objclxt

> Inability to project power beyond a few random pot shots at neighbors that aren't even the US.

This is a very funny way of saying “has de facto control of one of the world’s most important shipping lanes”.

> It is very unlikely that LLM had access to original source code of Photoshop.

It doesn’t matter. It’s likely had access to the knowledge of somebody who worked on that source code.

I have worked at companies that have done clean-room implementations. I was not permitted to look at their source or interact with those teams, because I had been exposed to the source of what they were re-implementing in a prior job.

As a human with a mushy brain I was never going to remember the source, but the fact I had been proximate to it was enough to lock me out. You have no idea what the LLM trained on, so you can’t prove a LLM derived clone is a “clean-room” implementation.

> The Directors Cut is the unbutchered version.

The Director's Cut (released in 1992) drops the narration and adds the dream sequence, but despite the name is not entirely approved by Ridley Scott.

The Final Cut (released in 2007) is the only version where Ridley Scott had full final cut approval. It re-masters the audio, fixes some of the effects (replacing faces on stunt doubles, removing wires, etc), and changes a few lines (most notably "I want more life, father" instead of "fucker"). The color is also re-graded.

Some people prefer the Director's Cut over the Final Cut, especially the color grading, although I saw the Final Cut in 35mm when it was released and it looked pretty spectacular. In any event the changes in the Final Cut are nowhere near as egregious as the Star Wars special editions or the AI remasters of James Cameron's films.

> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work

I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.

> Usually, companies like Apple are largely to blame

Just as a point of fact, Micron and its peers have in the past operated an illegal cartel that engaged in a price fixing conspiracy to manipulate the cost of RAM.

> mega-buyers like Apple caused various issues, and the production equipment that was scaled back during that time is now leading to supply shortages in the upcycle [2]. Apple fans probably won't admit it, though.

That's Micron's problem. Nobody held a gun to their heads and made them accept the prices Apple was offering. Micron willingly took those deals.

> Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.

You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.

(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)

> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.

Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.

Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:

* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.

* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.

* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.

* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.

> It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount)

Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards. Typical costs for processing are much lower than 5-10%.

For example, Adyen charges the 0.4% interchange + their fee of 0.6% and a flat 0.11€. On a 10€ transaction, that's 2.1%.

In most cases this is cheaper than handling cash. When you accept cash, you have to pay somebody to close and reconcile the drawer, take the cash to the bank (or have a security company do it for you), account for shrinkage / mistakes...it's a bit of a myth that cash is cheaper for businesses to handle, especially in places like the EU where card interchange rates are highly regulated.

Now of course, if your cash is not going the usual routes and isn't getting accounted for in the books...that equation can change.

> That sounds like bullshit to me.

Have you taken a US domestic flight? Everyone wants to bring their massive roll-ons into the cabin, nobody wants to check if they can avoid it.

> SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space

No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.