Article note: Aw crap, they succeeded in entering the "value extraction" phase.
Image: The Verge
Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.
The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.
Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.
Article note: The same kind of stunt made the news in 2018, and it's pretty obvious that automatically posting your location data somewhere public means anyone who wants to can track you, not just nation-states squeezing it out of your cell phone provider.
And, the Ukrainians just used the same trick to assassinate a Russian general.
But, as ever, most people aren't going to think about electronic privacy.
Article note: That seems about right, there are a handful of nifty and potentially useful things coming out of this AI Hype cycle. But most of it is useless gimmicks and executive FOMO.
The creator and lead maintaner of Linux says AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality. Linus speaks for a lot of us, I think! That it's marketed as "AI" in the first place is a good example of what he's talking about. — Read the rest
Article note: Right to Repair is good for everyone except for rentseeking parasites.
Photo by Gerald Matzka/picture alliance via Getty Images
McDonald’s always-broken ice cream machines might finally get easier to fix. That’s because the US Copyright Office granted an exemption allowing third parties to diagnose and repair commercial equipment — including the ones that make your McFlurries.
Now, franchise owners will be able to break through the digital locks that have blocked them from repairing McDonald’s ice cream machines for years. According to the Copyright Office, the exemption will allow people to diagnose, perform maintenance, and repair “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” McDonald’s ice cream machines have become so notorious for breaking that someone even created a tool to track broken machines.
The decision is part of the Copyright Office’s final...
Article note: This looks like a promising way to limit mobile suck.
Less automatic than system-wide ad-blocking - which at this point I'd go back to a flipphone before I'd tolerate a smartphone without - but able to cut off classes of problem that are currently hard to manage.
Article note: Surely this spat will end well for everyone involved and not be useless expensive posturing that slows down developments that are in both parties interest.
Arm has taken its feud with Qualcomm to the next level, two years after filing a lawsuit against its former close partner. According to Bloomberg, the British semiconductor company has canceled the architecture license allowing Qualcomm to use its intellectual property and standards for chip design. As the news organization notes, Qualcomm, like many other chipmakers, uses Arm's computer code that chips need to run software, such as operating systems. Arm has reportedly sent Qualcomm a 60-day notice of cancelation — if they don't get to an agreement by then, it could have a huge impact on both companies' finances and on Qualcomm's operations.
The SoftBank-backed chipmaker sued Qualcomm in 2022 after the latter purchased a company called Nuvia, which is one of its other licensees. Arm argued that the US company didn't obtain the necessary permits to transfer Nuvia's licenses. As such, Nuvia breached their contract and it had terminated its licenses, Arm explained in its lawsuit. Qualcomm has been using Nuvia-developed technology in the chips designed for AI PCs, such as those from Microsoft and HP. But Arm wants the company to stop using Nuvia-developed tech and to destroy any Arm-based technology developed prior to the acquisition.
Qualcomm will have to stop selling most of the chips that account for its $39 billion in revenue, Bloomberg says, if the companies don't resolve the issue within the next 60 days. It seems the US chipmaker believes this is a tactic by Arm to threaten its business and to get higher royalties, because its spokesperson told Bloomberg and the Financial Times: "This is more of the same from Arm — more unfounded threats designed to strong-arm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license." Qualcomm also accused Arm of attempting to disrupt the legal process, called its grounds for licensing termination "completely baseless" and said that it's confident its "rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed."
Meanwhile, an Arm spokesperson told us: "Following Qualcomm’s repeated material breaches of Arm’s license agreement, Arm is left with no choice but to take formal action requiring Qualcomm to remedy its breach or face termination of the agreement. This is necessary to protect the unparalleled ecosystem that Arm and its highly valued partners have built over more than 30 years. Arm is fully prepared for the trial in December and remains confident that the Court will find in Arm’s favor."
Update, October 23, 2024, 11:33PM ET: This story has been updated to add Arm's statement.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/arm-cancels-qualcomms-license-to-use-its-chip-design-standards-123031968.html?src=rss
Article note: Ugh, the MIT hype machine is ridiculous even by modern academic standards.
The finding is that copper doped PLA filament exhibits PTC (positive temperature coefficient; resistance increases with temperature) properties, and they can make a resettable fuse. Which is neat but not terribly surprising since one of the common species of commercial PTC devices for use as resettable fuses is made from conductive particles in a polymer substrate.
The suggestion of active electronics is pure bullshit clickbait.
Article note: Every time I deal with a recent Apple product (...or really most recent devices, but Apple is the worst. Most of the other makers of phones and tablets just copy some of their bad ideas.), I angrily think about what I know about discoverability and affordances from Design of Everyday Things (Norman) and Humane Interface (Raskin) who were pivotal in Apple's reputation for design.
I'm very much not surprised to hear he disapproves of their recent design ethos.
