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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

#281

Post by busterarm »

caslon wrote: post #277
busterarm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was. Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to ideas. It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's just that they are in proximity to money. Now the business people and their greed and money are leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?

"give money" This isn't what happens. SV worked fine before there was money there, they'll work fine after. No VC is going to stop throwing money with conditions at people in the Valley, because they're not stupid, and they know how to make more. They're just going to tell other people to leave.

Capital is cyclical and we're moving out of the phase that's favorable to VCs literally right now. We're in a consolidation period and winners/losers are going to be picked very soon. Funding has been slowing down a lot.

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

#282

Post by AussieWog93 »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #212
AussieWog93 wrote: post #190

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…

Forgive me for my ignorance, but could the issue have not been the ML but rather, put simply, the input data? Is it the case that we truly know what signals to measure to get a clear indication of intent? It seems to me the answer is no (then ML is not going to help)?

You've hit the nail on the head. There were actually impressive trials done wherein researchers used invasive sensors that penetrated the brain tissue itself and directly measured neutral spikes.

The idea that ML could magically classify signals from sensors above the dura/skull was laughable. Your signal (and therefore training data) is affected by basically any thought of action the user has, and is then spatially low pass filtered by a big fat slab of bone and flesh.

Imagine trying to train a "cat recogniser" by showing it low-resolution pictures of a random location in a room where a cat is. It was a joke then and I suspect still is now.

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

#283

Post by Ichthypresbyter »

patja wrote: post #234
chadash wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe this is true. Wealthy companies that do business in dangerous countries tend to pay quite a bit for security of key employees. If you are a white collar worker of MegaCorp Oil traveling to Iraq for business, you will be provided with security. If you are a local Iraqi working in the oil fields, you can probably expect less security, precisely because your loss won’t affect the bottom line. But even so…

This reminds me that there is a fascinating Econtalk podcast episode on the subject of how the kidnapping insurance market works. Companies who have employees working in parts of the world where they are at risk of kidnapping for ransom have access to insurance against this risk. Two of the things that struck me about this market are (a) the insurance companies require their customers to get serious about mitigating…

The idea of an insurance policy you have to keep secret reminds me of chancel repair insurance in England.

Because of various arcane feudal remnants, the ownership of certain pieces of land comes with an obligation to pay for repairs to the local church building. This can be very expensive, so buyers of land where there is a possibility that this liability might exist are advised to buy insurance to cover it.

This insurance is very cheap, because it's quite rare for this liability to be discovered- usually it's a one-off payment of about £30-50 on buying the property. It is, however, a standard term in the policy that it is void if you tell anyone that it exists.

The reason for this is that, while the liability for repairs to any given church originally attached to one piece of land, this land has often been subdivided. In this case, the owners of all the pieces of land are jointly and severally liable for repairs- in other words, the church can go after any one of them for the full cost. And, of course, a property owner with insurance is a more attractive target as they're more likely to be able to pay, and to do so without making unpleasant headlines about how they might lose their home because of an obscure mediaeval law.

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

#284

Post by ping_pong »

onethought wrote: post #149
ping_pong wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QR codes are Japanese not Chinese. Contactless payment systems are everywhere now, the big push being COVID. Taiwan isn't China, any Taiwanese will tell you that. Taiwan did a lot of things right when it came to the COVID response, but it's easy to do when you have a population of 23 million on a tiny island. I have several friends who are living in Taiwan and I've been jealous of them throughout the pandemic because…

I never said Taiwan was part of China... in fact I mentioned them both separately by name... which would be weird if I was saying they were the same right? #strawman >biggest creator of wealth in the world Amazon you mean? Or do you mean Tesla? Or Microsoft?... oh wait... none of them are from SV.

Yes, it was weird that you mentioned Taiwan when I mentioned China.

Tesla is in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Uber, Twitter, the list goes on and on. China takes US ideas and copies them, and then releases them in China where they don't have to compete against the US originals. It's a simple fact.

