I find this language fascinating. On one hand, the Department of "War" gives the department an underlying, unspoken goal that it should be involved in war with something. On the other hand, it's very easy to fund the Department of "Defense;" of course we need more money to defend our country. Don't we want to be safe! It's much less attractive to fund the Department of "War"
He's now on X bashing Anthropic for taking this same stance. I know this would be expected of him, but many other Google AI researchers signed this as well as Google Deep Mind the organization. We really need to push to keep humans in the kill decision loop. Google, OpenAI, and X-AI are are all just agreeing with the Pentagon.
Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.
If the goal is to make US goods attractive to other countries and to decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar has to become fundamentally weaker or the goods have to become more valuable. The latter feels more difficult than the former at this point. However, the side effects of a weaker dollar may not be worth weakening it.
> decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar
A direct link exists between a nation's status as the world's primary reserve currency and its tendency to run persistent trade deficits.
This relationship is often described by the Triffin Dilemma, a paradox where the global demand for the reserve currency necessitates that the issuing country consistently supplies the world with its currency, primarily through importing more than it exports.
The flip side is if you weaken the dollar by appearing unstable and displaying hostility to your main trade partners, you get the drawbacks of the weaker currency (reduced purchasing power) without commensurate improvement in the attractiveness of goods to other countries. Some devaluations are more strategic than others.
But the broligarchs don't need purchasing power. All their wealth is in assets, leveraged many times over. Currency collapse is the best that can happen to them.
This is the most important comment here. The US rebuilt nations' economies after World War II by printing dollars and buying goods from those countries. In return, the dollar became the world reserve currency and did not suffer massive inflation despite printing so much of it. It's a supply and demand thing, just like any good or service. There was a ton of demand for the dollar, so printing more (increasing supply) did not crash the "price" of the dollar (inflation is the price/value of the dollar decreasing). We printed a ton of dollars during covid but it didn't result in hyperinflation like what happens with, say, Iran or South American currencies because the demand for dollars was still so very high.
It depends on how this happens. Labor would still be more expensive here than developing economies. We could easily just end up with a weaker dollar and floundering manufacturing, which means more inflation.
Every country has rare earth elements. Just google "X discovers rare earth" where X is your country of choice and you'll find articles about how they have huge deposits. The underlying problem is the processing. China has figured this out and has cornered the market. Until other countries figure out how to process these materials, China will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage.
Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
It's have nothing to do with "figuring it out". Both mining and processing been figured out decades ago. But rare earth mining is disaster for ecology and western countries just don't want to pay the tall and deal with political consequences. Countries like China and Russia have advantage the they can do whatever they want without caring about protests or long term effects on population of regions where mining occurs.
There quite few talks on the topic, but you can check this one by Dr. Julie Klinger of University of Delaware:
I view my phone primarily as something I'm obligated to carry on myself at all times to function in modern society. The easier it is to carry the better. When I need to upgrade my phone, I'll always choose the smallest iPhone by weight.
Same. There are really only two features I care about in a phone: a high refresh rates and weight. At 165 grams the iPhone air is by far the lightest 120hz phone apple has ever made. Second place is the iPhone 15 Pro at 187 grams. Getting ready to ditch my 15 pro.
Me too, and I’m planning the same upgrade. Always wanted to downsize but 60Hz was a deal breaker for me. Been using 120-144Hz+ displays exclusively since the VG248QE in 2013.
I was quite surprised to see this entire thread full of HN users who apparently want some brick phone to doom scroll lying flat on a table all day until the battery dies.
Right, thinness doesn't help with anything. I want smaller width and height (i.e., a iPhone 17 mini) so that the phone will fit better in my jeans pocket.
I'm not sure about this. I think that if the weight balance is weird (esp. in the heavy top light bottom scenario - I sincerely hope it's not a thing with this new iPhone), it'll act as a lever and put more strain on your fingers to hold the phone.
Not sure you'd like the weight. All the major phone makers have consumer research saying they've reached the limits of weight comfort and many makers are working hard to pull back from those limits.
HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
