rmason

For those without a WSJ subscription: https://archive.is/8T5UF

I am certain they sell a lot of servers to China. I agree with you that there are citizens who want reunification with China. Despite China funding and promoting unification lavishly the numbers are falling. Last poll I could find from 2024 is that it is only 6.7%.

You are correct what they did is a violation of American law. I could not find evidence but my gut tells me he also violated Taiwanese law. Taiwan does not want to lose access to Nvidia chips as an untrusted partner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_unification#:~:text=Th...

I worked for a hosting company and the boss was a super fan of Supermicro. He was 100% with them. He liked deals and they'd call us weekly if they were long on something.

If this is true I am truly shocked. Supermicro was founded in Taiwan. I have been on livestreams with a friend who moved there and had Chinese Air Force planes flying over the bay outside his window. He said they will test defenses a couple of times a year. To live with that and still decide to betray your country as well as giving China a step up in the AI race.

One or both of the Knoll brothers came back to Ann Arbor several times and taught an introduction to Photoshop class. I wanted to attend but it sold out within hours and sitting up in East Lansing by the time I found out it was always too late and they only taught the class once every five years or so.

I thought this was very well done. It is a little awkward when you have the sound muted and are watching the subtitles only to have them switch to French and have to unmute the sound as the speaker is talking in English but after awhile you get used to it.

I have actually visited some of these companies operations in Hawaii in my previous career as an agronomist. A lot of them are located on Molokai which is off the coast of Maui and is quite rural. Dekalb has an operation on Maui itself.

Lack a NYT subscription: https://archive.is/HFAm1

Got a friend in Detroit who has a startup that takes the audio from a city council or school board meeting, uses AI to summarize it and then has a talking head read it newscast style.

Love seeing a totally different approach here with Ten Miles Square where the guy takes data from city government in Washington D.C. and builds news stories around it.

It's rather cool that this guy was able to do it himself. But it cost him more than if he got an outside lab to do it for him. Maybe it's worth the premium not to have his DNA in a federal law enforcement database. Pretty soon I'd be willing to bet you'd need to run your llm locally if that was your primary concern.

This is worth the read whether you have a subscription or not: https://archive.is/wXRzR

Turns out the people who jump the turnstiles of subways are way more likely to commit violence or vandalism than paying riders. For years the Left said fare enforcement efforts were a waste of money, turns out they were wrong.

This is the second attempt Detroit is making to capture the drone manufacturing business. Three mayors ago around 2006 the city made a major push to attract drone manufacturers. At the old City Airport there had been a school for training airplane mechanics. The city at the time was hemorrhaging money and kept cutting the budget for the school until it collapsed.

So they took those same buildings and offered cheap rent to drone companies. They attracted a half dozen drone startups. There were no longer any commercial flights at the airport, just the occasional private jet so there was plenty of room for drone test flights. I attended a meeting there and was pleasantly surprised both at the tech and the enthusiasm. Unfortunately the Chinese also had their eye on the drone market and crushed American manufacturers.

Now the city has re-launched the airplane mechanics school in the old airport buildings. The focus for drone manufacturing is now downtown and they're aiming at defense and commercial delivery markets. Detroit has to advantages: low cost and its the manufacturing capital of the United States with lots of resources to offer a startup.

For those lacking a NY Times subscription: https://archive.is/slfZ1

Here is Sam Altman's full comments on his blog:

https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512

For those lacking a Financial Times subscription:

https://archive.is/gGrBP#selection-1587.0-1587.61

I've got an older Kindle and this annoys me greatly. I don't use it a lot, maybe read one or two books a year on it. It works fine and the fact Amazon expects me to retire my perfectly good working device and hand them money for a new one is ridiculous. They are likely to lose me as a buyer of books on Kindle I will make the effort to buy more books elsewhere.

Does anyone know of a Kindle equivalent? Or has Amazon locked down the format to prevent that?

I posted on here yesterday they are offering entrepreneurs $15,000 to start a company there. While that might not be like getting into yCombinator or Techstars its what they can afford to offer. It is a pretty low cost place to build however with a strong entrepreneur culture and some excellent coworking centers such as Bamboo.

