Basically pulling jobs out of other territories and concentrating on being all-American where possible is going to sell to President Shart & chums more than the multinational aspect.
As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.
I should have been a bit more specific: as all-GOP-American as possible.
Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.
> Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.
Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.
The next president will have significant sway over decisions that will likely impact the tech sector’s direction. If the pendulum swings the “wrong” way, companies like Meta will face increased scrutiny, anti-trust investigations, regulatory oversight, and the like. If the pendulum swings the “right” way, companies will continue to enjoy free rein over their business practices.
Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.
The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.
Making a display to signal one’s willingness to mate and intended to impress a target audience, in this case the incoming administration.
It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.
He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.
He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).
Do you happen to know why? The other replies are all providing a narrative that it is related to the new US administration, but as you say it wasn't very clear who would win until the results were counted. So if it's been happening for a year it couldn't be related to that.
Speculation. Brexit (one of the greatest self-owns in political history, though the US is trying to top it) and the UK continue to tighten general travel/immigration rules. London used to be a great spot to have a companies EU presence. Brexit has only amplified London as primarily a bank for world criminals. Companies eventually wonder what's the point of being in the UK when they still need EU presence anyway.
I only have second hand accounts but I've heard the Instagram CEO just hated having employees in London (/ outside of the US) and therefore started with closing Instagram positions there. Then the rest is following.
And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.
If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.
I remember being able to have the live football scores over the top of any TV show. Most of the Ceefax/Teletext page would be 'transparent' with only a small box on the bottom of the screen showing the live updates.
Is it possible to do the same kind of thing with any smart TVs?
Modern smart TVs could hypothetically overlay virtually anything, however, you would not be able to overlay on to another “app” or channel as it opens cans of worms. For example, Roku had a lot of fraud from channels which showed one thing to the viewer while downloading ads in the background to persuade the backend the ads had been seen.
Back in the digital satellite era there was a transition where it was possible for the interactive content from one channel to be overlaid on the video of another as long as both were on the same satellite and underlying channel (a bit like “frequency” but not always 1:1). This is because digital TV multiplexes multiple videos for different user visible channels into a single stream with their interactive gunk, and the gunk can switch video streams. The fun part was this bandwidth is auctioned, and because every shady gambling company (half of cyprus it seems) wanted to be overlaid on sports the most expensive bandwidth was any spare around the sports channels. Not sure anyone ever made use of this in the end though.
Maybe I'm sheltered but I'm baffled by all of these replies. Is this a US thing?
At least in Europe and East-Asia, it's unheard of for any nice restaurant to have straws except for kids. And it's not like women there don't wear lipstick. The image of going for a candlelight dinner and drinking from a straw is something straight out of a comedy sketch to me. I guess if it's a certain kind of cocktail, but that's the only exception. And even then the majority of cocktails won't have straws.
I truly have not been this confused by any HN thread and I've been reading this place almost daily for years.
Outside of specific cocktails, straws are not a fine dining thing in the US either. There's a reason why people are talking about things like Coke and burgers in the context of straws in drinks.
Right. Another commenter mentioned "a nice sit down restaurant", and some of the other replies imply they're just not used to not drinking without a straw at all, hence my confusion.
Now fine dining is on the extreme end, but a nice sit down restaurant to me implies something at least halfway inbetween a McDonalds and fine-dining, and at that halfway point I'd never expect straws.
This is the third thing someone is demanding people give up just so we could have a token, ineffective, anti-straw policy.
1) lipstick (and the effort put into applying it)
2) health reasons (not trusting the cup's sanitary credentials)
3) children (no idea why, but I have kids, and let me tell you: they want straws. Plus prevents spills if you tell them to leave the glass on the table)
There's quite a difference with your example than the exchange you were replying to.
(For what it's worth, I have no problem with people wanting to accessorize their bodies with lipstick. I don't see beauty in those things, but I have no problem with others seeing beauty that way. Ultimately it is a choice though, as people can also decide to be beautiful through their grace, words, actions, etc; not what some company tells them they need.)
People need water if they want to live. Somehow you managed to picked the one need which is literally the single biggest need for life as we know it to exist, making it quite the opposite of "entirely subjective".
A statement like "I think pretty paint on lips is just as important as water because everything is subjective" is not making the point you think it is.
Its almost like I picked an extreme example intentionally and then made a joke about it to illustrate it was intentional. I wrote my point you missed it.
