Maybe, I mean it is all random conjecture. We have only the facts “US=more innovation, EU=less” not any real way to determining the cause. However I lived in the UK for a few months back when it was part of the EU and it didn’t feel any less free then the USA did. Granted I didn’t try to start a business in the UK, and I just kept working for my US company taking pay in my US account, and paying US taxes, and paying for stuff in the UK. Buildings were older, plumbing was weird, and random things seemed very outdated, and other things seemed more modern then in the US (at the time home internet was way ahead, in the US the backwaters had dial up and very rarely ISDN at 64 to 120Kbits while the UK seemed otherwise have at least th slow megabits even in the backwaters).

So if I had to make a guess I would say “personal freedom for the innovative individual” would not really be a thing the US has a monopoly on. If anything lots of studies have been done showing the US healthcare system tends to be a substantial drag on people being self employed. I know my personal insurance has gone from about $280 a paycheck to $3700 a month since leaving my last full time employer and starting my own company.

Yep, it is irksome wondering where the 10-20 seconds getting past UFI is going, but BIOS use to explicitly show a counter as it caused through RAM writing and reading various patterns, and you could skip it (ill-advised, but you could). Once you get past UFI modern boots seem to take tens of seconds, and in ye olden times the filesystem check on spinning rust was measured in minutes. If you couldn’t skip the check (at some point in the 1990s it became common for filesystems to note when they are in a “clean” state, on some systems between writes, on others only when the filesystem was unmounted) that could be five, ten, 15 minutes, on very large systems (which to be clear were much smaller then terabyte disks seen today) you could get into the half an hour range.

So the march of progress gives us sub-two-minute boot times today, and also the march of impatiance gives us the ability to get irritated at it.

Which to be fair to those who get irritated at 120 second ticking by with no good idea as to where they are getting spent, that is about the only way someone who can improve it will end up working on it. It is also the only reason it doesn’t still take “a noticeable part of an hour” because somebody in the past didn’t sit down and during that long wait think about how amazing it was that the system would take a mere 23 minutes to boot, and how booting was now super reliable and not prone to just not boot 3 out of 4 times or whatever. Rather someone got pissed off that it was taking 23 minutes and went and found some part that “took a while” and made it faster (or got rid of it), lather rinse, repeat until we get to today’s two minute boot. Progress depends on people not enjoying past gains and being pissed off with the current state of the art!

I’m guessing the shorter lifespan has a lot more to do with our deeply crappy healthcare system than any sort of restructuring laws. Deeper debit you could have a real point, being out of work with very little safety net makes it easy to run up debit.

Could be, but on the other hand something is different about how many new product categories come out of the US and the EU compared to investment. Is it just an accident that Apple, Netflix, Google and Amazon are all US companies? Could be. I kind of think there is some sort of systemic difference though. Maybe it isn’t “cheep restructuring”, I mean if it is worth billions of dollars to try to design a good EV maybe it doesn’t make any real difference if during unwinding VW has to pay out 3+ years of salary while in the USA barely over half a year’s salary is adequate. I mean the project already cost billions, what is another few billion? VW can’t actually have paid more to the workers it let go then they sent to Rivian to buy rights to some of their software (which I actually thought was a LOAN which makes it a bit cheaper).

It can’t be that your schools suck, because they don’t. It isn’t a lack of safety net making people worried to take a risk on a startup, what with having actual healthcare. Maybe you culturally have a fear of failure we don't? Or maybe it is all luck?

Sure, but in this case the money you invest is for material, buildings, equipment, and salary. Take your risk and try to make something new, and say run it for 3 years. It doesn’t work out. You sell the left over material, sell the buildings, or use both on another project. The salary is spent, you hired people and they got paid for 3 years. The product didn’t work, maybe the people you hired were bad at making the product you wanted, maybe you described the wrong product, maybe they made a great one but people don’t want it, maybe someone else made a better one. Salary is spent though.

As far as I know we are in agreement on that.

However money you have not yet spent on salary is still owed in the EU. Multiple years worth of salary for your employees. Like “hey too bad you all suck at designing EVs, go find a new job, and here have 3 years of pay while you are out job hunting” In the USA you get 7 months pay (on average) when your project doesn’t pan out.

Which means when an EU company is thinking about making a new thing they have to budget 3 years per employee extra salary. Result being maybe you decide not to pay as much salary, or you don’t take a risk on something nearly as wild, or in fact you take a risk on very very very little. In the US it means when you job hunt yes you have to worry a little more about going to a company doing something “new and exciting” where the thing might not work out. However it also means all the “new and exciting” is making new jobs, so more likely you can find one in the first place (or to replace the one you lost).

Yes, the exposure is unequal, if you go work for VW’s new EV division and they are successful you probably get nothing other then to “keep your job”. In the US you go and work for Rivian as a startup it is likely that what happens is they fail and you lose your job (and they owe you 6~7 months pay if they have it), and if they succeed? You have some stock, maybe it ends up being worth something and you can retire on it.

