Quite a narrow view to interpret what happened there as firing Gebru for publishing on AI safety. Google still conducts and publishes research on AI safety, just without Gebru who helpfully offered to resign if Google didn't name her critics.
What was the large family policy? I know about the one-child policy, but I don't think people needed a policy to have large families, it used to be the norm back then even outside of China.
In short, Mao Zedong thought that having a big population would lead to a stronger state. Keep in mind this is the same guy who declared war on sparrows as being "capitalist birds".
Why does it sound unreasonable? If it's problem that affects you deeply enough, if you sincerely believe that they're a core part of that problem, then I don't see why the person you replied to would be opposed to it.
Trump may be a bad leader but he'd still be just one type of bad leader. I'm not trying to fully relativize Trump either, they're not all equally bad.
I agree with Slavoj Zizek's take on Trump's appeal and why a lot of criticism of him seems to either have no effect or increases his fan appeal: As a general rule, people relate to others by identifying with their weaknesses, not only or not even primarily with their strengths. You aren't susceptible to his appeal because you're of a different class or background which has different sets of strengths/weaknesses which make it hard for you to relate to Trump.
The weaknesses Trump has - his stubborn ignorance, his impulsiveness, his might-makes-right mentality and disdain for rules, his vindictiveness - are deeply shared with his fans. They will forgive his sins because it is their sins too. For example when Trump is attacked for an impulsive comment, they relate to the risk that they could also be cancelled for some comment that is seen as racist or sexist or something. His policy framework is made of the kind of simple ideas you'll find in a pub, I once heard Trump described as "the average guy from Queens" and it made a lot of sense to me. "Nobody knew healthcare was so complicated", "We're going to build a wall".
I belong more to a white collar, professional class. I probably have a blindspot on the weaknesses and sins more endemic to my group, ones that I share with the figures I find appealing. If I had to guess I'd say it's something like an ideological/theoretical zeal, bureaucratic dysfunction, and an exclusionary judginess. When a politician unveils some theoretically elegant project and it largely fails and runs over budget and gets mired in bureaucratic hell, I'm maybe too quick to forgive that as it's a relatable sin.
In short, people like the dumb jerk because they are also dumb jerks? I can't say I disagree, but I don't think that's what cauch's comment was going for.
I think it is. It's one thing to point out dumb jerkiness which often stands out particularly in this administration, but self-reflection is realizing that you have your own blindspots for your equivalent of dumb jerkiness.
I'm not succeeding in that realization. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, and I don't think there are any attributes that could possibly make me admire anyone the way these dumb jerks admire Donard Trump. Maybe I'm just not aware, but I have no idea how I'd correct that.
I'm very much not convinced "that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for." People are not the same. I'm smarter than some people, dumber than others. I'm stronger than some and weaker than others. Surely the same is true here. Understand that I am also susceptible to mistakes/understandings? I'm 100% on board with that. But equally susceptible to the same ones? I really don't think so.
It is a problem that so many people thinks that a presidential election is to vote for the guy they relate to and not a competent manager. I guess they are so used to vote for the prom king and the reality tv show candidate that they don't realise that the point is not to vote for the person they like.
Similarly, it is worrisome that people vote for what will profit the most for them instead of what is the more just and fair (sometimes even voting against your own profit). It leads to stupid situations, for example where idiots are for protectionist measures whatever the consequences on other countries, but at the same time are angry when people in another country are voting for protectionist measures that affect theirs negatively. It is quite clear with the Trump supporter: they are furious if someone else treats them like they treat others, and seems to not even realise the absurdity.
It is really hard to live in a society with people like that: it just creates lose-lose situations for everyone.
I don't think most people consciously or explicitly aim to only vote for the guy they relate to. The people they relate to will just naturally be more understandable to them and better match their expectations of what a competent manager looks like.
Realistically, no democracy can really depend on widespread familiarity with the hard skills of civic & political management. It just gets really technical and complicated, voters naturally have to reason about what little they understand, and you understand what you relate to.
I'm not trying to make the point that voting for the reality TV show candidate is good, my point is that the problems with reality TV show candidates are in their blindspot but there are other bad leaders that will fit in your own blindspot.
edit: sorry I just realized that you already made this point in one of your earlier comments! And yes, I personally agree with much of what you say.
Debian doesn't "work" like Android works. Almost no end-user runs Debian on any of their devices because no one wants Debian over anything else. If you want to achieve Debian's stunning success of having almost no consumer adoption, you should follow its model of community development.
