> Our ambitious goal is by 2031 to have a fleet of over 50,000 scanners worldwide - with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month - enough to cover a huge percentage of the global population, or enough to give regular, monthly scans to a billion people.

> What This Leads To

> Whether or not our scanners are a service that everyone uses, to us, the most important thing is that everyone will be able to use them.

There is no way these will be available to a billion people. This is a luxury product for rich people, which is fine, but they cannot afford to run these for a billion people every month. Think of the infrastructure—both human and physical—to provide that. Think of the distribution of wealth across the world. Come on.

There are so many small, boring details that will have to be ironed out: many Americans won't fit in that machine, kids will not sit still, you'll have to clean them constantly (people pee in warm water), buying and re-tooling property for spas with zoning and licenses is arduous and jurisdiction-specific, etc. etc. etc.

What they are pitching and focused on (data, models, tech) is the fun part. It's not nearly most of the problem.

I'm not sure if they believe this (naïve, unserious) or if they don't (lying). Either way doesn't build trust.

> There are three ways to make a living:

> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

I wish I were joking.

(The had never been an engineer.)

VS Code is open source. (Cursor is built on it!)

GitHub didn’t embrace, extend, extinguish git. You can git push to a different company (e.g. Gitlab) and you’ve migrated. The biggest problems with GitHub are scaling and availability, not lock-in.

Microsoft today is nothing like it was 30 or 20 years ago.

Fifteen years ago we were writing HTML and JavaScript specifically for Internet Explorer. Edge is built on Chromium.

For example, I did the Amex presale for US Open tickets. There were 22k people in front of me for regular day passes during the earliest rounds. So we end up with an auction-ish situation anyway, via the resale market, but can blame scalpers.

The thin illusion keeps it palatable enough, if only barely. Ticketmaster is wants to extract the most profit. Being hated is fine. Being regulated because you’re _too_ hated is not.

But it doesn’t seem anywhere imminent with our current world state.

With the space data centers, it’s more, “Okay yeah so let’s say you do…why?”

It just seems like a really hard thing to do when the available options are, like, the Chinese building data centers on the Tibetan plateau where it is cold, ample renewable energy, tons of land, and, like, oxygen.

I say this entirely neutrally. Some people want to invest in that—and he’s made a boatload of money for those who have thus far!—while others find it insane.

But you don’t get to buy into this and complain.

And yet the vast majority of addressable market they list is enterprise AI apps lol

What you really need are lawsuits against individuals to be held accountable, otherwise it’s a lose-lose for shareholders.

In my opinion, Apple is doing the right thing for users. It’s not like they have a huge revenue stream here. Yes, there will be some features or usage that require iCloud plus or whatever to cover incremental cost, but I genuinely believe that they don’t want services creeping in that break their trust with users or their privacy-first reputation.

Apple’s decision (users will have a less powerful product because we’re not vacuuming up their data and using it for profit) is exactly the kind of thing the EU should want. No country has appropriate data privacy guidelines for AI (yet) so opening up choice can’t provide alternatives.

(To be clear, I’d be fine with Anthropic here, but am fine with this state. Maybe because I’m so used to Siri sucking that I’ve given up hope.)

While it’s difficult to say to what extent they were going beyond there agreement, it’s clear that they were. I’m not aware of any evidence that it was to the level of, “they’re continuing to make quick progress towards a bomb.” Which is what happened when the US decided to reneg.

There were another seven years to negotiate what’s next and real progress made from both sides trusting each other. That’s the type of momentum needed for further diplomacy (e.g. counteracting more bellicose members of the IRGC.) Instead, we got the opposite. And for what?