It is similar to the US being more lax in layoffs means during economic upswings hires new employees much sooner and at a much greater rate then he EU because they don’t get burned as badly if the upswing ends. I’ve been laid off twice in the decades I have ben working, and it does suck. On the other hand if we had EU labor laws I likely would not have gotten hired nearly as fast after my layoffs (~2 months both times, both while I still had severance pay to support myself with, the second time was during the gardening period and I actually had to get the new company to start employing me LATER then they wanted so I could collect the whole thing!), I have friends in the EU that haven’t recovered from the same layoff. It has been 2+ years.

Interesting, in the USA leases normally do not end with you owning the item. A typical house lease ends with you moving out or “extending” the lease for another month (or several), or getting another year’s lease frequently at a newer higher price. A car lease tends to have a buy out clause where you can purchase the car for a set price which normally ends up being above the “blue book” value at that time (the car manufacturer and bank tend to have better guesses about that value then the lessor, not that they negotiate much anyway), although you can frequently also extend a car lease a month at a time if for eample you are buying a new car from the same manufacturer and it is in high demand or even not quite out next. Not all car leases can be bought out (Tesla apparently does not have a buy out clause, they take 100% of the old ones back). Of those that can be bought out though a pretty low percentage are.

So let’s say you work at a company, and they have an OKR “use AI to improve productivity”. If you aren’t familiar with OKRs, they are something that your manager tells you to do, and the more of them you do the more likely you are to get a raise, or bonus, or at least keep your job. Sometimes they are flat out assigned to you, sometimes you get to pick off a list, sometimes you and your manager come up with them together. You manager likely has an OKR handed down to them to get their employees to use more AI, so this isn’t a pure blue sky thought experiment. It is a realistic situation.

So you end up with this OKR. You can ignore it and at the end of performance cycle you can either fess up “I didn’t even try”, or you can say “I gave it a shot and AI didn’t help”, or you can flat out lie “AI helped some”, or “AI helped a lot”. Which do you do? Which do you do if you were also pretty lazy on the other OKRs and really have almost nothing good to report? If you aren’t lazy yourself you already know any OKR with no real way to double check is something you report having achieved because you were too lazy to do any of ‘em.

If you aren’t lazy you have a bunch of OKRs that you actually managed to do (get 90% of TPS reports in on time, screen all your bugs at least twice a week, whatever). You also likely have a few you didn’t, and you have this one here. Maybe you didn’t bother with AI which gives you the chouces up above in “lazy”, or maybe you gave it a shot and it didn’t help, so you can report a failure, but you worked so hard on the other OKRs, do you really want to jeopardize your bonus because you have this AI OKR?

If you are super honest maybe you will report the AI OKR as a bust. Maybe your company actually has a “if you aren’t failing at least 20% of your OKRs you didn’t set high enough expectations” policy, and sure you can pass or fail some number of the unverifiable OKRs as needed to hit that magic success rate...but that is rare, it is far more common for a company to treat OKRs as “more is better!”.

Plus even if you are fundamentally an honest person, I’m sure you used AI once or twice to summarize someone else’s long emails into something shorter and maybe inaccurate, but surly that saved time, right? At least as long as they weren’t too inaccurate! Or maybe you used it to fluff up a short email/report into something longer, even if you then spent just as long double checking that it isn’t now inaccurate as you would have fluffing it up yourself (plus now everyone else ends up with longer emails they use AI to summarize...). Or you write code for a living, and you AI’ed up some code, and that saved you like 10 hours of coding, I mean it cost 45 hours of extra debugging, but you saved 10 hours somewhere, so you can report meeting your OKR without a lie!

If you are asked by someone outside your management chain, and outside your company the honest answer is somewhere between “I didn’t try”, to “it didn't help”, to “it saved me time in one place, but maybe cost me more in another place”, and occasionally “yeah it was helpful somewhere"

So workers are reporting “yeah, AI makes me more productive” up the management chain because that makes rewards flow back down the management chain. Which makes CEO’s think “this shit works!”, I mean it is exacerbates the problem of upper management job being the kind of thing AI can do anyway, of taking in a ton of data and making choices without understanding what the fuck is really going on anyway, so CEO’s already see AI “working” and they are inclined to believe it, especially when their whole management chain reports it as working...

Well it makes better music then I do. I can’t sing worth shit, and I’m not much better with instruments.

However band camp banning genAI can mean a lot of things, like genAI bothers band camp’s customers and they want customers to be happy. Or worse yet genAI is better at saturating the recommendation engines, but bad at closing sales so now Bandcamp is recommending stuff people don’t like, and won’t buy and that is crowding out stuff they would have bought.

If people actually like genAI it is foolish for Bandcamp to ban it because they would be making money selling it and would make less money selling only human created music.

Of corse this is actually dealing with huge numbers of people, so “nobody” like genAI produced music really means “most people”, maybe you love it. I mean some people like Phillip Glass, but most people do not. Whatever slice of people actually liked genAI music are not going to enjoy the results of a ban, but most people will.

Right, from the rental companies point of view your local bank is more reliable, but that isn’t the entity that cares about the risk. The risk is being evaluated by (or at least on the behalf of) the card the transaction is placed on. So your local card might care more about fraud, or has some actual experience with that company (and it is shady), or otherwise thinks it is a more risky transaction then the card from another country. Again this isn’t about the actual risk because it is the same either way, it is about how the different banks estimate the risks.

