In Big Tech We Trust.

All Chinese companies are subsidiaries of Chinese communists party. There is no single exception. TikTok and Huawei have been exploiting all of its information and power to influence in the favor of China Communist Party and it's against not just us, but all the free states and people in proper nations.

Isn’t pine64 a Chinese company? I haven’t seen them do anything pro ccp.

I think it depends on the size of the company. Some maintain a further distance from the party successfully, some even manage to criticise it, but I don't think you get to ByteDance levels of growth without close connection to the party. Consider that ByteDance has its own CCP Party Secretary.

Of course, this doesn't mean you're exploiting US data at the whim of the party, which is what Trump's actions imply the company is doing. I think you can successfully maintain a separate US structure from their Chinese one, and I don't think China really cares much for what US people do in their own country.

Great article. But almost all of B2C software products are self-serving.

The significance between top-down vs. bottom-up has been compiled and showcased by Matt Ridley, in his book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge." It says most of human beings are incapable of comprehending evolutionary design like free market. It's true. OP labeled markets as an example of top-down phenomenon.

Absolutely true. I started migrating to Linux when I had to bring an external keyboard all the time. The keyboard sucks, extremely. I loved reading on iBooks, but I even coded its alternative with the identical theme in Emacs. I hate "that" keyboard so much. It's extremely embarrassing.

What if unemployment is not the problem but the solution?

Whenever I face the arguments of determinism vs. indeterminism, I wonder how indeterminism would be defined in a purely indeterministic world. I don't know. But in this seemingly deterministic universe, we define indeterminism as a negative sense to the deterministic dynamics we observe, but we can't do it in a positive sense. All of our conceptions of "indeterminism" and random/chaos like concepts is all "determinism-biased" in that sense. Maybe, determinism might be a tiny, tiny small subset of a huge set of indeterminism, as if integers are a tiny subset of all real numbers. There's no such a thing as integers vs. real numbers. Integers are also just real numbers. In that sense, determinism might be a small part of indeterminism.

> In that sense, determinism might be a small part of indeterminism.

I agree. The astonishing thing about quantum mechanics to me is that it describes how deterministic laws emerge from completely non-deterministic processes.

For example, in quantum electrodynamics, a photon going from A to B, chooses a random path with a well defined probability density assigned to each possible path. When you do the math, it turns out that the shortest path between A and B is the most likely one and that's why the classical "deterministic" law that light goes in straight lines is a good approximation for large distances. Yet the path which the photon chooses to take is completely random, chosen by the photon's free will, if you will.

But we would still have the concept of determinism in the macro world even if physics turns out not to be deterministic in the small.

I love Haskell and OCaml, and other functional languages. However, no matter how intelligent and higher-level functional language becomes, I don't think they can replace procedural language, especially for time-based programmings, such as user interface effects, animations, or network-dependent operations. Some features are inherently procedural by their nature, and functional language are not functional for describing them.

Class hierarchies are just mental tools, not how machines/programs/automatas actually work. If the mental tools implode due to exceptions and complexities, that's the problem of their uses, not tools by themselves. Before blaming hierarchies, you should blame yourself for using tools in wrong ways.

The little tiny games topping the free chart may not earn as much as they seem, unless they are played again and again for a long time. They should depend on clicks of mobile ads and mobile games have poor CPI ratios. Yeah. Flappy Bird has been downloaded more than a few million times and is known to garner $50,000 a day. Nice. But that would be a grand outlier and I don't think the game sustains that amount of revenue now.