In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

China already won this war. They have robot taxis that cost a fifth of Waymo's. Xiaomi has a dark factory that manufactures a smart phone every second. There are already Chinese humanoid robots turning up at trade shows. They're years ahead of us and they have more research universities training more roboticists than the USA ever will. This initiative will fail just like Obama's attempt to beat China at making solar power tech did. Trump needs to pick fights the USA can win.

Remember the days when you could have a gaming rig with a killer Intel CPU, the best Crucial RAM on the market, a great Canopus GPU, Windows 2000 was stable and secure, and you still had money for pizza and beer? Now Intel sucks, Crucial won't sell to gamers, a great GPU is week's wages, and Windows 11 is almost as bad as Windows 95. We have lost so much!

On the up side, nobody is commenting about the Penis Bird anymore.

A Chinese company, Great Wall Motors, recently showed off the first motorcycle ever designed with a straight eight engine. It also has a touchscreen UI and a retractable windshield. They're years ahead of the rest of the world.

Monotype is the largest OEM font licensor in the world. Nobody knows more about font licensing. There is nothing about game licensing on their web sites because they negotiate OEM licenses on a case by case basis.

This will happen a few times because Waymo has to learn how to detect a small animal running into the road. But Waymo will figure out how to keep it from happening and then every Waymo car will be able to avoid small animals running into the road. Which is much better than millions of human drivers having to learn it on their own.

This is not typical of the font industry. Most type designers are solo practitioners or small studios that license their work directly and treat customers well. The asshole in question here, Monotype, is owned by a private equity firm that overpaid for it, then bought some small font companies, and is now trying to sell the combined company for a markup of billions of dollars. But Monotype's revenues were hit hard by Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, so they are trying to make up for it by dramatically increasing licensing fees. The higher prices have turned off customers which is hurting sales. They also tried and failed at AI. And their distribution agreement with type designers got nasty so they have lost some popular typefaces that used to be sold on MyFonts. Now Monotype is floundering and has been laying people off. Nobody wants to buy the company and it is now probably worth less than the owners paid for it. What Monotype is doing to these Japanese developers is going to bite them in the ass; AI for rapidly developing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts is right around the corner and in a few years Monotype will end up in a price war with smaller rivals, which they will not win.

OEM licenses for fonts are not always perpetual. These Japanese companies probably had licenses that expired and got screwed when they had to renew. This kind of licensing is often beneficial for the licensee because they can buy a less expensive license then replace dated fonts in their products with new ones every few years.

Those were bailouts. This is an investment. The US government has a long and very successful track record of funding the development of computing technology. In this case itâ(TM)s just being done more directly than when it is done by funneling money through NASA or the military.

500 years of the occupants of Gropecunt Lane.

Given that most Bitcoin investors are just speculative hobbyists, a mixing service is a fun toy! Kind of like when all the open source nerds signed their emails with public keys so strong encrypted email was a fun hobby and totally not a way for organized criminals to communicate.

Giannandrea is the one nerd in the AI world who tried to build a product around a SLM running on-device. An AI that actually considers user privacy. Apple started designing chips for on-device AI processing in the 2010s and has been shipping them in its hardware since at least 2020. This stands in stark contrast to everybody else’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on datacenters. Did he pull it off? Well, no. But he did try to find Apple an alternative to getting totally in bed with that weirdo Sam Altman. Or handing all of our texts and emails and photos over to Google. Giannandrea had a dream, and while that dream failed, maybe it will inspire a future AI boffin to make it work.

The jobs that pay those salaries are typically in cities with a very high cost of living. $135k in London or New York isn’t a bad junior salary but people can do better on a lower salary somewhere else. And many of them do, which is why the pyramid is huge at the bottom.

The problem is that graduates who know how to research and reason and write will end up working at Starbucks. Short sighted employers are going to hire people who can cut costs by doing everything with AI, not people who want to take time doing it right. It will be a business disaster in the long run, but the CEOs don't care because they will get seven figure separation payouts.

But maybe down the line the smart people will get paid to clean up the mess. Like the good programmers who are now getting paid to fix AI generated software.

China has put years of work and billions of dollars into getting people to avoid sanctions by conducting international transactions in yuan. They don't want people switching to Tether!