The clerk in this case I’m theorizing knows the “happy path” of credit card is swiped and the transaction is authorized, and all the other things the terminal does are a giant miss-mash of “the bad thing happened, that card will never work”. They should know the red CI light means “check ID and press the right combination of six buttons to indicate what kind of ID was checked” and the red D is “this deadbeat ain’t gonna pay, kick ‘em out”, and red CA is “tell them to call their credit card company and sort it out”, and CE is “communications error, reset the internet connection and try again”, and CP is “act casual, go in the back & call the police, give them the product if you can afford it, delay them a bit if you feel brave”, and so on. However they don’t know any of that. Maybe they don’t read well, or they were never given the book just a 5 minute tutorial that only covered one or two of the errors so they treat them all alike. Or they just don’t remember which are which. I mean maybe they don’t get two letter codes maybe they are all numeric.

Or maybe my theory is crap, I mean it has some strengths, but also holes. Maybe it ain’t the real deal, or maybe it is. I think it is plausible but hey, if you don’t like it, keep looking for an explanation.

Easier to tip in advance assuming serve will be good enough to justify the tip and reduce after the fact if it isn’t.

Clearly many people have a different opinion, however Clicks has a MagSafe physical keyboard that is intended to be used with an iPhone, and like many BT keyboards lets you switch between multiple paired devices (sadly “only” 3). I would say that is about as close as anyone who isn’t Apple will get to being able to make an iPhone with a physical keyboard.

Last month they had a pre-order price of I think $80, which I decided was may foolishly expensive, but also maybe a great deal and I bought one for myself as a delayed Christmas gift (maybe it will show up in time to be a birthday gift to myself). So if you actually are interested in a physical keyboard and were only not interested “because Android isn’t iPhone” you might want to take an actual look. If you were not interested because you like the on screen keyboard, fair enough, $80 is a lot of money for “maybe a nice keyboard, maybe crap” plus a “under 300Mah battery” (or maybe it isn’t, have you seen how much MagSafe kickstands sell for?)

Wind and solar tend to produce at different times, as in wind production tends to be higher when solar is lower. So if you have a lot of solar built out but not enough storage to bridge the gaps wind will make the most of what storage you do have by providing power mostly when solar doesn’t. (not so much “at night”, but other then night time either solar or wind produces well around 90% of the time in many areas while solar or wind alone is much closer to 50% of the time)

I’m not saying wind is better, but if you have a lot of solar already wind can be more useful in getting closer to uniform generation, which vastly reduces the cost of energy storage.

I can’t say why integrating them would be better, but I can say not integrating them has real advantages. For example adding a large storage facility could take excess power from wind and solar at different times. As an independent unit it could also retroactively add storage capacity for prior projects, or if this project turns out to have issues the storage could be useful for other projects. If the wind generation is a huge success but the storage system is a dud replacing it with a different storage system is simpler if it doesn’t also involve messing with the generation systems.

Depends. Storage is good if you fall short of generating enough power to meet demand, but you don’t need it if you are able to meet demand. So if for example you have some sort of LPG power generation that is meeting demand but also stupefyingly expensive, or polluting more then you want adding wind so you can cut back on the other generation is fine. If you aren’t otherwise able to meet demand more intermittent generation without more storage can still be valuable, if the existing intermittent generation and the new one tend to be low at different times. For example if you have a lot of solar adding a lot of wind just looking at uncorrelated percentages looks dumb, but in the real world wind tends to generate well at times that solar does not (stormy weather) so the two are much more complimentary then you might think.

To be fair this is mostly my experience from doing small off grid systems, and a utility scale system does have different dynamics (more consistent usage patterns, and less ability to change usage patterns to match supply, and much much higher cost of building out anything that handles peak load).

(replying to just the subject line)

Never agree to be bought by Meta/FB, I mean that is good advice in a narrow context. It is also similar advice with “google” as the acquiring company. A little less so with “Apple” as the acquiring company. I mean being acquired by anyone takes control of the destiny out of your hands, and it also takes most of the control out of your hands. In exchange for losing control over the fate of the company it places in your hands either or both a large pile of cash or stock in the profitable new owner.

So your advice is basically “if someone wants to give you a half billion dollars for your game studio, don’t”.

The more nuanced and more true bit of advice is: “When you sign your company over for life changing money, maybe generational wealth, you lose the company. They will promise you will still run it (as a division inside the parent), and that may even be true for a while, but they have control not you. Just expect to lose it. If that feels like a good trade, take it, if not, well, stay scrappy!”. Of all the companies I’ve ever built I would trade any of them for a few million bucks. After all I can always start a new one. Worst case I’m prevented form starting a new one for a decade or so while I still get paid. (non-competes in CA can be enforced but only while the other party keeps paying you a “reasonable” salary, so if you are making say $300k in cash and $500k in stock a year and you quit and they want to enforce a decade long non-compete they have to continue roughly that level of payment, not sure if they need to keep paying your healthcare, but at that salary level that is mostly irrelevant anyway...)