maximus_01

The days of the left being more supportive of free speech than the right are long over

Garbage blog post with no insight beyond copying and pasting some tweets. Clearly has an agenda.

I don't really care for any of the AI providers but for instance the idea that Nvidia is doing what its doing because it think OAI is failing is the exact opposite of what they are doing. Nvidia is scared of an OAI and Anthropic oligopoly, because in that case, their customers will have much more pricing power, and be much more motivated to work around Nvidia (essentially to either substantially reduce nvidia gross margins or replace them). Both companies are already taking actions to do so. So Nvidia is trying to get more competition (hence their support for open source models).

Let’s not forget that Anthropic only paid that to settle a class action lawsuit.

Yep and more like 25%+ of profits (given the google revenue, and most ad revenue, is close to 100% margin).

This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.

Good investment decision and obviously the street was very wrong, but the reason the multiple was low was because of concerns earnings were at risk from a) their issues in China (which they solved, at least for now, but was a very valid concern at the time) and b) android eating them (there was a narrative they were about to be blackberried, or that android was doing what windows did to mac). There are good reasons why that didn't happen.

Not that small. High income and roughly the same population as California, which isn't too small for companies to bother selling into.

Ozempic did about US$2bn of revenue in 2024 in Canada.

Private companies do things to maximize profits. They might lose money on some stuff to make more on other things, and there might be some gunk in the system but they are almost all laser focused on making bigger profits.

Governments have lots of other incentives (like job creation, elections, income distribution)

Except it isn't at all. The properties to buy all have a fixed price, costs of houses/hotels are fixed, rents are fixed and can't be adjusted, and most importantly, a) you can only buy a property if you randomly happen to land on it and b) people have no choice of what property to stay at (again, chosen by random dice)

No, that is not the free market at work at all. I agree it happens however. We simply don't live in a 100% free market world.

I'm not here to debate whether free markets are good or bad, but governments have a privileged position versus private companies, and effectively operate above the law (again at least compared to private companies). Any government intervention takes us away from a free market, either a little bit or a lot, depending on the action. Apple is a private company. Anything it does is really part of the free market, at least in the original meaning of that as described by Adam Smith and co.

I'm not really disagreeing with you as it's not like there is a 100% true definition of a free market, different people can have different conceptions, but the original Adam Smith / classical view is that a free market should essentially be 100% driven by the private market on supply and demand - with as little government intervention as possible on either side of the ledger (subsidy or blocking)

Yep. But Apple are appealing that decision.

There is a limit to this sort of logic though. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro free markets. But: A) Apple's policies make some products completely unviable (anything with a gross margin less than 30%). Even for products at say 40% gross margin, Apple as a storefront is taking 75% of the gross margin pool (ie 30% to Apple, 10% to developer). This in my view is direct consumer harm. B) Apple acts egregiously and restricts what should be basic free speech. For instance, app developers not being able to even mention they have to pay Apple (let alone being able to direct customers to their own website etc). To me this is the biggest one - I could probably live with everything else more if developers at least could show customers where their fees were going etc. C) Apple has changed the rules over time, or at least how they enforce the rules (by trying to force more and more apps to pay the 30% - eg what they did to Patreon)

You are really trying to say that for a startup trying to build software, say a productivity app or whatever, they should consider launching their own hardware device? They are very different things and would basically make indie development impossible (or really any software company that can't raise hundreds of millions to billions)

Power to you, but you probably miss out on masterpieces in the other direction though. The ones you would be more likely to watch if you spent more time watching those 'conventionally' liked movies, given the limit of time.

It does seem so.

To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.

Ok then. I wish you well in your quest.

I don't know how I can be more clear about this. It was a thought experiment. Take the very best piece of writing from [BOOK/ARTICLE/TEXTBOOK/JOURNAL] you could ever imagine. Would you or should you be willing to pay 10c for it? I'm not asking about Stratechery in particular (although there are many, many people that happily pay Ben Thompson $15/month that I'm sure most people would describe as intelligent).

