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I am not sure what he is talking about. I work on AI/Machine Learning and I can't think of any major paper that came out of China.
Why do we persist in this old fashioned notion that Nation States are the axis on which “innovation” turns? The brainpower, resources, and motivation for innovating increasingly lie with huge multinational tech companies, not nation states. And they largely don’t care where you live - if you’re smart they want to hire you (unlike nation states with their Byzantine immigration policies)
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There's a lot of "follow your heart", "live your dreams" stuff going on around there. I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.
> I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time. That's not what kids want to hear these days. They want life to be easy, and a big government ready to issue a wide safety net for them if they make bad choices in life. Perpetual childhood.
“Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.
None of that is true now. It’s drilled into high school kids that they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything. Then when they graduate they discover an awful jobs market. As for buying a house... better wait for a relative to die and hope they were generous to you in the will because there’s no other way you’re ever going to make that deposit.
The idea that young people today and spoiled and rely on handouts is a nonsensical meme.
> "America does not have enough people with those skills." Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "…
That might carry over to education. The biggest mistake the US seems to be making is centralising and standardising a whole bunch of functions (education, healthcare, etc) at the federal level. Then if the anything goes wrong there is no escape. And the US federal government doesn't seem to be up to the task on a good day.
The US has always had a big ignorant population dragged along by a small core of ingenious, often foreign, visionaries. That doesn't seem to have changed recently.
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It's because people being educated has become 'being elite'. Even in our own profession, I find it difficult to communicate with smart people who lack foundational knowledge, falter, ask for help and then ask me how I knew the right answer. I've had more than person tell me that there's no way this was taught at a university (threading, OS knowledge)
I have a BS in CS. 90% of the concurrency I know is self taught, 98% of the I/O I know is self taught , 85% of the networking I know is self taught. I went to RPI, which is not an ivy school but it is a good engineering school.
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Really, you "checked local walmarts" to inventory all their televisions? That's the biggest bunch of horse shit I've ever read, even on HN. According to the government, only 7% of recipients used any part of their stimulus money to buy household items. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/receipt-and-use-of-sti...
I think it remains a valid question though. What if we had handled the unemployment by creating infrastructure jobs instead of universal handouts? That has the added benefit of increasing the productive output of our economy.
But the broader question, could/should the US use this moment of mass unemployment to create infrastructure jobs: IMO, yes. But it’ll never happen because someone will say the word “socialism” and it’ll immediately become politically unimaginable.
The problem starts with culture. In high school, people want to be athletes and pop singers or idk actors. Social skills are over valued. Also the way science is taught in the US discourages exploration and encourages "draw indide the circle". Not to method how hostile academia is.
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Google Fi has been a godsend compared to the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and TMobile.
And then just like so many other Google initiatives, they got bored abandoned it and in some cases left damaged roads in their wake. https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-say... https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/louisville-to-fix-google-... In the meantime AT&T has been rolling out gigabit up/down for the past 5 years. I got AT&T four years ago and the price has been $70/month no extra fees.
Google has had no serious innovation in 20 years. Issue the dividend already and stop calling yourself a technology growth company.
MapReduce, Spanner, Protocol Buffers, Gmail, Go Lang, Android, Chrome, Microservices, Borg, Tensorflow, TPUs, Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Docs, Google Translate, Dremel, Duplex, Chromebooks, ChromeCast, Daydream, mobile first development, BeyondCorp, V8, Kubernetes, LevelDB...
Those are just some of things I can think of from the top of my head and doesn't include the machine learning research that google and deepmind are doing.
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The answer is on who you expect to innovate more: big corps that can afford to file, defend, and acquire patents or individual makers? America will win only when we can support both use cases.
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "America will win"? What do you mean win? Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off?…