Which did I say? "almost entirely subjective" or "entirely subjective"? Where did I write the quote "I think pretty paint on lips is just as important as water because everything is subjective"? I remember writing "context independent" tho as to indicate it's not about lipstick its about semantics of defining a need
I just visited San Francisco for a few days (first time!) and it was absolutely amazing seeing all of these cars driving around everywhere.
I also thought the driverless car companies had stalled (bad pun); but that is obviously not the case. I reflected on why I thought that and I realized I had allowed news about the Tesla self driving technology to negatively affect my understanding of this whole market.
I have since watched a bunch of Waymo videos online, they are so cool! The possibilities seem huge.
Fwiw, the outward deployment of Cruise has stalled, but it was mostly because withheld accident footage rather than anything to do with the tech. They were nipping on the heels of Waymo, and they have continued development internally while they wait for their time-out from the regulators to be over. I expect them to be Lyft to Waymo’s Uber.
I don’t know about that. Cruise tried to move too quickly in an attempt to catch up to Waymo and accumulated a ton of much publicized issues in SF. Constant stalling in intersections, involved in a few collisions, etc. CA DMV clearly noted “performance issues” as one of the reasons for their suspension.
The other incidents were much publicized, but I don’t think that had anything to do with their actual burden/costliness, which was quite tiny. After all, a Waymo car got violently totaled by a crowd even though they have had an almost flawless record. Some fraction of the population hates these things intrinsically, and I don’t think the disdain is driven by the actual risk or events; those are just an excuse.
Some of the incidents were overblown, sure, but even before the pedestrian dragging incident the CA DMV had ordered them to scale back their fleet by 50%.
I took a few rides with Cruise and it was clear it was not ready for prime time, the potential was evident but it seemed like they were a couple years behind.
I'm not disputing that Cruise was behind Waymo a bit, just the idea that development was stalling because supporters were losing faith in progress. (That was the possibility raised in the original comment I was replying to.) That is, there is no "autonomous driving winter".
Separately, any level-headed quantitative assessment of the cost-and-benefits of the roll-out to society will find that we are going way, way too slowly. It is madness to slow down a research program -- whose every day of delay costs the US over a billion dollars -- because, out of hundreds of test vehicles driving over many months, a handful blocked traffic for a few minutes. If you wait to start building out the fleet until autonomous vehicles are 2x-10x safer than human drivers (the conventional wisdom among regulators), it will delay things by years and so literally cost tens of thousands of lives.
(I've taken dozens of rides in a Cruise and had zero safety issues, am very happy to have them driving around in my neighborhood, etc.)
Maybe! I get quite a lot of Ubers here in Vancouver and they are almost exclusively Tesla. I don’t known if the “3d view” that is displayed on the screen in the dashboard is used by FSD or not; but if it is there is no way that could be safe for self driving cars. It’s so inaccurate!
I could be wrong about their progress though, always happy to be corrected.
What you see in those cars is not FSD, but Autopilot that comes with every car. Autopilot is lane keeping + traffic aware cruise control plus a few small features like green light chimes and speed sign detection.
FSD looks very different and you can see everything in the road and what the car is planning to do. There's some good YouTube channels where they test different versions of FSD in different situations, AIDRIVR does a good job, eg https://youtu.be/rMDNFLsXFEU?si=SHWAm24ZY3psnO4Z&t=136. Nice thing about those channels is you can also look at old videos and see the rate of improvement.
I had FSD for one month on my car and it was really impressive. There were plenty of disengagements, but they were all what I'd call "quality of life" issues. Car was too hesitant during blind lefts, or advanced lefts, car slowed down too much for speed bumps, it got into turn-only lanes later than I'd like, etc, etc. The hardest part of driving in my town is a 3 lane roundabout where upon exiting the roundabout you have to very quickly and confidently change 2 lanes in order to get on the highway, it handled it with ease. Overall, I would not buy it today, but didn't see any reason why they can't solve the issues I saw.
I own a Model 3 and have used FSD v12.3.x as recently as a month ago. I've also taken several Waymo rides in that time. I can confidently say it's not even in the same league as Waymo.
It is not "particularly easy" to build housing in the UK.
The governing party (Conservative Party) lost a seat it had held for decades (since it was created) in a by-election because Boris Johnson (then PM) wanted to change planning regulations to allow more housing to be built. The government then had to reverse those plans.
This is also the case at the local council level. People will turn out to argue against new housing but people do not turn up to planning meetings to support it.
> I know of at least one that has different versions of its website for different countries because they know that Germans like X and Americans like Y - small changes make a huge difference to sales
Can you speak any more to this? Do you or anyone else have any examples? I would be very interested to see.
