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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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171–180 of 302 posts

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet. Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.

Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome! It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)

5G FR2 is certainly fast but we already had "fast" (5Ghz Wi-Fi or wired Internet), and it's pretty harsh on mobile batteries. 5G FR1 is somewhat better than LTE but not really enough to enable new uses.

The real issue preventing new consumer uses is that wireless plans are expensive and have data limits. Driving that down presumably involves investing in the wireless ISP backend, which doesn't have much to do with the radio technology.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong people in tech in the Bay Area.

Probably most people I work with in their 30s or 40s are multimillionaires.

Definite humblebrag here.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#173

> The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence are still there Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors? Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation

There are sv open projects but many are extentions of some company effort, i.e pytorch/Facebook, tensorflow/Google.

Much of the traditional spirit of open source seems to be coming from Europe and South America.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#174
post #24

Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too. However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK. O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change i…

Oceania's willingness to be bold may be a good omen for their future

Oceania will be on the front lines of the geopolitical rivalry between China and the West. Australia is already hurting because China is screwing with their exports.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#175
post #24

Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too. However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK. O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change i…

What you say is true, but I wonder what you mean by "failed it's people". Because from what I saw it wasn't just really poor leadership. It was the prevalent attitude of individualism above everyone else that made things really bad in many western countries. People failed themselves. And great leaders aren't going to change that culture.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#176
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have to lose the status to do the experiment. There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.

> There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. All irrelevant. > Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing…

The root cause is people around the world still trust the US organization as a country, at least more than the others.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#177
post #24

Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New Zealand and Australia did well too. However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK. O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change i…

> O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development

Solving climate change in relevant timescales involves severe cuts to consumption, which will cause havoc because it will mess with all the economic growth projections people expect, which will cause short term pain even if it accomplishes long term gain. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#178
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. All irrelevant. > Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing…

The root cause is people around the world still trust the US organization as a country, at least more than the others.

Yeah and the terrirists hate you for your freedom.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#179

This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…

The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals,…

> The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity.

Let's drop "cyber" for a second.

Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom line. No one would say "They have to start investing more into security". It would be normal for the company to totally offload the problem on the home state.

Now, getting back to "cybersecurity": why company is supposed to handle it instead of offloading the problem on the state?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#180
post #77
post #45

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

I can't figure it out. I'm fairly well travelled in the world, and San Francisco is my least favorite of any city I've ever encountered. But some tell me I just don't understand, which, in fairness, is also a true statement.

But San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. For most of the history of Silicon Valley, SF wasn't any part of it. It is only in the last decade (roughly) that a handful of high profile companies have established in SF, so arguably, perhaps, SF is today part of Silicon Valley.

Even today, none of FANG is HQ'd in San Francisco.

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