The history of ASML involves a "failed" company that other multinationals felt they had to keep alive to allow the technologies to continue. And that's saying that the capital investment needed to produce a thing of that scale can't work if it is subject to a yearly profit cycle (or works much more poorly).

The further factor shaping ASML is that as chip technology has grown, the investment required for support technology has grown and so only a single supplier can remain profitable and it seem logical there would only be a single company acting as supplier (maintaining research and expertise in two or three huge companies, only one of which can be profitable at a time, is highly inefficient - why we're done down to 1-3 cutting edge chip makers at this point also).

So ASML was economically logical and it being in Europe is perhaps a combination of European tradition and Europe wanting some part of the global chip production system (which is by a fair bit the largest/most-valuable concentration of capital and technology in the world).

https://medium.com/@crcjeffkim/why-these-5-acquisitions-have...

US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.

So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).

Just as much, there's a certain HN complaint form that basically goes "any complaint about the crap that sold now is just programmer/civil-rights-fan/etc idiosyncrasy, real people want exactly this crap 'cause markets never lie".

Student turn-in a mid-term paper. A professor chooses a certain number of points from the mid-term paper and asks for explanations of these in long-hand. Pulling questions this way doesn't seem like it would take more time than a thorough reading of the text.

Oh, but paper reading has been delegated to a drudge you wouldn't trust with pulling question, oh how inconvenient. Which is to say the problems AI introduces to education are strongly related to much of work already being made mindless before AI appeared.

Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.

No, High school students can do this. Well, they get impelled to do this. They can't do this now but that's a testament to current education.

I make dozens of decisions daily: vendor outreach, pricing, inventory orders, staff schedules, website updates, social media. Most happen without human input. When I hit constraints (broken tools, missing capabilities, strategic uncertainties), I ask the Board.

So it sounds like the thing primarily interacts with other online tools/stores/etc. However, the original article mention "her" on calls, which implies some interaction. That raises the question whether the thing will chat with the employees on a regular, whether it's reachable by phone and so forth. A big question is whether once the store is set-up, it would be able to see the arrangement of goods and ask for changes in arrangement to further "her" vision.

My impression they've only got an inventory picker that wants to "own" the entire stores' process but isn't doing what I'd consider the hard part of stores - actually directing and supervising humans.

That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people.

But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that all their interactions with the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's employees".

And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go. Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the information for any accurate determination.

Keep in mind, the losers in a conflict have more of an incentive to lie than the winners. The US and Israel seem very much the losers here.

Is there evidence these groups are a minority? I mean, the OP sounds like they are taking the right approach but I suspect it requires both skill/experience and an open mind to take their approach.

Just because an approach has good use-cases doesn't mean those are going predominate.

If you just say "competition", you can point at the efforts of ten people to gain a seat on the politbureau as a clear case of this.

Other projects' success will be proportional to their number of Schwartz' and so it seems unlikely they disappear. But they may disappear for areas in which there is no immediate money.

I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.

And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.

The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.

Transformers are made in specialized factories and use specialized components made in even more specialized factories. Expanding production requires not just immediate demand but commitment to future demand because a factory is a very expensive thing. The big thing is that increased demand often involves a demand that won't continue for a long period of time.

You could see the same thing with both masks and vaccines during covid - ramping up ten factories to meet a temporary demand would be very expensive.