You're right, if Google steps away from Android completely then there would be incentive for others to do it, another megacorp will step in. Maybe Facebook or Microsoft or Samsung.
Millions of people run Debian, even though it has zero marketing budget and is competing primarily with Microsoft Windows (infamous for anti-competitive practices) and macOS (a largely competent operating system with the backing of another multi-trillion dollar megacorp that itself increasingly uses anti-competitive practices).
Meanwhile there are hardly any devices that come with it, because Macs come with macOS and Microsoft exerts pressure on PC OEMs, so all of the people running it are people who explicitly did want Debian over anything else, as opposed to many millions of Windows users who have no real preference or an active dislike of their operating system but got it by default with the hardware and may not even realize that anything else is available.
If Google stopped developing Android, it would still be one of the two major incumbent platforms and people would continue to use it. It might even get better because third party apps would have to stop depending on proprietary Google APIs/services and then the community could strip out the Google spying code without worrying about losing access to those APIs. So then the question isn't how to get a critical mass of users -- that's already there -- you just need basic maintenance of a stable code base, which is a thing the community can demonstrably do.
Yeah millions of people out of billions, I was talking in relative terms. Good to know that Debian could have a fighting chance in a world where everyone had zero marketing budget and there weren't any rich corporate backers that used anti-competitive practices.
Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.
But I didn't have to explain this to you, you already know this. You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people. You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users. You know this because you know friends or family or colleagues who are aware of Debian and still don't choose it because they rely on some proprietary service or API that Debian's community developers have never given a rat's ass about.
> Yeah millions of people out of billions, I was talking in relative terms.
In relative terms, Linux market share is increasing and Windows market share is declining.
> Good to know that Debian could have a fighting chance in a world where everyone had zero marketing budget and there weren't any rich corporate backers that used anti-competitive practices.
We could enforce the antitrust laws, yes.
> Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.
None of that requires anything proprietary in the operating system.
Centralized notifications are implemented as a lock-in mechanism. Idle TCP connections don't consume battery unless they need keepalives, and in the latter case you provide applications with a non-proprietary API to have the OS handle keepalives by sending them together for any open connections that need them. Then the radio only has to wake up the same number of times it does with a single connection and there is no real advantage to centralization.
App stores are likewise only glued to operating systems for anti-competitive reasons. Spending 30 seconds once to install one that didn't come with the OS is such a low barrier that it can't be the thing preventing anyone from choosing an OS, and apps can be listed in more than one store, so there is no reason to expect any one store to dominate the market in the absence of anti-competitive practices.
The way tap to pay ought to work is you tap to get a payment request from the merchant which is then passed to your bank app using a standard protocol to make the payment, and then money is transferred from your bank to the merchant's bank with no intermediaries leeching a percentage. In the absence of sane regulations allowing this, you could also use any existing payment processors, but this is still something that an app does and not something that the OS does and the app doesn't have to be from the same entity as the OS.
> You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people.
Once again, Debian isn't what came with their computer. "Most people keep the defaults" works the other way when the default is Android.
> You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users.
The proprietary APIs don't provide anything good, they exist for the purpose of lock-in, because then third party developers use them without realizing or caring that it creates a dependency on proprietary code or services, since the existing installed base of phones that don't provide them is negligible.
Linux often does provide implementations of these things (e.g. wine), and certainly provides its own non-proprietary alternatives to them, but because the purpose of those things is lock-in the incumbent takes measures to prevent interoperability.
If there was no one providing proprietary APIs to begin with, or the antitrust laws were being enforced as they ought to be, that wouldn't be an issue. As it is, Linux market share keeps going up, but slowly, because the incumbents fight tooth and nail to keep the users in their cages.
> This change makes zero difference to how the app functions.
That's not true, different api levels have different restrictions and defaults even if you don't change any of your app code, that's why they force you to target a new api level.
For example, one Android 15 change is "Apps that target Android 15 must be the top app or running an audio-related foreground service in order to request audio focus.", or another one "For apps targeting Android 15, the `elegantTextHeight` `TextView` attribute becomes `true` by default".
It's not always a no-op. There's zero chance that storage costs are the concern here, they've long struggled to fix overly permissive APIs and poorly designed legacy APIs on apps that target old api levels.
> I dunno why anybody thinks a computer with a 10 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16GB of RAM and a TB or two of storage is "an e-bike".
Because it's marketed as an e-bike, shaped like an e-bike, and sold in the e-bike section of the store. If Apple put that e-bike engine into a land cruiser, then you could drive it like a land cruiser, but that seems like a weird expectation to have after you bought it.
