rchaud

The efficient market hypothesis has taken a real beating in the age of tech industry anti-gravity valuations.

This is a country where people are fine with more of their taxes going into police budgets every year.

Adding a line item to their property tax bill showing how much is paid into settling lawsuits will not make people think that they should demand more accountability. They will think that it should be harder to take legal action against the police.

Newsletters have a webview fallback with a public URL that makes them just as susceptible to scraping. If that ever gets fixed, Google will just scrape the full-text content in Gmail instead.

Newsletters have been around forever and never taken off like the open web and free blogging have. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ads shown on Google itself are far more valuable than display ads that get shown on random websites. Google has been slashing payouts to those sites for over a decade. More recentlt, they've been slashing search impressions to those sites as well. With search engine ads + Youtube ads + Play Store ads, they can probably cut out the third - party site ads business altogether and not miss a beat.

And as time goes on, it becomes more and more like Ebay with a liberal returns policy.

Democracies aren't automatically immune to voting in illiberal leaders. Russia and the west have both been heavy handed in their efforts to swing Ukrainian elections in their favour.

Not trying to defend Russia in the least, but isn't their fear more about Ukrainian accession into NATO rather than the possibility of joining the EU?

EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.

I ran into this issue last week but it's gone back to letting me access the site normally on a mobile browser. This may have been an A/B test measuring app conversions pre and post mobile browser blocking.

The EU is probably footing the bill for most of it. Part of the funding Malta receives goes towards "digital projects" along with green tech and SME support.

> everyone, especially fresh grads, should be thinking actively about,

Everybody is already thinking about AI. Hearing another 'business leader' yapping about it at commencement is the equivalent of working at the guitar store and hearing somebody play Stairway to Heaven for the 10,000th time that week.

Dating apps were fine before the Silicon Valley DAU-maxxing, microtransaction-to-IPO pipeline obssessed twerps entered the picture.

Before swipes, before "buy Premium to un-hide these people who like you" paywalls, dating apps let you message people directly in exchange for showing some Google ads that were unobtrusive.

No surprise at all that an out-of-touch, billionnaire CEO thinks that the missing ingredient is AI.

Same way it always has for empires throughout history - expropriating land and resources from the weak and giving it to the strong. And of course, borrowing money to finance more looting and pillaging.

> but at the same time they aggressively fight against any kind of tax policy that would allow UBI to function.

Because that isn't the UBI they're thinking of.

Altman runs an eyeball-scanning crypto startup and Musk wants to replicate WeChat to create a panopticon paradise for surveillance capitalism. In their world, UBI looks like something that even Black Mirror writers would reject as too unrealistic:

a) Free housing, but it's right next to a datacenter with its 24-hour noise. If you develop health problems from drinking the water or living near power lines, you get mandatory arbitration before an AI judge, with your legal representation provided by Grok.

b) Free money, but it's all in Worldcoin, and can only be spent at company-owned stores built around the datacenter. X.com charges a 30% fee if you try to convert it to USD.

That's the economic model of Saudi Arabia. Just because the world wants to pay for oil and apparently ad inventory today doesn't mean that it'll do so forever.

Isn't that what the Framework laptop does?

It'll probably require access to your contacts, call history, messages, geolocation and browsing information at all times. Maybe even a Microsoft Recall-style data suck where it takes periodic screenshots of your activity and ingests it into its knowledgebase.

Except that Chromebooks are widely reviled as cheap, laggy garbage plus a negative mental association with tedious schoolwork. If anyone buys one, it'll be in spite of the brand association.

Pot calling the kettle black. It'd be like Barney Gumble telling Boris Yeltsin what a great president he could be if he cut out the drinking.

One of the first viral videos in the early years of Youtube. This was at a time when the Internet was just small enough that a single video could organically circulate around the whole world and be universally appreciated for its ridiculous yet endearing nature, by adults and kids alike.

"Google" and "local" is an oxymoron. The same goes for Amazon and Microsoft who all sell cloud compute. They'd all prefer that the computers of the future are all dumb terminals that can't do anything without being logged into their platforms.

What's high in demand is supply infrastructure, i.e. GPUs and RAM, purchased with borrowed money. Actual end-user customer demand is an entirely separate question. Nobody is selling AI services at anywhere near what it costs to supply. Nintendo doesn't run on VC money so it can't subsidize its products the way Anthropic and co. can.

They already do. Apple News is basically a gossip blog plus Taboola ads. Apple TV+ is useless without a subscription.

The US is the only market where Apple's blue bubble iMessage empire exists, so its makes sense that they'd try to make Apple Maps tolerable to use for users there.

Another factor might be that Apple knows that its days are numbered when it comes to charging giant premiums over Windows and Android hardware and getting away with it because of its purportedly superior ease of use.

If you are of the generation that grew up with a smartphone, Windows and Mac are no different vis-a-vis the learning curve. You will need to learn how to use filesystems, learn window management and install desktop applications on both. And let's face it, that generation is using Gmail and Google Docs that are identical across platforms. The difference isn't worth handing Apple a huge chunk of cash to upgrade to 16GB RAM.

The old internet can't come back, no matter how many MySpace[0] and Geocities clones[1] are spun up. The world has changed. Even the author's reference to TikTok lip-syncing videos are at least 5 years out of date - kids aren't doing that anymore.

People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.

If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.

- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/

A few things come to mind:

- SPAC IPOs that dodge standard disclosure requirements and worsen information asymmetry. See WeWork.

- Board positions filled with CEO loyalists instead of independent directors. See OpenAI firing Altman before Microsoft reinstated him.

- Management taking seemingly arbitrary decisions that turn out to be directly linked to their own compensation. SpaceX ordering a bunch of Teslas, or merging with a distressed asset (xAI). See above point on loyalist boards.

- The very concept of leveraged buyouts where financiers borrow money to buy a company, then put the burden on repayment on the company AND pay themselves hefty management fees. This inevitably leads to layoffs and a rapid decline in product/service quality while the company is scrapped for parts.

I think the the author is greatly overstating how big the tablet market is for the product strategy he's hoping for. "Tablet-optimized apps" are a historical artifact of the 2010-2015 period when tablets were a new and exciting category of internet-connected gadget with a plethora of use cases in entertainment and productivity, held back only by 'blown up' versions of mobile apps. Within a few years however, most apps people use (Netflix, Office, Google Docs) were redesigned to scale to the size of the screen, in the same way websites do.

A decade on, the market has spoken. Tablets are overwhelmingly used for Netflix, YouTube and casual mobile games, use cases where specs don't matter and every tablet is more or less "good enough". Maybe a million or so users have an iPad for digital art or as a laptop replacement. Even the cheapest model iPad has pen, mouse and keyboard support. So what would an iPad Neo add?

Actual capitalism is the free and unfettered ability to handpick cabinet members, bribe government to deregulate an industry in your favour, hand out no-bid contracts, offer tax credits and subsidies, and shelter you from foreign competition.

What you've described is a heavily regulated market economy.

DeX is not a fork. It is a UI layer on the phone that activates when you connect to a USB-C display. There is no difference between doing something on your phone and on DeX.

The product is perfectly fine as it is. The way I see it, if it's being advertised, it's being monetized behind the scenes. That changes incentives and usually makes the product experience worse. All it has to be is a window manager that supports standard desktop KB shortcuts (CTRL-C, ALT+Tab, etc.)