You might quibble that you would only pay for a physical book or whatever. I say why? Are you paying for the content (that word again) of that book or the paper? I'd argue the former. So why does it really matter if it was online or not? In the future it seems reasonably likely that there will be a higher proportion of the best writing online vs in books. Sure, a lot may be willing to write for free, but do you think it absolutely impossible that some percentage of them charge?

I must admit I didn't know that. Do you think that is widely known amongst people who eat them? But yes, either way, I find that disturbing.

I get all that. Still doesn't mean there isn't some things worth paying for that are created in real time and aren't out of copyright. Something like Stratechery, as an example most people would be familiar with.

Picking on my use of the word content is a bit silly. I think you know what I meant. Use whatever word you want there - best book, best textbook, whatever.

I think that example wasn't the best as it's probably so obvious it isn't salmon it wouldn't fool anyone. But would you be comfortable if someone sold Hoki or Puffer Fish as Salmon? And then only in the fine print said it was actually Hoki that tasted like salmon or whatever. What if someone sold actual fish but called it Tofu, and only disclosed in the description that it was fish that tasted like Tofu?

That is a world I don't want to live in.

Sure but that's what happens when you cut distribution costs to zero (i.e. the internet). It's pretty indisputable that most content online is garbage. But there is also a lot of super high quality information out there in all sorts of fields, more than there was when distribution costs were high.

There is a prevailing attitude amongst some that they aren't willing to pay for any info - and they hold that as basically some sort of weird sacred belief. I think those people, even if they came across the best piece of content ever written, would be unwilling to pay 10c for it (pre or post). I'm just saying I find that odd.

If you invert it, though, money is really compensation for time (directly or indirectly). Most of the things you pay money for are compensating someone for time spent (whether that time was spent in the past, present or future). Why is it so hard to go in the other direction? It doesn't mean that you think money is more important than time or anything. It's just that people trade one for the other. Even if you remove the money element altogether, you have a finite amount of time and should value it as such.

I also never said anything about equality or that an engineer or a scientists time is necessarily worth the same as other occupations. I was pointing to a very large disparity (paying a very small amount for content that one clearly values, if they value their time). You can put whatever numbers you want in my original comment and my point would stand.

How much do you value your time? A lot of people think like this and I'm not judging you or saying this applies to you. But I find it kind of odd when people I know who earn hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour won't pay even $0.10 for something that took them say 15 minutes to read. If their own time is worth $200 / hr, they thought it was valuable enough to use up $50 of their time. If they refuse to pay anything for the content, then in their mind the content was worth exactly $50, not a cent more to spare to the author of said content (eg $50.10, if you paid the author $0.10 and paid $50 of your time).

I agree with this. I think potentially someone may have suggested the federal court sit on the decision until the 10% tariff was confirmed a couple of weeks ago. Mostly because the announcement pre Tariff might have resulted in a long Truth Social post from DT followed by a knee jerk reaction. But I highly doubt it would factor into the decision.

Australia is also in the process of regulating platforms and I'd expect it to end up a little closer to Europe/Japan in the next couple of years anyway. They will watch to see what loopholes Apple/Google exploit and try to deal with that in the regulations upfront.

Important context for anyone not aware is that Australia is one of the few countries that US runs a large trade surplus with.

100%. But gradually being solved as source links are being provided. If the source link is as good as what you’d find on Google anyway then you have a way better search experience and don’t really burn much extra time checking the LLM work

He means the top part above Google suggestions. If you type a url or company name Apple sometimes guesses the url and provides a direct link. Google not involved there - only if you click a Google suggestion or hit search/enter or whatever

I don't entirely agree, but thank you for elaborating. I see at least where you are coming from.

So you have decided anyone who can read faster than you is a fraud? Meaning you think you are in possession of the fastest non-fraudulent human reading abilities possible?

Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension? The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case against you.