Incredible anecdote, I purchased the book. In this way, the relationship between America and China is exactly like the relationship between America and the USSR was -- each trying to become the other precisely as they try to consume each other.
Another sign of Chinese ideological dominance is that nobody can conceive of a future that does not mimic China's solutions to social problems. Trump says frequently that he's jealous of Xi's position as dictator, tech firms envy 996 culture, public safety advocates are pivoting to restricting internet speech and constant surveillance.. etc. etc.
Well a lot of people can conceive of a cultural hegemony that is more pleasant to live under. It’s more that Y Combinator wants to be exposed to the returns of the Palantirs, Andurils and Clearviews out there.
Possibly. I think, at the very least, Garry Tan is a true believer. He's not proposing putting this in someone else's neighborhood or city, he wants it in SF, SJ, Berkeley, etc.
it's the opposite. expanding the Y Combinator startup index strategy to include the surveillance startups is less belief not more. it's less opinionated. Paul Graham is actually more opinionated about this than Garry Tan is.
The calculator analogy doesn’t really work, speaking as someone who is more of an AI booster than skeptic. The addition of calculators to the classroom necessitated a change in pedagogy. So now kids learn how to do math without them, and then add them once the fundamentals are there. Learning how to think is even more foundational.
Quite debatable. Learning how to think frequently involves basic math skills like "hmm, they claim a two of order of magnitude effect, but is that even feasible?" When you can't do "math" like that in your head, your ability to think is significantly impaired, as we are currently seeing.
I think we agree? If LLMs will be included in classroom learning at all, it has to be done with an understanding of how it will affect learning outcomes, and it’s not clear that the effect will be the same as introducing calculators was, at all.
I don't think it will be the same, but I also don't think we have any idea how it will actually affect us. Human development is a true chaos system. Psychohistory is fiction. Maybe AI might be able to enable it, but it sure ain't here, now.
If we are looking just at IQ scores, then there's literally, billions of factors involved. It could be chemistry, nuclear radiation, malnutrition, stress, etc.
Most of that stuff is totally unpredictable, and we can only tell, after the fact.
Alea jacta est. There's nothing we can do about it. The candy ain't going back into the piñata. We'll just have to see what happens.
The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.
Related, I think math went through a similar transition.
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AI
Great point, and to drive it home -- TSLA is the only competitive non-Chinese company in the EV space. You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms, considering the whole U.S.-Taiwan stranglehold on chip mfg
> You could make the argument that it's one of very few successful U.S. manufacturing company winning on purely technical/capitalist terms
Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.
Tesla was very popular in the Chinese market and globally, including in markets where Chinese EVs aren't banned, until literally this year, which I'd argue is due in part to the trade war.
The real whole shtick is run economy in closed cycle to keep currency weak. Or the good old 1930s trade bloc economy. They're not just good at optimizing costs, they charge appropriately in CNY and inappropriately in USD. Workers don't care about obscene undervaluation in USD so long that they have bacon on the table after few hours of work.
It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.
The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
> I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
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