tal

My understanding is that America doesn't actually have 5G telco equipment manufacturers

it's a weak point in the US tech lineup

which is one reason that there was such a major kerfuffle several years back over it. The US does not want China in its sensitive telco infrastructure. There was some point I remember where some US senator said that if Europe wasn't going to support Nokia or Ericsson

Europe does have some entrants -- and just let Huawei take the 5G market, that the US would need to buy one of them. There was some real concern from the US that Europe might just accept ceding the 5G provider market, which would make the US dependent on China.

kagis

This is probably what I remember. I could have sworn that it was a senator, but maybe there were multiple statements or it was actually AG Barr.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/white-house-dismisses-idea-of-us-buying-nokia-ericsson-to-challenge-huawei-idUSKBN2012A5/

White House dismisses idea of U.S. buying Nokia, Ericsson to challenge Huawei

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Friday and the top White House economic adviser dismissed an unusual suggestion from U.S. Attorney General William Barr that the United States consider taking control of two major foreign rivals of China-based Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow added later on Friday that the United States was working closely with Nokia and Ericsson, saying the companies' equipment was essential to the buildout of 5G infrastructure. But he said the "U.S. government is not in the business of buying companies, whether they're domestic or foreign," adding that "there's nothing to prohibit American tech companies from acquiring" them.

"That's the plan the president has endorsed and will be carrying forward," Pence said, adding that the United States can expand 5G "by using the power of the free market and American companies."

In a remarkable statement underscoring how far the United States may be willing to go to counter Huawei, Barr on Thursday disclosed proposals "by the United States aligning itself with Nokia and/or Ericsson."

EDIT: IIRC, Cisco or some other US company that I can't remember made some 5G hardware, but they weren't on par with Nokia and Ericsson.

I think that, TP-Link aside, consumer broadband routers in general have been a security problem.

• They are, unlike most devices, directly Internet-connected. That means that they really do need to be maintained more stringently than a lot of devices, because everyone has some level of access to them.

• People buying them are very value-conscious. Your typical consumer does not want to pay much for their broadband router. Businesses are going to be a lot more willing to put money into their firewall and/or pay for ongoing support. I think that you are going to have a hard time finding a market with consumers willing to pay for ongoing support for their consumer broadband router.

• Partly because home users are very value-conscious, any such provider of router updates might try to make money by data-mining activity. If users are wary of this, they are going to be even more unlikely to want to accept updates.

• Home users probably don't have any sort of computer inventory management system, tracking support for and replacing devices that fall out of support.

• People buying them often are not incredibly able to assess or aware of security implications.

• They can trivially see all Internet traffic in-and-out. They don't need to ARP-poison caches or anything to try to see what devices on the network are doing.

My impression is that there has been some movement from ISPs away from bring-your-own-device service, just because those ISPs don't want to deal with compromised devices on their network.

There are probably some communities that would be interested in this.

I think that it has very limited relevance to !Europe@feddit.org.

Perplexity isn't even a European company.

You jest, but there was the "5G causes COVID-19" people.

car chatbot

I mean, xAI isn't specific to cars.

The man had the most tax-optimized filing for a hot dog stand in the history of the United States.

Axie Infinity

I'm not familiar with Axie Infinity, so I can't tell you off-the-cuff.

It's showing cell phones as marionettes. Marionettes are sometimes used as a metaphor to indicate that someone else is, behind the scenes, controlling something. Here, the company is controlling social media accounts.

A16Z should be shut down

No point. I'm sure that they're not the only ones, and there will be more.

One possibility is that we just have to have expensive identities

the "Reddit model" where anyone who wants to can just create a new, anonymous identity doesn't work. We can maybe be pseudonymous, but we might not be able to create lots of identities the way we do today.

Or maybe we'll have to have a more-elaborate reputation system.

pyramids schemes

Pyramid schemes are not legal in the US.

There are some systems that have some aspects in common with pyramid schemes that are legal (Social Security sometimes gets called a "pyramid scheme" by people that don't like it, for example, and MLM schemes are legal, though they can, in practice, partially work something like pyramid schemes).

Lemmygrad.ml should be interesting.

That's possible.

That being said, John Maynard Keynes also made a similar prediction:

NPR Planet Money:

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren." It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week.

The specific quote:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930)

Basically, had we decided to leave our standard of living where it was in 1930, we could have worked two days a week. But...that's not generally what people wanted to do. We wanted to take advantage of new stuff that people produced to appeal to us, jack up our standard of living.

In the past, we've always managed to come up with new, appealing things that wind up making use of that new productive capacity. Climate control or anime video games or more space per person in housing.

Is it possible that in the future, we will be unable to make use of scarce human labor to provide something that humans want? Maybe! And that's something to think about. But simply the fact that human labor is finite, that things that involve human labor can be used like a status symbol, might itself fill the problem. We shall see.

One thing that I do agree with is that transition from the world of today to a world with AGI is going to be a very disruptive transition.