Balder

It’s funny that the exact same thing happened in Brazil during Bolsonaro. When the pandemic peaked, the Federal government simply sit down while the States themselves (literally all States) joined and negotiated the vaccines for Brazil bypassing the Federal role.

Apple’s market share in the U.S. fell from 56% to 49%, while Samsung’s share surged from 23% to 31%

As much as they come up with reasons of why this happened, the reasons given don’t make sense to me. It’s not like there’s anything new to Samsung having a wide range of devices (from cheap to expensive) and iPhones changing little from one version to the next.

I’d guess the reason is something else, like an unusual deal or promo going on etc.

For example, the main reason iPhones got a huge market share in Japan is because in the old times they used to be cheap because of a deal between Apple and a carrier there (SoftBank).

Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.

The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.

Exactly, the one big issue with the modern world is the algorithms pushing for engagement as the only important metric.

This is spot on. The issue with any system is that people don’t pay attention to the incentives.

When a surgeon earns more if he does more surgeries with no downside, most surgeons in that system will obviously push for surgeries that aren’t necessary. How to balance incentives should be the main focus on any system that we’re part of.

You can pretty much understand someone else’s behavior by looking at what they’re gaining or what problem they’re avoiding by doing what they’re doing.

It reminded me of an older writing about it:

Open source doesn’t make money because it isn’t designed to make money

You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).

More processing might result in more water use, but storage? It makes no actual sense. Having more stuff sitting in your storage isn’t making your computer hotter.

In fact, I guess creating a guideline for servers to use more efficient processors would do much more for that.

Unfortunately game theory says we’re gonna do it whenever it’s technologically possible.

Think about the number of articles they can write considering the infinity of random shit an LLM can output.

If you think about it, the majority of the world population never knew anything different than dystopia.

In a sense, the article is tailored to a certain public that has a reasonably good life now and is naturally afraid to lose it.

But the truth is the world is (and always has been) very shitty for the majority of people on the planet when you consider the distribution of wealth.

I think it’s important to think about who are the winners and losers in this whole thing. Are these execs so altruist that they’re worried about the average person or is this doom prediction something that serves their agenda?