Well.. farming equipment are high 6 figures 7 pieces of business equipment (the lifetime operating costs are definitely in the 7 figures.) These are owned and operated by people who I would expect to do this type of research and critical thinking. These aren't normie consumers buying everyday appliances or electronics.

However.. farmers are a weird bunch and they are blinded by brand loyalty or will only buy from an "American" company which ironically allowed JD to stomp all over them because of their dominant market position.

I'm no farmer, but brand loyalty might have practical reasons, such as compatibility with attached farming equipment (plows?).

The attachment mechanism is usually standardized, so you can just switch between brands.

Nowadays a larger factor might be how close the next dealership/repair shop is. Some things are time critical, and when it breaks in this time, then you don't want to drive hours to have it fixed/get a part/ have a mechanic available.

There are some differences between the brands... And you can always be Clarkson and get a Lamborghini, even when it makes no sense ;-)

Bootstrapping an electronics supply chain on another planet seems harder than building the dyson swarm itself.

Just let Claude figure it out

Probably not that flexible without some big cancellation fee. It can take 4-6 months to go from bare wafer to packaged chips.

Didn’t car manufacturers cancel a bunch of contracts during covid? Only to immediately regret the action.

Investors are not part of the market?

The investors? They were part of the market. But after the front fell off they’ve been towed outside the market.

And it’s perfectly safe out there. There’s nothing out there but mission statements and TAM slides and pea-protein slurry.

And $1.8 billion of burned cash.

I speculate that they are hitting the reticle limit for models not much bigger than this. Judging by the size of the chip in their demonstrator for a 8B model I'm sure they know this already.

To scale this up means splitting up large models into multiple chips (layer or tensor parallelism). And that gets quite complicated quite quickly and you'll need really high bandwdith/low latency interconnects.

Still a REALLY interesting approach with a ton of potential despite the unstated challenges.

Apple has products in their lineup where they refresh and keep the name. Example: Mac Studio is the same every refresh.

I speculate they gave themselves a lot of thermal engineering margin to bump up TDP with the M-series MBP design (or perhaps they underestimated how good the M-series chips were going to be) The battery being at the TSA limit of 100Wh is quite nice as well. Another benefit is that it now differentiates the "Pro" line from the rest of the laptop lineup quite significantly. For most people the Air has enough power now and its plenty thin and light. The pro line is for "true" pros with actually intense workflows.

I'm a dev and the MBP line is definitely overkill for me. The 15" MBA handles everything I can throw at it.

Congrats on the front page MH, hard to forget fellow Chicago/midwest entrepreneurs.

Thank you!!!

Fight fire with fire. Anti-drone drones that are near cost parity. Or make some investments to develop, cheap, mobile, relatively short ranged point-defense systems. A middle ground between CWIS and CROWS or a CROWS-like system optimized for drone defense. The engagement distance will be close, but it turns the asymmetry back around.

This is what Ukraine is doing, but it will always be imperfect. Shahed style drones don't fly a straight path. Ukraine has built out an auditory detection network using cheap phones, has mobile response teams for different types of incoming threats, yet it is still not enough.

Given the resources we are using today, while still seeing drones and ballistics get through, does not bode well for a 100% reliable system.

South Korea is a very young democracy with fresh memories of what it was like under dictatorships. The people very much understand the price it took to get to that point and is not complacent in stomping out wannabe autocrats.

Okay at the same time they had the daughter of one of those autocrats fairly recently as PM, who then resigned due to influence peddling by a religious advisor (and did crazy things like her daughter didn’t go to class yet got amazing grades because her teachers were made to do her work, which she posted about on social media.)

They’re very much not over those players.

Why is his favorability rating so high?