eh... I'm pretty sure I mentioned net income (which i think is pretty close to profit in some circles) but if we care about debt servicing, buybacks...etc, let's just look at cash flow. And there too, in Q3, they posted $1B+ for quarter.
I'm not sure I understand the point of your analogy with respect to wining/losing at a casino. If I follow it, you are effectively saying something akin to, when Google first became profitable, its achievements should have been completely dismissed because of a decade of prior losses. That's not how tech companies work. Most of the value creation is 5-10-20 years out. You bear enormous losses with the knowledge that returns compound and eventually render irrelevant prior years' losses.
So? I can make the exact same point about Google and other tech companies that endured years—decades sometimes—of eye-watering losses, only to eventually build enormously valuable businesses.
yeah but even then, it's still just a contract. The legal math behind Cisco's decision might just be to extend support just long enough to meet obligations and tolerate the risk that the remaining customers might sue.
yes at Seam we've seen a number of large deployment in multi-family buildings where you need to deploy devices (locks, thermostats, water leak sensors) but wiring the whole building with wifi isn't an option.
I don't know if it will count as DIY, but take a look at LEGIC and their devkit for this. We (seam) work with them and I recall seeing a couple of startups doing demo's of their UWB solution at their LEGIC Connect conference.
Sounds like a really interesting technical challenge.
Couple of issues I can see: (1) most devices out there would probably be mobile, so no NVIDIA/CUDA for you; (2) even with binding to, say, Apple Silicon, you might still be memory limited, i.e. can you fit the entire net on a single mobile GPU; (3) network latency?
The reason this is terra nullius is because the river has moved that land around for centuries, and will continue to do so. That border attempts to follow the river but the river doesn't follow diplomacy. These people who take advantage of this fact are very short sighted and mostly bored middle/upper class kids.
Maybe if a bunch of libertarians get together for mutual defense, elect leaders, set rules on how they'll pool their resources, they'll be able to prevent this from happening...
Are you giving a definition of libertarians or making a rhetorical point about the inadequacy of democracy in the short term for avoiding a crisis, or arguing against any form of government?
Nathan -- thanks for your work on this issue. I'm the ceo/co-founder at Seam (YC S20). We're building an API for IoT devices. I have many, many thoughts for you.
For Seam, we purchase, set up, and test many individual devices and systems in our lab in San Francisco. During the course of this work, we discover quite a few interesting things. When possible, we work directly with manufacturers on addressing the more concerning problems we find. We maintain an internal device database (partially available here https://www.seam.co/supported-devices-and-systems) where we keep track of our findings on devices we test & integrate. One area that I haven't seen addressed here is data-storage jurisdiction. imho, that might be one of the more concerning aspect.
happy to have a chat; my seam email is in my hn profile.
For the wetter sciences, the answer is somewhere in between. We usually have somewhat of an understanding of the prior theory. We then throw a lot of stuff at the wall…. Oh, this sticks? Eh, why? And then usually some more clever person will come up with reasons for why X works beyond what we already knew. A few years later, the field reaches some sort of consensus around one of the hypothesis.
This is only true from the perspective of developing new theories for why are things happen. Of course new theories arise from other theories.
It's not true for Discovery in general. New phenomenon can be created and observed without any theory for why they occur, either before or after observation
You can't even observe something without theories. For example:
- I need to observe here and not anywhere else
- I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly
- Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y
- etc
Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
Well sure, that's the point that you're trying to make. I thought anything most people felt you were claiming you need a theory related to the novel Discovery or convention. That is to say how it might work and what the expected outcomes are. I can't go to the lab without a theory that my car can get me there. That doesn't mean I have a hypothesis for what will happen when I mix two substances in the lab.
Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.
Nothing, just words that don't have any predictive value or convey any understanding of the world.
Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.
Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
It might be a theory that a scale display a value when I put things on top of it, but that is a different topic, and not what I'm testing.
This Theory doesn't tell me how the world works and if the expected value is 0 lb, 3 lb, or 1 million pounds.
I could go into the lab with no operating Theory or hypothesis on what the value of two masses should be when added together and collect data.
I can collect data with no expectation of correlation, and after measuring the combination of many weights, deduce that there is a relation between the combined weights and the total mass, and in fact it is a simple sum.
> Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.
> Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
The relevant theoretical background here is hidden in the "weigh them together" step: that there is such a thing as weight, it's described by a single real number, you can measure it in such and such a way, and so on.
You don't notice these considerations when it comes to weight and speed and size because they're hardwired into our brains by evolution. We're not so lucky when it comes to, for instance, the quark mixing angles - we can't even conceive of them without a background theory, let alone start measuring them.
Im not making the claim that theory Never informs experimentation. I'm making the claim that it possible to make discovery without theory about what you are exploring.
