They're competitive but they're not drop-in replacements. Even office for Mac is not a drop-in replacement for office on Windows. It's pretty trivial to find significant differences that will be in use in any large organization.
Considering every job I’ve had in recent times has involved a switch between Google/Microsoft tools after being acquired, it’s about as drop in as anything gets in tech.
Of course no product will be an identical replica of the Microsoft tools, but both get the job done.
It depends. If you're writing documents and sending email, it probably not gonna be too tough. If you've got 100,000+ lines of Excel macros, you're gonna need a pretty significant migration.
IME what it means is that they have a bunch of processes built that specifically depend on it. It doesn't make it impossible to switch but depending on the scope could be financially or practically prohibitive to migrate. Maybe someone has 10 years of custom excel macros put together that are run every quarter, that would need to be migrated. To migrate you might not have the internal capacity and might need to hire external help to do it.
The US used to have a more built out industrial base but since those days a lot of things have changed, structurally, economically, culturally, and in their regulatory environment. The people who would have been doing this work are doing cushy service industry jobs today.
I'm not sure if you've been following economic and demographic trends over the past 50 years, but people have largely left those places to go elsewhere for work.
Huh? The people who would have been doing this are doing shitty HVAC jobs (but still getting to be a bit creative). Are doing shitty welding jobs. Are doing HEAVILY underemployed service industry jobs they hate. Etc, etc. None of the people I know with a mind for making/tinkering/refining processes are working service industry jobs happily.
People didn't culturally decide they don't want these sorts of jobs, business did, because short term monetary benefit. The other stuff may have come along after but could easily be reversed. But currently there is no need to reverse because US business only cares about short term monetary gain.
All this talk like this is some huge systemic thing is BS. If there were jobs, it would all happen. Just like it did in China.
This goes far beyond skilled labor. But I'll start with that point. The US already has a huge shortage of skilled labor, and it's not like we would ever take people from the HVAC industry and put them in a factory. People in the US are gonna still want air conditioning. Culturally, the US absolutely pushes young people to aim for white collar service industry jobs.
Second, it takes a huge amount of engineering talent to do what China is doing as well. In the US, a lot of engineering talent has been attracted to software (or other service industry jobs), where there's a lot of money to be made, and you can sit on your ass and argue on an orange-colored website all day. I prefer that to wearing a hardhat and waking up at 6 AM to go to a factory.
Third, China concentrates a lot of this talent into dense cities, and people make a lot of sacrifices to live there. You're definitely not gonna convince an HVAC guy to leave his suburban home and sell his pickup truck to go live in a dormitory in a dense city and ride a scooter. In China, there's plenty of people that are itching to leave the countryside for the city, leave their families, and search for a better life. In the US, people that live outside of cities, generally want to live there, and aren't interested in relocating. Most developed nations feed this need for skilled labor by importing labor from countries where people have a strong desire to better themselves but don't have a cultural expectation of a backyard and a white picket fence. But the US has had a fucked up immigration system for a long time now.
Fourth, China pulls out all of the roadblocks in order to facilitate the growth of their industrial base. They don't need to go through 10 years of planning to build something, they don't need to argue with a local zoning board, and if they want to build something they don't wait for the free market to decide to do it. If they want to support an industry, they just do it. Single-party unitary governments are efficient as fuck. Of course, this comes with many drawbacks, which politically are just not viable in the US.
Edit: I grant I could be old and outdated. But having seen cycles. Having seen Japan go up and down. Having seen offshoring first go to Mexico then easily transition to China, I just don't see any black and white here.
1. The HVAC guys would definitely fill the the quick turnaround, small shops that surround the manufacturing industry in China if that was an option.
Culturally doesn't matter. The majority of young men I know are underemployed and hate the service industry, but would be a fit for having their own adjacent business like that ones in China that get so hyped as enabling their dynamics. I think you are very focused on the crowd you know. The young people I know are so itching to create they have 3d printers, or make fishing flies, or make their own clothes.
2. Sounds great, if you live in the bay area or other tech scenes. I no longer do. I left tech to work (albeit tech) in a factory. For the majority of people I know, what you lay out it isn't an option or on the table. They are under-employed in brain dead service jobs they hate, and that do not provide them a future. They would jump on building up the adjacent small businesses that China's manufacturing depends on and that people here hype as 'wow, you can find a shop that does XYZ'. The stuff people say 'we just don't have in the USA'.
