to claim that the fines are far too small, and the companies will happily just continue breaking the laws and treat the fines as a cost of doing business. The other is that the fines are so impractically huge that they're going to drive the companies out of the EU entirely.
Both narratives are just nonsense. The goal of the fines is to change product behavior immediately, and to act as a deterrent for illegal product changes in the future. The fines seem pretty well calibrated for that. $1 billion is real money even to Meta. They can't afford to ignore this and other similar issues, and will need to at least make an effort that looks like good faith enough to avoid the fines ratcheting up higher.
But on the other hand, Meta probably makes on the order of $10 billion / year in profit in the EU. They're not about to leave. Like, even in that one year (2018?) when Google ended up adding a separate line item for EU antitrust fines into their financial statements there was no chance they'd leave.
There's very little chance they leave entirely, but there's every chance future products or functionality simply don't roll out in Europe due to regulatory uncertainty. In as far as the goal of the fines is to 'change product behaviour', it's working. Europe is, for the first time in my adult life, being specifically and deliberately excluded from tech roll-outs. Right now that's still nascent, but let's see where we're at in five, ten years.
It will also have a disproportionate impact on small and mid-sized businesses. Apple, Meta, etc. have the lawyers and profit margins to do EU compliance; many smaller companies do not, but were they to trade in Europe, they would be exposed to the same risk of arbitrary fines issued for non-compliance with complex and unclear laws. This sort of thing has a chilling effect. There's nothing particularly commendable in passing deliberately vague laws designed to facilitate the arbitrary enforcement of fines - it's a fraying of the rule of law.
And to the glib sarcas-bro who's about to say 'good riddance', just remember that this is Hacker News. Innovation is good, actually. Smart-watches with medical sensors, AirPods as hearing aids, those things are good, and missing out on future versions of tech like this is not a win.
Except the change the EU is trying to encourage with this ruling is really absurdly dumb. It's clearly and transparently rent seeking.
We are already in a trade war and the only one that refuses to acknowledge it is the US. The US needs to embargo and deprive EU of the essential tech infrastructure they provide it. Just turn it off or brick it one day and leave the EU scrambling to catch up with 20+ years of stagnation and missing services and hardware.
Let's see how good it will be for the consumer when tech just leaves. Maybe then they'll change their regulations to something that works to enable technological progress and innovation.
And should the EU then compell SAP to retaliate in kind? You can argue the EU is more a serv than an ally to the US, but they still need them on their side.
The number of times you can pull a Nordstream are preciously limited.
> No it's not. It's as any other regulation that tries to prevent overusing ones power.
That's an alien concept to a lot of Americans, even more the ones who grew up after Reaganomics with the true belief that corporations should be free to do as they please, nowadays it's always veiled under the empty platitude "it will hamper innovation".
Will future pharma companies bother with creating new drugs if they have to get FDA approval? Will engineering companies bother drafting new projects if they have to pass safety inspections?
Every other industry thrives despite regulations. It’ll be no different for future tech companies.
If you have ever worked in pharma you know that literally thousands of promising drugs have been left on the table because the regulatory costs/burdens to see the ideas through are simply too high. It is maybe one of the greatest travesties in the sphere of human health.
At this point, only the easiest and most obvious wins are worth pushing through the regulatory gauntlet. Innovation has been strangled. It's not even worth trying something unless you are 110% certain the costs will be recouped and it's worth spending billions to get it approved.
It's a large market, and more profitable than APAC and RoW per user (just look at the Meta investor presentations which show that it's US, followed by the EU then APAC and RoW[1]).
Telling that you think this is happening just because their products are available in the EU and not because they were "acting in a way that gave it a significant advantage over competitors" as the EU claims.
They have done a ton of advancement in AI. They also have to have the infrastructure to handle so many users. I feel like they fall squarely in the tech company world.
Does running a website automatically mean you are a "tech" company?
Or does it become "tech" company just because you need to buy a whole lot of servers to store all the hoarded user data that later is sold out to advertisers?
What's the exact number of servers where running a website becomes a "tech company"?
You know what. I just ran this query in gemini and it spit out “I'm not able to help with that, as I'm only a language model.” but just before that I got a glimpse of a real answer:
NFL Starting Quarterbacks for the 2024 Season
Note: Quarterback situations can change throughout the season due to injuries, trades, or poor performance.
AFC
• Baltimore Ravens: Lamar Jackson
Buffalo Bills: Josh Allen
But then it gets wiped and you cannot see it even in the drafts. The text above is from the screenshot I managed to make before the response vanished.
This non-deterministic unpredictable behavior blended with poor “safety” policies is one of those major “dealbreakers” that pushes me back from trusting any existing LLMs.