Article note: The answer is easy: Have a culture that allows people to earnestly engage in well-resourced research with expected payouts measured in decades instead of the current demand for a regular stream of "accomplishments."
The _how_ is the hard part.
Bell could easily swing it because they were an abusive monopoly with deep ties to the government, so they had all the money and were accountable to nothing. That part is less than ideal.
Now research career arcs are completely governed by short-term metrics, so any early-career researcher that isn't primarily hustling the next hyped-up incremental paper, the next funding source, next product, next patent, is going to be driven out (denied tenure if they even make it that far in academia, fired or demoted to technician work in commercial labs). Because of that filter, late career researchers will mostly be hustlers who have lost any interest in big ideas if they had them to start with, and if they still _do_ have the mindset for big long work, they will be retired or dead by the time they're in a position to see it through.
Look at Katalin Karikó (MRNA), who was basically driven out of academia before society desperately needed the MRNA work she was being punished for spending too long chasing. Look at Shuji Nakamura (Blue LEDs), who was only not ejected from the industry thanks to the patronage of Nichia's founder/CEO and a massive supply of stubbornness and insubordination that lead to, arguably, the most socially important advance in semiconductors since the transistor and a Nobel prize.
We _don't_ hear about all the people who responded to the incentive structure and became a metric-chasing hypebeast, left in disgust, or were driven out.
Instead, we hear about hype-cycles that suck all the funding and attention in a field for a few years, then end in disillusionment because every little incremental advance in a technology that probably _had_ a payoff measured in decades gets treated as a massive breakthrough (the hype treadmill means that in modern academic writing, anything less than effusive is condemnation), until the level of over-promise-and-under-deliver brings the cycle crashing down, and almost everyone decamps for the next hype cycle until we come back around in a decade or two.
It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bell Labs, originally founded as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in January 1925. As an integral part of AT&T and Western Electric, it enjoyed immense funding and owing to the stable financial situation of AT&T very little pressure to produce results. This led to the development of a wide range of technologies like the transistor, laser, photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled cell (CCD), Unix operating system and so on. After the break-up of AT&T, however, funding dried up and with it the discoveries that had once made Bell Labs such a famous entity. Which raises the question of what it would take to create a new Bell Labs?
As described in the article by [Brian Potter], one aspect of Bell Labs that made it so successful was that the researchers employed there could easily spend a few years tinkering on something that tickled their fancy, whether in the field of semiconductors, optics, metallurgy or something else entirely. There was some pressure to keep research focused on topics that might benefit the larger company, but that was about it, as the leadership knew that sometimes new technologies can take a few year or decades to come to fruition.
Bell Labs Nobel prizes: comparing year winner was hired vs year of discovery. (Credit: Brian Potter, Construction Physics)
All of this came to an rapid stop following the 1982 court-ordered breakup of AT&T. Despite initial optimism at Bell Labs that things could remain much the same, but over the following years Bell Labs would be split up repeatedly, with the 1996 spinning off of Western Electric into Lucent Technologies that took much of Bell Labs with it being the first of many big splits, ending for now with five pieces, with Nokia Bell Labs (formerly Lucent Bell Labs) and AT&T Labs being the largest two. To nobody’s surprise, among all these changes funding for fundamental and theoretical research effectively vanished.
A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].The article then raises the question of whether Bell Labs was a historical fluke that could exist solely due to a number of historical coincidences, or that we could create a new ‘Bell Labs’ today. Theoretically billion-dollar companies such as Google and Apple are more than capable of doing such a thing, and to a certain extent they also are, funding a wide range of seemingly unrelated technologies and business endeavors.
Ultimately Bell Labs would seem to have been at least partially a product of unique historical circumstances, especially the highly specialized field of telecommunications before the same transistors and other technologies that Bell Labs invented would make such technological fields something that anyone could get started in. It’s possible that even without court order, AT&T would have found itself facing stiff competition by the 1990s.
The short answer to the original question of whether Bell Labs could be recreated today is thus a likely ‘no’, while the long answer would be ‘No, but we can create a Bell Labs suitable for today’s technology landscape’. Ultimately the idea of giving researchers leeway to tinker is one that is not only likely to get big returns, but passionate researchers will go out of their way to circumvent the system to work on this one thing that they are interested in. We saw this for example with [Shuji Nakamura], who cracked the way to make efficient blue LEDs, despite every effort by his employer to make his research unnecessarily difficult.
If there’s one thing that this world needs more of, it are researchers like Nakamura-san, and the freedom for them to pursue these passions. That, ultimately could be said to be the true recreation of Bell Labs.
Article note: If this is reasonably high-quality it should be delightful.
Termux, which is currently the best analog, is one of my must-haves, and their play store version (which ...isn't the one I use) is currently crippled because the whole point is that you can download and run software in the app, and google has been forbidding that for security and/or anti-competitive reasons.
Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.
There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you’re doing because you believe it’s right.
![A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/shuji_nakamura_with_blue_led.jpg)
