Steven Sinofsky

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. CS Lewis

This graph is so important. The implications on today's quality of discourse are significant.

Historically, finance as been the first scale adopter for every technology I have lived through. First to PC. First to GUI. First to C/S. First to Unix. First to WWW. First to Mobile. Even first to things that died like OS/2 and Palm Pilot. I think the clinical trial use case is interesting but in terms of cost of testing, that is primarily gated over human trials / subjects and the lockup Pharma has on that process excepting the regulation of steps/evidence by governments.

@stevesi Why do you think finance is "most excited" about AI? I work in finance and don't feel AI will make that big of an impact. Clinical trials seems like an obvious use case. Decrease the cost of testing.

If I had to pick an industry at the top of the list most excited about AI it would be finance. Oh look, that's a third of the state GDP:

@JoannaStern Yes. Completely. Chat is in the corner but nothing is available from launch other than launching and managing stuff. Like if gmail showed you only an expandable root folder at launch. Plus private and temporary seem completely missing. And delete chats is only archive.👿

So did OpenAI basically just destroy the ChatGPT Mac app? I'm great with Codex and Work being integrated but nobody puts Chat in the corner.

@DrScottClark And nice to see you show up with the new "algorithm"!

@stevesi That's fair. Now we just need models that work natively with differential privacy so everything is always encrypted and there's nothing to seize, until quantum breaks crypto in 2030...

Absolute minimum is 4th amendment. The problem is establishing probable cause will be (as we have learned with cell phones, GPS, street cams, and more) a pretty low bar. 5th is tricky because there's no compelled speech. Maybe this is part of the penumbra? jk

Creating weights is clearly first amendment and the weapons claim I would bet is as well given the Bernstein case on encryption. Using weights feels like object code which can be copyright. The 4th is more about due process as it does not confer "privacy" just process which is why it worries me given what's happened w/ all digital info.

@stevesi I think it'll also be interesting to see if open weights is 1st amendment and if using it is 2nd (since itar claims some are a weapon for non-export), then 4th for using it locally and keeping it yours.

@ramez My point was how they got started. I also think the US market knowledge with Solar as a customer and pushing like roof panels was a positive assist. Much of the argument around tech mfg and the moat China has boils down to US investment and being a client pushing the learning.

On EVs, some benefit to China 5-10 years ago. Not in the last few years in which Chinese companies have gained the advantage. On solar, it went the other way. Tesla / SolarCity was never a major solar manufacturer or a big customer. Tesla PV manufacturing efforts struggled, so they shifted to buying Chinese panels. Germany was an important customer, though. Chinese solar manufacturing really started in response to German solar subsidies and the booming German market. No shortage of customers in compute. And China can and is doing teardowns of ASML machines. Physical process is the main advantage US companies have right now, and that's something China is adept at catching up on. Software won't remain a barrier. One-time software moats like CUDA aren't anymore, and export controls are just accelerating that.

China produces solar, batteries, EVs, nuclear power, & robots at a lower cost, higher volume, & often higher quality than the US. It's naive to think they won't catch and surpass the US on GPUs and AI compute. Export restrictions can only slow China's AI efforts temporarily.

One of these is illegal and the other legal.

In the US we see this in "company formation" which is also a measure of entity (LLC or CORP) formation simply for liability or tax/estate/privacy reasons versus economic output. The rise in "company formation" for COVID was mostly a rise in fraud to obtain free money. Even that associated "job creation" was frequently friends and family frauding together. Still local politicians love to count this company formation data as a measure.

This is one possibility. Another is that the fraud methods vary by country. ?

@asif_aleem @ry_serene The UX that almost always wins for tech products is "feels in control" versus "automagic." People like automatic, but it needs to work 100%. If it works—for them—99% of the time then all they remember is it being 1% wrong. Repeatedly wrong 1% of the time is "can't control."

@ry_serene Physical controls keep winning for one reason, and it is not nostalgia: you can work them without looking. A touchscreen charges every action in eye contact, and in a moving car that bill is paid in meters. Feedback you can feel is the feature, not the styling.

Physical switches and buttons are highly desirable in this age of touch-screenification, but these are two of the most regressive trends in modern design.

Arm CEO Rene Haas makes a great point in the AI data center debate. The same factions who railed against the gutting of the U.S. manufacturing base to China risk repeating that mistake if the AI factory ecosystem gets blocked domestically. Tae: AI is going to happen. Do we want the jobs and manufacturing ecosystem here in the U.S. or not? Or are we going to be dumb and defeat ourselves again? Welp.

@KairosPraxis @firstadopter It is a physical plant that requires massive IP and capital. While an electronics factory provides direct employment, AI will provide significant indirect employment via the uses of AI and AI-powered devices and factories. It's an upleveling like we saw with previous tech waves.

@firstadopter I don't think the factory analogy is accurate. Datacenters employ a lot of folks during the construction phase but in steady-state, you barely need 200-300 people.

At first you think you don't need a speaker but I think speaker is the wrong word. It is a listener (which could sound creepy given early travails with these devices)—it isn't speaking as much as listening and then answering. I never use my Google/Apple speakers for music/pods. What I find is that I use the speaker quite a bit for "answers" but the problem is I don't want to place multiple speakers in the home. That gets right back to the need to wear the device and watch or just phone are the best entry points. If my wifi access points listened that would be cool. I have Sony TVs that can be Google listeners which is awesome but they have the challenge of being highly directional and overly sensitive even at low setting (so nearby rooms bot hear a query), and Google only.

+1 for Oreos, O-R-E-O FTW

@mgsiegler Certainly no one would have thought a slab of glass would become a "wearable"...nor EarPods then AirPods. Just like no one thought balls of foam connected by a wire connected to a tape deck would be a "wearable."

Pretty good guess from May 2025... spyglass.org/the-anti-iphon…

@shaunmmaguire @EylonALevy No one made any sense or had any coherency in this. “Occupation” “defense” and so on.

@EylonALevy That is true

‼️Holy shit Jeremy Scahill presses Rep. Ro Khanna to say he supports the October 7 Massacre. Khanna: “It’s a scale of 1-10. You’re a 10, I’m saying let’s go 6, 7, 8.”

Data centers haven’t been raising residential bills. The sharpest increases are found in states that have pursued the country’s most aggressive climate policies, not those with the most data centers. California, with some of the nation’s fastest-rising electricity rates, has seen relatively modest data-center growth. Virginia, where data centers consume more than a fifth of the state’s electricity, has experienced price increases near the national average. @Shawn_Regan in the City Journal Substack: cityjournal.substack.com/p/data-centers…

@jasoncrawford People rallying against AI and/or data centers on TikTok, bluesky, or reddit certainly make that point clear.

All tech starts out as a luxury, then becomes a commodity, then a necessity.