Not stranger than my experience with openai. I got banned from DELL-3 access when it first came because I asked in the prompt about generating a particle moving in magnetic field of a forward direction and decays to two other particles with a kink angle between the particle and the charged daughter.
I don't recall exact prompt but it should be something close to that. I really wonder what filters they had about kink tracks and why? Do they have a problem with Beyond standard model searches /s.
For what it's worth I run every query I make through all the major models and Google's censorship is the only one I consistently hit.
I think I bumped into Anthropics once? And I know I hit ChatGPTs a few months back but I don't even remember what the issue was.
I hit Google's safety blocks at least a few times a week during the course of my regular work. It's actually crazy to me that they allowed someone to ship these restrictions.
They must either think they will win the market no matter the product quality or just not care about winning it.
Microsoft's OpenAI models seems even worse. They run their own "safety" filter.
Using their models in a medical setting is impossible. It refuses to describe scientific photos and will not summarize HCP discussions (texts) that it misinterprets.
I'm reminded of this short story about a government bureaucracy banning research in certain areas to prevent dangerous technology being discovered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
Will try to update this post if I come across a good book.
This RAND Blog Post covers activities that happened during RAND's first seventy-five years of history, which is still nice, as well as browsing through some of the publicly available papers and reports:
- There's a RAND paper that I recall reading while I was there on designing an office campus for intentional serendipity as part of cultivating a research organization. I hope I can find a copy online so I can link it to this article, as many of the ideas were incorporated into the design of RAND's future/replacement campus in Santa Monica, CA.
- The ideas on office/campus design were quite good and even included the subject of floor planning and desk assignments. Despite the inherent draw of organizations to divide office space by departments and functions, the RAND ideas were to deliberate interleave the locations of personnel such that people would have increased chances of collaborating with others that they would not naturally be drawn to directly in executing their work. This extended further to how walkways and passageways should be designed to connect floors, buildings etc... ensuring that people would pass by and see other people/functions/departments that they would not normally see or consider in their day-to-day work. I recall trying to cite some of these ideas when I worked in other research organizations (e.g. Google Research) where one of the principal complaints was siloing/lack of collaboration, yet teams were allowed to physically silo themselves in seating plans (by their own request/demands).
- I never got to see the original campus, as it was demolished and later turned into a public park. However, the drawings and photographs of the original campus reminded me of something that resembled an American high school or small university campus.
- There are many small details about working at RAND that were part of deliberate efforts to influence an individual's experiences and decisions to improve their creative/work potential. For example, the equivalent of Vacation/PTO time at RAND is called "sabbatical time." RAND employees were paid more, on an hourly equivalent rate, when taking their "sabbatical time" than for regular work time; this idea was not implemented to reduce financial liability of unspent PTO time for the company under modern standards, but because it was believed and understood --through research-- that employees were more likely to bring their best selves to work when having sufficient and periodic time away from their work -- often bringing back new ideas that wouldn't have emerged simply by grinding away at a problem... So they hoped to incentivize employees to take that time away from a problem by paying them more during their time off.
If we are sharing favorite RAND books, this introduction to game theory from 1954 is lovely (I read it twice): https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB113-1.html I admit I skipped over much of the maths, since a lot of it is about clever tricks to manually do operations on matrices (might be fun to read about, but probably not very useful these days?).
And also this book from 1947 with ONE MILLION random digits: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html The foreword from 2001 goes into a lot of detail how and why the numbers were made (which is, I guess, more interesting than to download the book itself?).
These tables were reproduced by photo-offset from pages printed by the IBM model 856 Cardatype. Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors of the Cardatype.
> the RAND ideas were to deliberate interleave the locations of personnel such that people would have increased chances of collaborating with others that they would not naturally be drawn to directly in executing their work. This extended further to how walkways and passageways should be designed to connect floors, buildings etc... ensuring that people would pass by and see other people/functions/departments that they would not normally see or consider in their day-to-day work.
This type of cross-specialty pollination is feature of Hacker News design and moderation.
"tiqqun" contains the unfiltered ideas from the academics actually toiling on the ungrateful rand idea mines. hq was mostly for suits and wizsalespeople (nowadays confused with actual wiz)
Huh. I just checked. Swiss-based company Arxada supplies the (battery grade) prussian blue that Natron uses. Though I didn't quickly determine where it's actually made. Probably UK.
The Overton window has changed. Imagine Google saying this during peak BLM.
"But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted."
There is hope here that Google will not fade into irrelevance.
Has it, and which Overton window are you thinking? The public tolerance for (disruptive) protest, corporate tolerance for political activism in the workplace, or.. ?
If I had to venture a guess, I would say the window has shifted towards political burnout. People may be more comfortable shutting down disruptions like these because they are burned out, and feel the disruption/protests/activism has gone too far.