3. Small town America was factories since forever. I don't think China's way is the only way. We have a very good transportation system whereas when China established it's manufacturing it didn't. I think your view is myopic here and clouded with 'the China way'.
4. Again, the 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.
Nothing you say is a limiter IF the jobs are there. American companies pulling the jobs killed American dynancism, not any of the things you list. If it's TRULY no longer about cost, we could EASILY do it again. The people I met in China weren't better than the average American. They were great, and I think very highly of China. But the advantage I saw were wages, and people from the countryside willing to put up with a lot, but I don't think they will put up with as much long term (and I hope they don't have to, again the people I met are all great people and I hope the best for all of us). And a side of environmental pollution (I know 2 guys that moved their factories to China purely because of savings by not having to be environmentally friendly. So many that falls under your regulation, but that isn't a long term solution/state for China and that was a decade ago, maybe things are changed for the better already).
I don't think you realize the difference to which cultural expectations of the workers are different. Yeah, people "hate" their service industry jobs here, but you can get a job in Iowa wrangling spreadsheets making $50,000 a year, grab coffee from the office coffee pot, sit in air-conditioning all day, then you clock out at 5 PM and drive your truck home to your house in the suburbs with a yard and a white picket fence. Nobody wants to make that same money or less working on a hot factory floor with a clipboard on a 996 shift and live next to a factory belching smoke. But in China, you can find people who will do that, and they'll wake up at 3 AM to work on an urgent customer request. And collaborate with all the factories down the road, and have a prototype out by 8 AM. In the US you're not gonna get somebody to respond to your email before 10:30.
> 80% of America you seem to ignore, pulls out all the stops for shitty ass 50 employee employers to build. You seem to be focused on a very small part of the US.
It's easy to get politicians to give out some tax breaks for a reelection campaign. It seems to be damn near impossible to actually get anything done that actually matters. We frequently spend billions of dollars to support manufacturing investment and have nothing to show for it.
Just look at Foxconn in Wisconsin, as an example. Over $1 billion and half a decade and still nothing. China could've had a whole city built. We were just trying to get 13,000 factory jobs, but we couldn't even manage that.
I think we live in two different Americas. My mom who was a controller and CFO in Cali couldn't land a $50k spreadsheet job when she semi-retired here to be near grandkids. Old boy with a pickup definitely isn't doing that. We have plenty of actual non-grift factories going up here from owners relocating. The Apple 3am example isn't making or breaking an industry product, it's just shitty management, probably needed because the product was scheduled to go onto a boat, something that isn't needed if made here, or some artificial bs. Imagine operating that way as a public company, I think that's working with unacceptable risk and a failure of management.
But we'll probably just talk past each other past this point. It will be interesting to see what happens. Like I said, I remember the Japan scare. Then all manufacturing going to Mexico (and my dad making sure he didn't buy the heche en mexico lable) before it finally landed in China.
I think expecting software licenses to enforce your rights outside of the realm of software is a pretty bad take. I think Linus's take is quite solid: "I give you my source code, you give me your changes back, and we're even". There are a lot of us who don't think that FOSS should be weaponized as a poison pill to enact the authors worldview on topics outside of the realm of software alone.
If it should be a consumer right, why limit it only to devices certain types of software? Why not consumer protection law that applies to all devices? I think software licenses are the wrong tool for this problem.
There's a lot of crazy crayon licenses out there that try to fix the whole world by tacking on a whole lot of restrictions to their software licenses, prohibiting use for a long list of reasons... to me it sounds like a bunch of newspeak, as if "more restrictions = more freedom"
Is being able to replace software on the devices I own not in "the realm of software" somehow?
"Sure, you can have the sources, you just can't use them on your own devices because the vendor that shipped it has decided to bar you from doing that with a 2048-bit RSA key" just feels like GPL was upheld in letter, but not in spirit.
Yeah, it is -- you're asking for restrictions on pieces of hardware unrelated to the original software other than the fact that someone decided to install it on there.
How would you feel if a piece of hardware came with a license prohibiting software developers from using encryption to secure their systems?
The root of the issue here is that phone hardware landscape is effectively a duopoly. It is an antitrust issue. Trying to use software licenses to do this 1) won't be effective because the duopoly will never use them, and 2) is like going around your ass to get to your elbow. Even if it did work it wouldn't get to the root of the issue. The law needs to fix the fact that almost all phones on the planet are controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies.
> controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies
While many manufacturers physically make Android phones they all functionally play by Google’s rules as a contractual condition to get proprietary gApps.
Amazon even tried to pull off an Android fork without gApps but failed.
The only third option is Huawei’s HarmonyOS if you live in China.
Because it is. Android runs a modified Linux kernel. There's nothing misleading about it at all, unless you think "Linux" means something that it does not.
Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers, looks like they primarily used data sourced from police reports, which most people only file if the incident is serious enough to turn into insurance.
Tesla notes:
> These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police
And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans have, their vision perception is frequently inadequate and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough, "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle injury cases.
the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
Humans have both issues. There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related, e.g. misestimation of depth/speed, obscured or obstructed vision, optical focus issues, insufficient contrast or exposure, etc.
But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down
Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:
* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object
* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles
* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)
* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic
* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.
These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.
> But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving?
Most of them.
We can lump together "inattention" and "idiocy" for the purposes of this conversation, because both could be massively alleviated by a good self-driving car without lidar.
If you look at the parallel comments, you'll see that the majority of accidents and fatalities indeed come from these two factors combined (two-thirds coming from distraction, speeding, and impaired driving), and that kube-system is having to resort to ridiculous fallacies to try to dispute the empirical data that is available.
> There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related
Which are a tiny minority. The largest causes of crashes in the US are attention/cognition problems, not vision problems. Most traffic systems in western countries (probably in others, too, but I don't have personal experience), and in particular the US, are designed to limit visibility problems and do so very effectively.
> That sounds more like a personal opinion, because I don’t think that data is particularly easy to objectively collect.
That sounds like a personal opinion?
Maybe do the bare minimum of research before spouting yours.
DOT says that only 5% of crashes are caused by low visibility during weather events.[1]
In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths. [2]
I was able to find these in 30 seconds. You did zero research to confirm whether your belief was correct before asserting that my claim was opinion. That's pathetic.
> Regardless it is irrelevant to the point.
And your point is therefore irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because the person you were replying to did not claim that vision had no safety impact, but that it had little safety impact:
> the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
...and, as we can clearly see, the issue is attention (and some bad decision making), not vision.
None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
“Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking because of the inherent limitations of relying on depth perception to estimate the exact location of the vehicle when it cannot otherwise be directly seen. Go look in a parking lot and see how common curbed wheels are.
Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
> None of those things you cited is “human vision or perception”
> “Low visibility during weather events” is a small subset of this.
You're still refusing to do the most basic research or even read my comment:
> In 2023, the combined causes of alcohol, speeding, and distracted driving (all cognitive/attention issues) caused 67% of highway deaths.
Do the math. 100% - 67% is 33%. Even literally not opening Google, you can already deduce that the maximum fraction of fatalities caused by vision is 33%.
Given that you aren't interested in reading or researching and instead just want to push your opinion as fact, I think your claims can be safely discarded.
Edit: Because you're editing your comment because you realize that you're making an absolute fool of yourself:
> A ridiculously common example of the limitations of human vision is when people hit curbs parallel parking
A completely irrelevant distraction - this causes virtually zero accidents and even fewer fatalities, and you know it.
> Also, NHTSA estimates that they don’t have any information for 60% of incidents, because they go unreported.
Aha, so now you actually did research, and found that all of the available data supports my claims, so you're attempting to undermine it. Nice try. "Estimates" vs. actual numbers isn't really a contest.
Come back when you have actual data - until then, you're just continuing to undermine your own point with your ridiculous fallacies and misdirections - because if you actually had a defensible claim, you'd be able to instantly pull out supporting evidence.
I'm not arguing about fatalities or relative percentages of contributing factors, nor am I arguing that alcohol/speeding/attention are not all also issues. They are, you're right.
The only thing I argued is that "lapses in human visual perception are responsible for some crashes", which is a fact.
Attention is perhaps the limiting factor, but being able to look in two directions at once would help, and would help greatly if we had more attention capacity. E.g. anytime you change lanes you have to alternate between looking behind, beside, and in front and that greatly reduces reaction time should something unexpected happen in the direction you aren't currently looking...
These large consultancies staff at a lot of places that aren’t big tech. While they certainly have some good talent the overwhelming reputation with body shops is that they place some pretty mediocre talent.
The vast majority of YouTube takedowns are done through voluntarily moderation, not via copyright takedown. They require no more due process than moderation of posts on this or any other website.
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