gajeam

Un-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/3vDun

Hello, I wrote this! Happy to see it circulating HN again. You can find more of my writing on competition here in the Boston Globe — https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/11/opinion/be-wary-when-...) in the Boston Globe

It's important to note that this new ad slot "will allow advertisers to promote their apps across the whole network, rather than in response to specific searches." This is exactly Facebook's game, and the underlying technology they use to target these ads could easily be repurposed for oh, I don't know...a new search engine?

Coincidentally, iOS 13 updated iBeacon in a way that also made it a lot less useful to developers (although there was a clear privacy benefit for users.)

I was doing academic research on this exact topic and Chris' is the only book that I found that breaks down the techniques one at a time this way. This book is nothing short of brilliant.

Right now I code two days a week and do academic/journalistic writing the other three days a week. The work styles are totally different.

With programming, I work at nearly full capacity until I'm almost done with the task, and then get sort of distracted during that last little bit of testing and documenting.

Writing I find far less conducive to a "flow" state though. I alternate pretty much the entire day between 30-60 minute chunks of working and 10-20 minute chunks walking outside or checking HN.

In the rare instances when I have to switch between the two modes, my productivity basically collapses.

Lot of people talking about third-party application development in this thread. It's also worth considering the opposite side of that, data portability. GDPR already requires companies allow users to easily export all their data [1], and if the US did the same it could really help mitigate the network effect social media companies use to hold onto their dominance (i.e. Facebook's properties)

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

This view of "traditional monopolies" isn't actually that traditional. From the end of the Gilded Age to through the LBJ administration, antitrust law was focused on reducing market concentration, barriers of entry, and anti-competitive behavior. Only in the 60's did Robert Bork and the Chicago School start to chip away at this way of thinking. By the end of the Reagan administration, Bork's idea that a firm is only a monopoly if it reduces consumer welfare (aka raises prices.) [0]

Google and Facebook have taken full advantage of this new definition. They provide their products for free, acquire competitors without a peep from the FCC (Waze, Instagram, WhatsApp), invest heavily in corporate lobbyists, and have the fastest connections by colocating their data centers and building fiber optic cables. How can a new competitor be expected to lay undersea fiber optic cables?

[0] Tim Wu, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age", 2018

"Microsoft spent more than a decade, investing tens of billions of dollars and absorbing an astonishing $12.4 billion in cumulative losses, to establish Bing as a credible competitor. It is cheaper and easier to build a manned space program than it is to build a modern search engine."

- Matthew Hindman, "The Internet Trap", 2018 (p. 174)

Why is this the case? Don't the data portability rules make it easier for Europeans to be able to switch to a Facebook alternative?

In this piece, Alexis Madrigal gives one of the all time most straightforward descriptions of how neural nets work. Kudos.

I'm not sure whether this is the right site for the job, but it's super important that this kind of resource exists for Ethereum. "Trustlessness" can only go so far since not everyone has the technical knowhow to detect scams for themselves. Getting trusted members of the community and having good transparency/governance on this kind of platform is key for it to take off.

The fact that this paper uses a very vanilla LaTeX format is almost taunting to academia. At least many other "whitepapers" (e.g. Gnosis) format theirs more like a corporate brochure.

> There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.

The car companies aren't making the same mistake that Microsoft and other old tech companies made with smartphones. They all see that autonomous vehicles are coming and they're doing their best to put out their own solutions. For them to "grow the market," they have to do AVs far better than everyone else. It's tough to imagine them doing that with Google working on this since 2009.

> Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.

It's an arms race to outspend in this area. Yes, they could muscle their way through, but only at a huge cost. And even then, employees could leave to start their own startups (see Faraday Futures, Otto, Argo AI, etc.)

> If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing

There are way more parts in building an autonomous vehicle than a mobile phone. This graphic [1] does a good job of getting into some of involved industries. Shareholders won't stand for them to sink money into reinventing the wheel (e.g. car components, vehicle to vehicle communication software, AI.)

[1] http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/SELFDRIVING-SUPPLI...

I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into, especially if they insist on controlling the whole ecosystem like they do with their other products.

First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, Ford (and a dozen other car companies), and who knows how many start ups are all vying for the same pool of engineers. Even if they get top talent, it's another story holding onto it. If you look at the LinkedIns (Anthony Levandowski, Jur van den Berg, Chris Thrun, all the founders of Otto and Argo AI), they change jobs every two years.

Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships and how good they are at choosing winners in the race to autonomous vehicles. They already have $1B invested in Didi last year--it will be interesting to see where they go from here.