This solution makes more sense to me than what has been proposed: blowing a canal through a mountain in the UAE.

There was a mass shooting event at MSU back in 2023 and campus administrators made a lot of changes as a result so they are still very sensitive to the issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Michigan_State_University...

Had he required a signup process with student ID that might have muted the concern somewhat. But I totally understand his excitement at creating something and wanting to share it with his friends. It got way too popular which is a testament to the fact he had built something better than what existed. In the end I hope that university officials are understanding.

Detroit doesn't have a Barbary Street. Unless that is a reference to staying away from the rougher parts of the city. Course that is true in any city. In general if you ask the locals will point out to you the places to avoid.

I have both graduated and worked for Michigan State. I truly feel sorry for this poor developer. He was trying to scratch that itch and make things better. If I was that department I'd hire him not try to get him thrown out of school. When I worked there we had some truly amazing student interns who went on to jobs in Silicon Valley.

If I had a way of reaching this kid (or he reads HN) I will buy him lunch and try to convince him he's really a born entrepreneur but he just doesn't know it yet.

You might not be able to live in Detroit quite as cheaply while building your startup at say Thailand but you can go a pretty long time on $15K. Plus there is a very strong entrepreneur community and great coworking centers like Bamboo.

Wonder if there is anyone on Apple's payroll besides Woz who remember when Paul McCartney was a member of the Beatles?

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has failed for 15 years to produce a complete federal program inventory.

So a rather newish employee, April Haring, figured out how difficult can it be? She fired up ChatGPT and let it compile it for her. Now if they don't fire her for doing this on her own it's yet another reason why AI is going to change things forever everywhere even including the federal government.

If they ever name an award in the federal government after the trailblazing Carl Malamud this lady should receive it.

They covered most of the parking lots with solar cells a few years back at nearby Michigan State. The economics weren't there, but as a friend who worked there pointed out they viewed it as research.

It's great that when it snows you don't get nearly as much of the white stuff on your vehicle. But when it snows energy production slows to a crawl. We have a lot of snowy days a third of the year.

I was a senior at Michigan State when Coach Litwiller invented the radar gun for measuring pitch speed. Used to attend games primarily to watch our star wide receiver, Kirk Gibson, try another sport.

He was so proud of the radar gun that they would display the radar speed on the scoreboard, the first and only time that I have ever seen that in baseball. When they built the new McLane baseball stadium I was happy to see they kept the pitch speed on the new scoreboard.

I ran GEM on some of my early computers. Also bought both Windows 1 and Windows 2 to try. GEM was clearly superior from a user stand point. Windows 3 shipped and they just disappeared.

I was really interested in how they would respond to the challenge. IBM was working publicly with Microsoft on OS/2 so they had to know the market was going to change. The only real surprise was when Microsoft went all in on marketing Windows 3 and the rise of Office.

Borland tried to compete against Office and got killed. Perhaps with a competent GUI operating system it might have been different.

For those without a subscription: https://archive.is/VdzLq#selection-309.0-309.41

I do not know about other states but there's a strange thing about Michigan journalism. When I grew up and decided to become a newspaperman they did investigations and held people, regardless of party affiliation, to a higher standard. That has totally changed.

Most of our press whether its newspapers or radio/TV are owned by large conglomerates. They are interested primarily in selling ads. We believed there was a wall between editorial and advertising but it has been torn down. Politicians have discovered that if a journalist challenges the narrative all you have to do is ban them, call their editor and threaten to pull your advertising.

So as a result the only useful journalism being done is by independent media. I have never met this lady but I respected the online publication she started highly. Looking forward to whatever she starts next.

We do not have a lot of people in Michigan who have BHAG (big hairy audacious goals) and that is why this stands out to me. If they could raise $50 million there's a good chance they can succeed. If they do, it this idea could be a template used by other communities.

Link: https://archive.is/ZRt12

I grew up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties. Although I no longer live there it still feels like home and I return home.

From the beginning of the crack epidemic in the mid-eighties through the city's bankruptcy in 2012 Detroiters refer to those as the lost years. Everything slowly started falling apart and then it sped up. This story is about the human toll that happened. Things are a world better but the city is still slowly, determinedly coming back.