TrainedMonkey

You are not wrong that secret ingredient is crime, but I think the single largest use of crypto out there is tax evasion. When traveling Asia in 2025 I've met several people who worked for western companies and got paid in tether. Western companies pay flat consulting that avoids payroll taxes / etc and employees skip taxation from whatever country they are in. On the trading side we have ETH wrapping everything and enabling trading of most financial assets.

Not familiar with the issue, but that has to be $1m minimum order, correct? And you would get a production run in 1-10k. How many revs does that include?

My understanding is that Shenzhen dominance so far is from 3 pillars - low minimum order size, low per-part price, and fast response. They can do that because they have lot of highly trained labor that work mad hours. So to compete you would need to leverage a lot of automation... which would be a lot less flexible and very rocky at the start. Would love to get a correction from someone more familiar with the situation.

Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.

> Why not hold your cards until afterwards?

It's a public company that is beholden to the shareholders. They have to explain what they are doing. But I agree with you, seems sus. Even if you can make more money by scaling the old tech today, that does not justify dropping the future innovation. Especially because by all accounts they are swimming in cash... Unless they are telling the truth and 4f extra complexity does not justify extra cost. I really have no context to evaluate that.

On the surface that seems like a responsible thing to do

Unfortunately I've had. I've had two different scanwatch models and ended up buying ~3 chargers each for of them. Just thinking abut USB-C and how much less different chargers types I have makes me really happy.

I concur that this is probably a good thing, but UTC without leap seconds already exists. That is TAI and some applications that care about long term persistent and self-consistent telemetry use that.

Some, maybe most, humans outperform AI. I've had some calls where I would have preferred an AI that could not understand me to an agent whom I could not understand AND who could barely understand me.

I do not care for Withings software or subscriptions, but their hardware is so nice.

Given the speed, intensity, and potential payoff of the AI race I am surprised anyone expects anything else. Anthropic is currently winning and if OpenAI needs to let skynet cook for a bit to catch up, well that is just the cost of doing business. This is capitalist system working as expected.

Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box.

It is almost like there is a cool new technology that makes shipping projects faster.

It is rarely a challenge to turn $100 into $50.