If you want to count distant theories like "I exist" or "The world exists", then sure, every action starts with theory. But like I said, that is every different than a specific theory about what outcome an experiment has, and the underlying physics that make it so.
If you think nobody can discover anything without a theory for what could be discovered, you are flat out wrong.
Consider the story of an artificial sweetener being discovered by a chemist who didn't wash their hands properly and the bread they ate that night was sweet.
Are you suggesting this was only possible because they had a "theory" that bread is not sweet?
I’ve done so much experimentation with GFW pre pandemic while staying in China for extended period of times. I was always amazed at how quickly they would catch up on my shadowsocks, random ssh tunnels…etc. 48 hours top before I had to rotate IPs. This report seems to indicate this is now instant?
Fwiw My most reliable trick ended up piggie-backing off of a physical line going into Hong Kong from Shenzhen, and when roaming around China, using a vpn to get to that shenzhen gateway. As far as I can recall, that always worked. This led me to believe that most of the vpn traffic analysis (and blocking)was done at the edge of the GFW and not inside of it. Again, this could be outdated by now.
I tried to setup a shadowsocks server to bypass the GFW about 2 weeks ago. Server was hosted on my local network in Australia (with public IP), client was connecting from China (using the server IP).
It was blocked immediately and the client could not connect. I had several unknown IPs try to connect prior to the attempted connection.
I was stunned at how water tight the GFW is, it's really unfortunate as I would love to work/travel through China but cannot due to needing an active internet connection.
Yeah pdf of report says that blocking is instant as of 2021. Also completely agree with the need for an active connection to do work. A lot of the software/hacker devs I knew have left China all together in the last 3-4 years. Inability to look up stuff reliably (even on working VPN providers) was one of the reasons cited by a few.
A fellow Aussie currently in China, a Trojan [0] server has been working fine for the last week I've been here. I've got it hosted through a VPS (smaller provider) in LA. While it's a bit of a pain to setup, reliability has been pretty decent (with occasional? short breaks) and definitely useable - my laptop is connected 24/7 and I can access the unfiltered web, including video, just fine. V2ray also supposedly works quite well, but I haven't looked into it.
Last time I went to China (2018) you could simply get a China Unicom Hong Kong SIM card and then use that to roam in mainland China. With that you'd get the Hong Kong censorship level, which is much much less restrictive. No VPN or anything needed apart from the SIM card itself.
I'm in China right know with a Mainland/Macao/HK eSIM. My Chinese friend has to use a VPN to access Instagram as did I when I was connected via WiFi in mainland China. Using the eSIM connection I could access Instagram and Youtube without any issues, likewise here in Hongkong (with WiFi).
I didn't investigate how large the difference is, but Hongkong traffic is still treated more liberal.
There's a more straightforward way: roam with a foreign sim card. Roaming traffic is tunneled to your home telco and for whatever reason the tunnel isn't inspected at all. With the advent of esims you can buy a roaming sim and use it on your phone within minutes.
Can you activate it while abroad though? After I moved away from the UK I still had to have a UK mobile phone for various things. My UK sim would stop working after about a year away. When buying a new one I had to get someone in UK to put it in their phone to let it at least once connect to the home network. Without it the card would be useless. Is using foreign sim cards now easier?
eSIMs just need a data connection back to the SM-DP server and that can be done over Wi-Fi. I don't think that protocol is blocked that they talk to it, and the SM-DP vendors on the market are typically "global" providers that work with multiple operators.
EDIT: I checked myself to be sure. It's "RAM over HTTP(s)" -- "Remote Application Management" of the eSIM. GFW doesn't block HTTPS, so you should be able to get provisioned to any carrier worldwide while inside the firewall.
There are esims explicitly targeted to travelers. Those are the ones you want. In my experience they don't have any activation restrictions like the ones you describe
Many years back I was running a socks proxy for access while in China and I found that it worked great in Shanghai but was rapidly blocked (or degraded in some fashion) in Hangzhou. That seemed internal and not edge but I do no really know how they were interfering with it. Given Hangzhou's tech expertise it just may be the ISP there was more capable and up to date?
Was there an international event in Shanghai at that time? If they expected a large number of foreigners in a particular region they would relax the censorship in that particular region. They could even do it per hotel room where hotel rooms booked by foreigners automatically have lesser interference between GFW.
That might be it. I was there every year for about a 15 year period but this may have been around the time of the 2010 Expo. Though I was not in hotels, I was in apartments (ones owned and lived in by Chinese, not foreigners).
Yes but they are unfortunately targeted more than other censorship circumvention tools. Since everyone knows Tor/Obfs4/Snowflake it's easier to get your research published if you work on detecting that.
They certainly could, but I assume there’s an understanding among officials that to do so would cripple certain sectors of the economy. Certain kinds of work would grind to a halt. I’d wager that a majority of non-Chinese residents would leave the country.
Source: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UBER:NYSE?hl=en