Unfortunately it turns the iPhone into a lever that is always trying to launch itself from your hand. The iPhone part is much heavier than the keyboard part. And the ergonomics of the camera control become impossible (unless you have enormous salad fingers or something).
These are all commodity use-cases though. Google, Meta, and Anthropic already all have competing products of equivalent quality and customer pricing is being driven down aggressively.
> This is the same as Searles Chinese room. The intelligence isn’t in the clerk but the book. However the thinking is in the paper.
This feels like a misrepresentation of the "Chinese Room" thought experiment. That the "thinking" isn't the clerk nor the book; it's the entire room itself.
> Most of my criticism of Ben’s perspective is against the idea that some kind of emergent morality that we would recognize
I think Anthropic has already provided some evidence that intelligence is tied to morality (and vice versa) [1]. When they tried to steer LLM models morals they saw intelligence degradation also.
It's also the weakening of the dollar. If the dollar is 10% weaker, an international gold seller now needs 10% more dollars to be willing to give you their gold -- which means the "value" in dollar terms is 10% higher.
> And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country.
How does it kill the ability to custom order? My understanding of removing de minimus is only that the tariffs now apply to all orders. And because most tariffs now have been set ~30%, an order that was previously $100 is now $130. It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.
No, now you also need to go through formal customs entry and pay the other related fees. I think the minimum flat duty fee is $80-200 depending on country, so that'd be a $50 shirt becoming a $130 shirt.
Or they can switch courier, but that comes with the ad valorem tax and then that couriers brokerage fees - at least $30 dollars (though they'll probably raise it now that they don't have to compete). So a $50 shirt is now $85.
On top of that is the extra paperwork the seller now has to go through. And who knows if the tariff will change on the way, so maybe throw on a surcharge for Americans or just refuse the orders entirely.
> It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.
These aren't rich people. They're paying a little extra already to avoid the poor tax of cheap, unethical crap they have to replace more often. Even just 30% is a huge markup because now instead of being double the price, it's almost triple the price of the worse stuff where those fees are amortized.
It's hard for me to believe I'm hearing, on HN of all places, "it's just 30% more expensive".
It think these "positive news" approaches are always falling prey to stated vs. revealed preference. People's revealed preference is that they want news about _actual_ events, which is why these positive news approaches always stay niche.
People stated reason for not liking news is the stress, attributing this to the negativity of the news. I think a larger issue is the frequency and transience of the updates, leading to oscillations in peoples understand of situations (similar to the car dealership example in the "Thinking in Systems" book).
Modern news networks are always pushing shallow views of new events (i.e. "BREAKING"). Unless someone explicitly follows up on a story, they were only exposed to the crisis and not the resolution of it. I'd love a network that was "yesterdays news" which waited to publish any news until a broader picture of the situation was understood.
You should read Postman's Technopoly. He critiques "context-free" news as leading to a confused viewership and argues that it's an unexpected consequence of modern news media: trying to give the viewer a fully-coherent understanding of current news simply wouldn't play as well as shallow, quick stories.
This creates a skewed information-action ratio, where people are inundated with information about problems they have no power to influence. Consequently, news is reduced to a form of trivia, and the act of being "informed" becomes a passive— and ultimately meaningless— ritual.
This! I also wish the news would be charged to follow up on their lead stories. It's interesting to read that the US wants to sell TikTok but as soon as it leaves the headlines you have to actively search for any updates - and you're lucky if there are any.
This kind of reporting (breaking, tickers) generates more stress than any understanding and never enables you to form a more complete picture.
Subscribe to a periodical. I got a bit too busy recently but for two years I subscribed to Private Eye (if you're not from the UK you might need to find an alternative) it's fortnightly and they don't put much on their website. They follow up on stories sometimes going back to the 80s or more.
> If the number is only 17%, I'm not sure we need to ban them.
Job hunting is a market and the government should tryu to make every market as efficient as possible. Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.
You are free to build a job marketplace that profiles employer posting behavior and shares relevant info with applicants. Like it or not, employers will be forced to cooperate with you to get access to the talent pool you attract.
> Like it or not, employers will be forced to cooperate with you to get access to the talent pool you attract.
Except for the problem of "talent will be forced to seek out employers, no matter how shitty or stupid the latter behaves, because they'll starve and die within a matter of weeks or months while understaffed companies can survive for years."
Doubly so in tech where the combination of A) A huge hiring spree during covid & following layoffs has created a glut in applicants, B) Economic malaise is slowing the economy, and C) Companies are being irrationally hestitant to hire because of AI.
Ghost Jobs are fraudulent on several levels, they should be legislated out of existance. (The public company favourite of "pretending we're still growing when we're not" is very clear securities fraud.)
This is a superb take. I've admittedly always thought of interviews as a process in desperate need of improvement. Thinking of it as a market is a helpful perspective shift on some long-standing ideas.
> Imagine if you went to any other store and 17% of the items you bought were just junk and didn't work.
I dunno, that sounds like real life? The percentage of purchases that I return or ultimately don't use is probably around there, for non-repeat purchases.
A kitchen gadget that doesn't really work, a T-shirt I order that turns out to have a weird fit or weird material, a Bluetooth whatever that randomly disconnects after 5 minutes...
If 80% of my new purchases turn out to work as expected and do their job, I consider myself to be doing pretty well.
The robotaxi evaluation only made sense when they claimed to be years ahead of competitors. A robotaxi service operating in a regular taxi market could have large margins. But Waymo is already operating, any Tesla robotaxi company is going to compete away all the margin with Waymo.
As I understand it, Waymo is restricted to areas that it has mapped extremely well, i.e. major cities.
Which also happens to be where most of the money would be, so it's probably a good bet. Tesla seems to be hoping to displace Uber in the suburbs, while being an also-ran against Waymo in the denser downtowns. That includes ferrying a fair number of people into and out of cities, where Waymo can't (currently) go.
That's probably not as lucrative as Waymo's core market, but it could have some decent margins.
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