>It’s not about credential hustling, it’s about having more tools in the toolbox.
Yes. However, there's a strain of anti-intellectualism in the US that denigrates knowledge and learning, as Isaac Asimov observed:
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'"[0]
This is discussed in greater detail in Tom Nichols 2017 book The Death of Expertise[1].
This is exacerbated of course, by the Dunning-Kruger effect[2]. I mean, heck, why should I go to a cardiologist for my heart condition? I'm a plumber and watched youtube videos about the cardiovascular system. Which is exactly the same as indoor plumbing, so I'm doing my triple bypass surgery myself. Fuck you, medical establishment. With your "school" and "residency" and other gatekeeping. It's all a scam! Anyone (and especially me!) can do all of this stuff without some "doctor"![3]
The academic fraud in US is at its peak. Harvard President was caught red handed plagiarizing. Many scientific papers are not reproducible and more than 50% in some cases.
Most academics are sophist. Most universities practice scientism instead of science.
Erudition has been replaced with test taking and sophistry.
A hostile regime 90 miles from US mainland will be treated differently. Cuba is not some vanilla leftist regime that has no love for America. Cuban intelligence and elite for the past 50 years have been active subverting US interests. A unilateral withdrawal of sanctions would mean rewarding bad behavior. Do not let the small size of Cuba underestimate them, they are behind all major anti-American activity in Latin America. They were are major force supporting Maduro in Venezuela.
Why does not the Communist regime in Cuba "open up"? Because they know the day Cuba becomes a multiparty state with elections -- they have to run out of the country. Both Cuban and Venezuelan elite along with many Caribbean states are active in Drug Dealings and Money Laundering.
Yes, the hawks in US have a role but they are not only active players, there are hawks in Cuba too.
This is classic demonstration of the fact, you do not have to get most of the things right, but extract maximum value when you are right.
We have the excellent advantage of hindsight but definitely in 2007 the general agreement was Microsoft was losing to Google and Apple, which were the darlings of the stock market while Microsoft remained stagnant.
> definitely in 2007 the general agreement was Microsoft was losing to Google and Apple
In 2007, [1]
MS had market cap 274B (#4), revenue rank 49.
Apple had market cap 80B(#33), revenue rank 121.
Google had market cap 143B (#17), revenue rank 241.
MS had, and still has, many billion dollar sub-businesses. Google and Apple have never had as many highly profitable lines as MS does (and did).
I think only pop media sold the story that Microsoft was "losing," and maybe only that in areas MS didn't historically compete in or make much money in. Google had almost all revenue from ads (and still do, a very one trick pony), and Apple had a few lines (iPhones, iTunes, not much else), while MS had Client, Server and Tools, Online Services, Business Division, Entertainment and Devices, each with many billions in revenue (and many of them containing yet more billion+ subdivisions). Even Visual Studio had over a billion in revenue annually.
Apple and Google had very little effect on any of these revenue streams in 2007. At best, Microsoft was late to the areas Apple and Google were in, yet took markets anyways in some areas (Azure vs google?).
Instead of slashing the sale price, incentivizing leases seems to be the go to for now in the EV market. You can only kick the can so much -- 2024 December will be a glorious time to buy vehicles.
Leases right now are assuming much higher residuals for EV's than for ICE cars which is where much of the difference is coming from. It's hard to say whether that will turn out to be true or not, but if the manufacturer/dealer is willing to take that risk it might be a good idea to take them up on it.
A lot of lease special deals are during the holiday season, so you have a lot of leases ending around that time. (We leased our Tesla last December just before the $7500 tax credit expired.)
With the gas savings we're paying about $200/month for our Tesla 3. Our only regret was not leasing the Polestar 2 instead.
The power of Intolerant minority is covered by N.N.Taleb.. the easy examples are Kosher and Halal foods becoming mainstream even though the size of minority itself is small.
Fat Web Client are generally bad idea and most sites are better off being Thin Web Clients with Servers doing heavy lifting and lite frameworks like htmx fill in the gaps.
The more appropriate analogy is, you do not need a sky-crane to build a single family home.
I've personally worked on "simple" sites that actually had to do a ton of state management for user analytics and lead tracking purposes. (Whether or not all that tracking was necessary is out-of-scope for this comment...) It was pretty painful in a thin client; we were using PHP and jquery when I started. Even though the sites barely had any user-directed interactivity, I was really glad to migrate to React. Essentially I was able to shift my mental model of the site from content wrapper to software, and focus on how it could accomplish tasks, with content wrapping becoming fairly automated.
In our case that was useful because it aligned with our business goals, although I didn't particularly care for it. I wonder how many bloated, React-cargo-culting sites are actually not using that bloat, vs using it for user-invisible and/or user-hostile purposes. Are devs out there building personal blogs as React SPAs still?
AI is useful especially when there is a tight feedback loop. Validating what the AI suggests via a 'System' or a Competent Mahoot riding it. I find it incredibly useful when I am specific and can test out.
I installed the new Ubuntu LTS and was trying to install a cargo package and was running into issue. Google/Bing search took me on a tangent. I put in the error in ChatGPT 3.5, got exact apt install to solve the issue and it worked when tried.
A million of these a day is going to have one heck of an effect on the planet.
I am not saying AI fixes the search but the Search Results are hit and miss any way. The real low hanging fruit are the domains, where the existing system is hit and miss.
The AI long case is, that People are also glorified LLMs/Pattern-matching machines. People who can make Computers sing will make AI sing (most likely). For most domains, AI elevates their 'base line' from the existing floor.
note to self: take HN righteous indignations less seriously.