seabird

Stock is still up 53% YTD. Even if they are experiencing headwinds they won’t be allowed to fail. You’re inside the terrarium.

It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.

The commenter you're replying to doesn't represent the company and they are 100% correct. The company sells expensive products to educated commercial customers pretty much exclusively. A five second Google search for "what is a resin 3D printer" gives you a very good idea of what's being talked about. Clarifying every single obvious details in the comments doesn't improve the conversation being had here.

Those CVTs were fucking terrible for years. They were so bad that loads of them ended up on buy-here-pay-here lots after the transmission blew and the Altima is now widely known as the highway missile of choice for drivers with a credit score in the 400s and no insurance. You lucked out.

At least in the US, Toyota is wildly successful across every segment. The RAV4, Camry, Corolla, and Tacoma do massive numbers, even though the compact and midsize sedan market is collapsing. Even niche offerings like the GR Corolla can be challenging to procure from a dealer. The Toyota Tax in the used market is unbelievable. For a huge number of people, there is no manufacturer that gets even close to the same amount of respect that Toyota does. Their victory was so overwhelming that it permanently changed how manufacturing is done and an entire generation of prideful Americans will readily admit that the Big Three were on the back foot in the 80s and 90s. Not to say that China isn’t capable of something similar, but you do have to understand that your tastes/value assessments are very much not representative of the sizable US market on the whole if you would seriously take a Sentra over a Corolla, or an Equinox over a RAV4. The calculus may be a bit different in the European market, of course.

>You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile

We've been able to do intensive CAD and CAE to make effective missiles for a long while now. Modern process nodes are not required. Iran has been doing appreciable missile damage to US bases, and has never entered the TOP500.

> and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.

We have current, ongoing conflicts where it's clear that battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing is taking the backseat to just shooting people, blowing people up, and blowing obvious buildings and installations up. I know that is a gross oversimplification, but militaries worldwide have been chasing after sci-fi shit that's going to be The Future of War just for 99% of the ideas to hit the scrap pile while the remaining 1% develop into incremental improvements in doctrine. The most impactful idea to come out of the Russia-Ukraine war has been strapping an RPG-7 round to an ATmega328-controlled quadcopter, no Nvidia H200s involved.

>Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.

I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that technological issues are even close to the top of the list of issues for the Russian military.

>Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks, along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan,

Something being high margin doesn't mean it's a critical part of European sovereignty. Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful, but it's hardly a matter of security. A lot of low-margin businesses are massively subsidized for this reason. Why do you think the US has such massive subsidies for farming?

>not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?

The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue. If you had to choose to be a nation with only power electronics and MCUs, or a nation with only high-end CPUs, any sane person is picking the former. It follows that you focus on making sure the former is in place first.

>An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs.

In a literal sense, yes, in most cases it is. You NEED the microcontrollers and power electronics to support the production of critical infrastructure and equipment more than you need the latest phone SoC. Even if you have the cutting edge CPUs and GPUs, if you are cut off from other componentry, you're not getting very far with it.

>By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day.

The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running. Yes, the x-ray tech would massively outstrip the strategic importance of the people that actually build and maintain the hospitals if buildings lasted forever and you never planned on building another hospital again.

>Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.

Alcohol, advertising, gambling, and porn create a huge amount of added value. These are of very little interest to national security.

>Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much.

Those salaries are massively suppressed by various cultural dynamics in Europe, and a misplaced trust in the US to protect it. Europe is waking up to the possibility that the US may not be a permanent ally. The government that no longer trusts NATO's biggest spender isn't concerned about your wish that they would primarily invest in cutting edge technology that has as-of-yet undetermined returns in national security so that you can have a salary closer to what you would see in an American tech company.

>Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".

I'm in the US. I don't have a dog in the hunt. I do agree that European ignorance/arrogance has put your nations and you personally in a bad position. I truly am sorry that you can't make the money you want working on the things that will allow you to endure if the rubber actually meets the road. Even though that's all true, prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move. It is not a coincidence that this stuff picked up steam after the war in Ukraine started, and Trump started floating the idea of leaving NATO.

You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.

We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.

“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.

There's a lot of sociological observations you can make. RWD Challengers and Hemi Chargers are obviously going to be death magnets. The Altima gets the exact type of numbers you would expect. The WRX is surprisingly low. The Outback is no surprise considering your average Outback driver. Most of the chart toppers are the type of car you would buy if you're looking for trouble or you don't know how to drive. People with more expensive cars seem to be making an effort to not die in them.

A good road driver just generally positions themselves to not get hit by other cars, regardless of whether or not they're in something pretty nimble or a fat pig boat.

> How do you know that?

Because I started giving a shit about it functioning properly starting with Windows XP and have been using the product for basically as long as I can remember. I’m not saying they’ve never had stinkers but you’re being obtuse if you actually don’t notice how extreme the bugs have gotten for basic tasks.

As an aside, I’ve basically only worked for large companies. Incompetence being common doesn’t mean everything is hopelessly terrible.

> the author is a power user

Installing routine updates isn’t power user activity. It’s actually mandatory and the system constantly nags you if you don’t do it. Installing an image viewer isn’t power user activity. If you seriously believe that’s the case you have a rotten view of the user and we are never going to see eye to eye on this. I genuinely hope you don’t manage or design software.

This argument sucks and there’s no point making excuses for Microsoft when we know full well that they can ship updates without constant severe defects. Somebody isn’t a power user just because they use their computer for more than watching YouTube and light web browsing. The type of shit that is being broken on a month to month basis now would have been scandalous in past versions of Windows.

That being said, we’re never going back to what we had in the past. Fixing it would be nasty business.

1. Appealing to the attitudes of 150+ years ago leads to all sorts of absurdities. We live in 2026.

2. The US not functioning without illegal immigrants is a bad thing. More often than not, employers like illegal immigrants because they can abuse them in some way or another. If you actually interact with illegal immigrants or the people that employ them, this is clear. “We need modern indentured servitude” is not the country I want to live in. I would rather these industries just be subsidized by the government to whatever extent it takes for US citizens to take the jobs with all of the protections we expect workers to have.

3. Not every country is short of workers. Employers may be short of workers that they can lord over, but refer back to point 2. Pointing to Canada’s policy as an example of a “smart move” is a strange play.

The current administration is certainly not working on the above premises, but I’m floored when I hear supposedly progressive people going on about who is going to work the psychologically scarring meatpacking plants if we don’t take on an undefined number of people who are only here to get shit on for a good paycheck. I have compassion for illegal immigrants, which is exactly why I don’t want them in the US.

It’s an awesome looking machine even if it’s a bit dated for some people’s tastes. Any way the wind blows, it’s massively preferable to today’s largely soulless designs.

Their strategy is more in-depth than that, and they’re more accurately looking for sharps. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer betting for “their guy” isn’t a problem, even if they’re not going to make the book much money. Somebody working minimum wage in a trailer smurfing for a sharp can be a huge problem. You can read first hand info from professional bettors, books don’t like to reveal their risk management methodology for obvious reasons.