Yeah, I'm not sure if "no moat" analogy stands for chip manufacturing. Even if foundries acquire lithographic nodes, the procedures (temperature, duration, etc) are for them to figure out and are usually kept secret. This secret could be the "moat" that differentiates each foundry's operational capabilities.
Japanese here. Caved is not an accurate expression. After intense negotiations with Trump, Lutnick, and Bessent, Minister Akazawa managed to reduced the tariff from the proposed 25% to 15%. His story of flying weekly to the States on commercial aircraft became legendary.
PM's resignation stemmed from unpopularity not due to tariff negotiation, but diminished ability to pass laws after the ruling party lost significant number of seats in elections for upper and lower houses.
As for other countries around the world, the world-wide inflation caused many ruling parties to lose support.
I said it in another comment, not only did they negotiate that, the resulting negotiation held very little of substance for the US. It was very light on specifics and all for show.
It has been said that when the tariffs started that the Japanese delegates went to Washington to negotiate. The delegates asked them "Since you are trying to negotiate, what do you want of Japan?"
All they got back was "Well, what can you offer?"
Turns out they had started the tariff war with absolute no idea on what demands they wanted to make. Japan used that to their advantage because without any specifics, they were free to write the terms.
To add some context, the removal of trash cans accelerated prior to the hosting of the Tokyo Olympics. The municipal government was concerned about trash possibly overflowing from the can, thereby ruining the appearance of the streets.
Meanwhile, Japanese subway stations still have trash cans, which are only blocked when foreign dignitaries visit the country. It doesn't seem authorities are reacting to the subway attacks from 30 years ago.
I would never do this as a visitor to another country - but if this happened where I lived I would advocate mass littering until it was repealed. Just drop the trash where the canvases to be. If you could get even a single percent population doing this in a large city it would snowball and it would be over in 30 days tops.
I would happily do that ~anywhere. The social contract is that I carry my trash around with me on the basis that there will be a can somewhere nearby.
In a nearby municipality there is a particular spot that sees a lot of dog traffic yet has no can. Some civilly disobedient good samaritan keeps leaving an empty bucket and the city periodically gets around to removing it long after it fills up. Seems to work well enough despite being entirely illegal.
The social contract changes when you change location. It’s unreasonable to be accepted as a guest in country and not expect to have to modify your behavior to accommodate local norms.
I agree with you in principle but given this specific example I'm failing to come up with any counter examples. Community provided trash cans seem to go hand in hand with a cultural aversion to littering and both seem to be a direct consequence of population density rather than anything to do with a particular culture.
Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music.
iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release.
Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts.
While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue.
(I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.)
> We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix.
You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences.
Just as an aside, I do not get a social media platform for music. I don’t need a separate social network to manage, and certainly wouldn’t care what 99% of the people I know are listening to 99.9% of the time.
I think this is an interesting application of computer vision for healthcare purposes.
I've noticed that the app tends to use 15% of my CPU constantly. I wonder if there is room to improve efficiency so that the app does not hog resources.
Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader.
The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.
Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.
I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."
This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms:
- Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato)
- Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant)
Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple.
Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
reply