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

#285

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

It isn't kidnapping - operating under physical assumptions betrays a lack of understanding of the digital. It is the same fallacy as the airforce roots in thinking that the best defense is a good offense for cybersecurity.

We don't have wars where engineers do some work and render soldiers intrinsically immune to grenades but we can prevent buffer overflow attacks by not using bad functions. We don't need to develop new police practice to deal with every new house design or modification.

Especially given that computers themselves are hijackable you cannot rely upon ad bacculum cybersecurity.

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

#286

Post by caslon »

busterarm wrote: post #281
caslon wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"give money" This isn't what happens. SV worked fine before there was money there, they'll work fine after. No VC is going to stop throwing money with conditions at people in the Valley, because they're not stupid, and they know how to make more. They're just going to tell other people to leave.

Capital is cyclical and we're moving out of the phase that's favorable to VCs literally right now. We're in a consolidation period and winners/losers are going to be picked very soon. Funding has been slowing down a lot.

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-2020-funding-and-exi...

Global VC Report 2020: Funding And Exits Blow Past 2019 Despite Pandemic Headwinds

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

#287

Post by onethought »

ping_pong wrote: post #284
onethought wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said Taiwan was part of China... in fact I mentioned them both separately by name... which would be weird if I was saying they were the same right? #strawman >biggest creator of wealth in the world Amazon you mean? Or do you mean Tesla? Or Microsoft?... oh wait... none of them are from SV.

Yes, it was weird that you mentioned Taiwan when I mentioned China. Tesla is in the heart of Silicon Valley. Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Uber, Twitter, the list goes on and on. China takes US ideas and copies them, and then releases them in China where they don't have to compete against the US originals. It's a simple fact.

So what is Tencent a copy of?

And which application does wechat copy? Or Weibo?

What is Huawei a copy of?

Your simple fact, sounds awfully like racism.

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

#288

Post by webmaven »

Clewza313 wrote: post #152
weinzierl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of wo…

Superconductors, buckyballs, artificial diamonds etc are all quite sexy and easy to grasp, so they have a big profile in popular news despite their comparative lack of utility, much more so than (until recently) incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about mRNA, convoluted neural networks and whatnot. That said, materials science is vital for incremental improvements like modern composite airplanes or SpaceX rockets etc, and i…

> That said, materials science is vital for incremental improvements like modern composite airplanes or SpaceX rockets etc, and if we ever do get to space elevators or room-temperature superconductors, the potential is life-changing.

There are a lot of other directions that materials science is exploring that might turn out to be transformative. Higher energy densities and power densities in batteries and capacitors, weldable ceramics, thin film thermal insulators, electroactive polymers, tunable optical refraction and reflection, biocompatible materials for implants, etcetera, etc.

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

#289

Post by webmaven »

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…

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

To a certain extent it does get offloaded, just like other crimes. But also like other crimes, businesses have a role to play in prevention, and basic competency in security should be expected.

It's 2021. If you employ more security guards than cybersecurity pros, you may be doing it wrong.

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

#290

Post by randomsearch »

maccaw wrote: post #165
randomsearch wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a genuine question: have the tech companies done much to help out with the homelessness and crime rate? For example, through funding homeless shelters? I ask because I thought SF wasn’t a very nice city, due to the large scale of homelessness. Seeing how much money there was, I wondered why tech companies didn’t just throw money at the problem so that they’d have a nicer environment to live in. I know that ho…

Yes, they threw a huge amount of money at the problem. https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/state-and-local-ta...

There's an assumption that if you pay taxes, then you have no social responsibilities beyond that. It's subjective perhaps, but to me that's such a weird way to look at the world. Helping people is one of the main purposes to life, and - particularly if you're partly to blame for the problem - why wouldn't you want to help as much as you could? In this case, it'd even be partly selfish to help, as your employees would presumably be happier if they didn't have to step over homeless people on their way to work.

We can't rely on the "system" to be perfect. You can't say "As long as it's legal it's good" and you can't say "so long as I pay the tax I have to all is well." You have to develop a conscience.

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