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

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

#181

Post by lanternfish »

helge9210 wrote: post #179
logicchains wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're still supposed to put locks on your doors even though it's the police's 'job' to prevent property crime.

Moreover, I don't think many tech companies want to give the state the access required to impliment preventative security measures for them, they'd rather role them themselves to maintain control.

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

#182

Post by jjav »

keenreed wrote: post #90
blast wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not entirely wrong, but you're more wrong than right. For example, yes, a good paying SV job involves spending a lot on rent, but nowhere near "most of it"...very much the opposite. Yes there are issues, but it's not "how big of a scam", and by describing it that way you lose credibility.

When I looked a few years back, nice houses would go around 12k/month. Maybe shared condos are not expensive, but not everyone wants to live that way.

Your definition of nice is pretty over the top, even by SV standards, if you'd need 12K/mo to find a place.

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

#183

Post by presentation »

m_mueller wrote: post #132
temporalparts wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US? I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.

I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG. Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose. I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software , by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech spa…

Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American company?

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

#184

Post by helge9210 »

lanternfish wrote: post #181
helge9210 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You're still supposed to put locks on your doors even though it's the police's 'job' to prevent property crime. Moreover, I don't think many tech companies want to give the state the access required to impliment preventative security measures for them, they'd rather role them themselves to maintain control.

> You're still supposed to put locks on your doors

Locks are for honest people.

> to impliment preventative security measures for them

That's not a job of the state. The job of the state is to punish (cyber)criminals. And it's not the harshness of the punishment that matters, it's the inevitability.

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

#185

Post by cblconfederate »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #166

"To be sure, a great deal of content on the World Wide Web and in social media is produced and consumed with commercial intent, but a remarkable amount is produced entirely without a profit motive. Google economists have told me that only six percent of Google search result pages carry any advertising at all. The other 94% of pages are the product of the joyful exuberance of humanity, creating and sharing for the joy…

> nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero

Google has pretty much eaten all advertising they can eat, there is no more to eat no matter how many ads they add. They can pretty much set the prices of their ads arbitrarily high since they have control over both advertisers and publishers.

> financial services did not make the the list of exemplars

Yeah, from the outside , SV currently seems to be Finance #2: greed is good, morals are for losers, grow fast and gtfo mentality

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

#186

Post by lansdale10 »

DaedPsyker wrote: post #173
cblconfederate wrote: post #110

> 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.

The spirit is still there outside the USA, but especially developers from Europe catch on to the fact that their free labor is exploited by U.S. Foundation and Council members, who build their careers on the work of others.

This is not "ideological flamewar", it is a fact that international contributions are monetized and governed in America.

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

#187

Post by splittingTimes »

m_mueller wrote: post #132
temporalparts wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US? I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.

I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG. Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose. I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software , by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech spa…

I would even add that only a handful of companies out of SV did add real societal value and many of them with their dark engagement patterns are even detrimental.

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

#188

Post by m_mueller »

presentation wrote: post #183
m_mueller wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG. Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose. I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software , by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech spa…

Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American company?

you could say that, but certainly not an SV company.

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

#189

Post by sradman »

> as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered.

This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said:

> Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap.

Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests.

Our collective small minds couldn’t focus on anything but the people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard problem.

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

#190

Post by AussieWog93 »

I started a PhD in biomedical engineering back in 2017, coming from a EEE background. The topic I was studying was the application of machine learning for neurosignal decoding.

Imagine the development of a "thought keyboard" that could be used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited!

While it's true that the field had shifted towards machine learning in the decade preceding, that wasn't because ML techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact - there was strong evidence to suggest that the "ML revolution" would go nowhere, but that's where all the grant money was.

So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would get a "breakthrough" result that never generalised to other datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going through that I'm always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a PhD in Australia again.)

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