What's the added risk here? It's fine to "risk" almost the entire iPhone itself to be manufactured in China but the servers for some random AI features need to be pure?
Sounds more like technical marketing and the company will treat any decisions around it as a marketing exercise.
Apple's commented previously on why they build in China, and it's beyond just the pricing - the supply chain for every single part they use is in China and mostly in the same geographic region, so there's a level of flexibility there they couldn't get in the US. It wouldn't surprise me if it was genuinely a goal for Apple to manufacture more in the US - they're a notoriously privacy-focused (corporate, not end-user) company, and China's known for IP wandering its way off campus. They're not going to sacrifice the iPhone economics until the US option is actually viable, but I'm not surprised they keep kicking the tires on US manufacturing.
> "the supply chain for every single part they use is in China"
Not entirely true. Some of the highest value components in an iPhone, including the CPU/SoC, baseband, and the majority of OLED displays, are sourced from countries that are not mainland China.
> They're not going to sacrifice the iPhone economics until the US option is actually viable, but I'm not surprised they keep kicking the tires on US manufacturing.
Apple could, with its immense cash hoard and cash flow, _make_ the US viable, but it chooses not to because it'd rather take the easy way out and have China or India or $COUNTRY fund it and return money to shareholders. They've returned money to shareholders rather than invest it in US operations, by design.
This is a classic feint to protect Tim Cook's entire raison detre. He built his career on super high efficiency operations by outsourcing to cheap labor countries. It relies on the low-to-no tariff access to US consumer money.
And I don't care that it's better for their stock price; that's Apple's problem not mine as a US citizen. And even as an Apple investor I would rather the money be spent on US on-shore operations.
There is no way Apple as a public company could just burn cash getting everything made in the US, shareholders would revolt long before the money ran out.
> And I don't care that it's better for their stock price; that's Apple's problem not mine as a US citizen.
That is the shareholder’s problems. People like to think that their investments won’t go batsh*t insane overnight.
> And even as an Apple investor I would rather the money be spent on US on-shore operations.
Apple doesn’t even make all, or even most of its money in the states. Not all of its shareholders are American, if they went this route they could lose half of their revenue overnight (as other countries note the protectionism and tariff or simply forbid Apple products from being sold).
This is correct if you only care about Apple stock price. But consider that there are people who simply do not care about Apple's stock price. Like me, an Apple investor. I care more about the US's industrial base than I do about whether it goes up 5% or down 5% (or whatever, it's besides the point)
>Apple doesn’t even make all, or even most of its money in the states. Not all of its shareholders are American, if they went this route they could lose half of their revenue overnight (as other countries note the protectionism and tariff or simply forbid Apple products from being sold).
So? I don't care about their revenue, I care about the future of American industry. Having a bunch of cash hoarded by old people is irrelevant if it isn't reinvested in something I care about. And I don't care about your supercar or Nobu reservation, or if some fund returns an extra 2%. This is despite being a direct beneficiary.
Live by shareholder return, die by shareholder return; the US is not and shouldn't ever be geared to shareholder return over everything else. Apple and other companies have freeloaded off the US for far too long.
Again, Apple ceases to be much of a company at all if they go your route of being isolationist. It isn't even about the stock price: their revenue tanks, their ability to produce tanks, everything about the company is basically just decimated. You might as well say "I don't care if Apple exists or not". So blow Apple away and how does that help the future of American industry?
Juche doesn't work in North Korea, it isn't going to work in the USA.
It's mostly about cost and market access to China.
Most smartphone supply-chain for Samsung and Apple exist outside China -- primarily in Japan (camera, sensors), South Korea (DRAM/NAND, OLED), and the US (various ICs fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan). There are quite a few reliable estimates/teardowns showing that these three countries account for close to about 90% of iPhone BOM (bill of materials). That's one reason why Samsung's smartphone unit was able to pull out of China without much disruption back in 2019 -- ie, low dependence on China.
I feel that Apple has pushed this misleading narrative a bit too long to defend their massive China outsourcing.
They've actually been diversifying iPhone manufacturing away from China for a few years already. As of April 2024, 14% of all iPhones were already manufactured in India. That's around 30 million phones per year. And Apple plans to double their India manufacturing again by 2028.
Do you know about referendums? Recall elections? Snap elections? Midterm elections? Strikes and protests? Or how about just letting your representative know how you'll vote in their next election to deter bad behavior they're conducting in the current moment?
Must be nice for the current American administration to have 4 years of no democratic oversight to do whatever they want.
