u/vexingparse

These might work in terms of removing the massive liability in terms of the threshold but they still create massive distortion in terms of pricing and an effective tax rate increase for the individual of around +25% at 90k revenue which will be extremely distortionary.

I think the tax/pricing advantage for small businesses is intended. It's not an accidental distoration. The extra distortion caused by the cliff-edge is unintended and that's what I'm trying to solve.

You are absolutely right, but I think there are less problematic solutions.

E.g, you could apply VAT only to sales above the threshold rather than catching past sales retrospectively. This would still be a hit in terms of complexity but it would solve the main financial issue.

Or you could require businesses to register for VAT if they crossed the VAT threshold in the previous year, again not applying VAT retrospectively. Perhaps there should to be some limit to how big the overshoot can be to avoid creating a massive tax loophole.

Or you could drastically lower the registration threshold (say to £1000) and introduce a tax credit to compensate small traders for any tax up to the existing threshold. The impact on prices and tax revenues should be neutral.

In any case, VAT should be radically reformed to reduce its insane complexity.

I might have missed it, can you share more about these issues?

I just mentioned it for completeness sake because it's one of the few situations where desktop OSs manage the lifecycle of user launched processes. It could cause network connections to time out, etc.

Not taking sides here (because I haven't even tried Chome on Googlebook OS yet), but I think it's worth responding to OP's main point, which is not really about Chrome being "the same" or "identical" to Chrome on other desktop platforms (even though they are using these words an awful lot).

The main point, and the question that I find interesting, is whether Chrome on Googlebook OS is intended to be a fully featured browser as opposed to an intentionally restricted one. Differences between desktop versions are to be expected. Feature gaps are not.

One point that deserves attention in my view is whether Chrome on Googlebook is subject to Android's app lifecyle management. On desktop platforms such as macOS, Windows or Linux, Chrome manages the lifecycle of web pages. But the main Chrome browser process itself never gets killed by the OS (unless it runs out of memory on Linux). Is that also true for Googlebook OS or does it behave like other Android apps?

I believe (but I'm not certain) that Chrome on Googlebook OS is technically derived from the Android version of Chrome rather than from any desktop version. What I don't know is how extensive any Googlebook OS specific adaptations are.

The app lifecyle issue is actually a more general concern. On a desktop OS, I have an expectation that any process I start will continue running until I stop it (ignoring sleep mode related issues for a moment). Is that general assumption still true on Googlebook OS? Is it true for processes running inside the Linux VM?

There are a lot of open questions at this point.

So you go to Amazon only to get 150 adverts for random chargers along with 500 fake reviews for each of them. "Best charger ever - life changing!". Then you head to ChatGPT to ask which ones are any good. ChatGPT taps into its training data and web search to check which chargers people on reddit recommend. But "Top 1% Commenter" on reddit recommends Amazon search 😅

My understanding (regarding Googlebook OS) is that an AI agent (such as Claude Code or Codex CLI) running inside the Linux VM can access the Linux VM file system itself and any host folders explicitly shared with the VM.

Well, reproduction is still one of the basic natural insinct and the very true final goal of nature life.

Nature doesn't have goals and humans have no procreation instinct. It's just that the species that randomly mutated in a way to link something pleasurable (sex) to procreation are the ones that survived. It's a tautology.

Or, in other words, to parliament, to which the BBC is already beholden as the current funding debate shows.

If it's that simple, why do countries trade at all? If something looks like win - win - win - win then it's usually because some trade-offs are being omitted.

But it is beholden to other interests. It's not like financial profit is the only form of self interest that doesn't necessarily benefit everyone equally.

That said, if funding a government TV network has democratic backing then fund it through general taxation. Why make it unnecessarily complicated?

I'm starting to think we are in the midst of a new "compiler revolution" similar to moving from hand written assembler code, to letting compilers write the code but hand tweaking the important bits, to compilers just being better than hand coding. 

This analogy comes up a lot but in my opinion it is incorrect. Moving from hand coded assembly to using a higher level programming was just a move from one formal model to another. Details are left to the compiler, but the logic is completely specified by the developer. It's like using SQL instead of a procedural algorithm to describe a query.

What's happening now is completely different. Coding agents are not deterministic and no complete, formal specification of the requirements exists. Many developers even generate the test cases.

I'm not saying it's bad or anything, but it's radically different from what a compiler does. LLMs are more like contractors that we task with delivering software based on an incomplete, natural language description.

The main consequence is that there is no one "in-house" who understands what the code actually does. This has to be reverse engineered after the fact.

For LLMs to be like compilers, we need to specify the requirements in a formal language.

Antigravity is pretty clunky to use and there's no android Claude code.

You could run Claude code in the Linux VM.

I sold all my individual (mostly tech) stocks a few months ago and moved to a wait and see position. I have parked 60% in an ACWI ETF and 40% in short term bonds and money market funds (in multiple currencies).

I don't want to be out of the stock market or make any contrarian bets, but I'm taking the foot off the gas.

I see that the AI investment boom is speeding ahead unabated. End-user revenues from AI are actually coming along pretty well, so this isn't investment in bridges to nowhere. S&P 500 earnings growth is great as well. Things don't look too bad on the surface.

But the AI boom is running into all kinds of shortages. Chips shortages. Energy shortages. Capital shortages. Shortage of political and resident patience.

Most of the increases in AI infrastructure investment are just price rises right now, not actually volume growth. So I think the boom will have to slow down and there will be disappointment about that, especially affecting chip makers and other equipment vendors. There could also be some positives as a slowdown would improve earnings and balance sheets of hyperscalers.

Also, bond yields have been rising far too quickly. Everyone is raising both debt and equity like crazy. Formerly very cash flow positive companies like Google are suddenly raising debt, competing with governments that are spending money they don't have like drunken sailors.

Big IPOs are happening. We've seen SpaceX go public at insane valuations. Anthropic and OpenAI are next. And it's coming to index ETFs as well. This isn't something you expect to see at the beginning of a stock market boom.

So I'm happy to leave something on the table in what feels like an overextended market in a historically very unusual situation.

Sorry for the rambling response to what was a simple question 😄

I agree Tower Hamlets is much nicer near Victoria Park. London Fields is Hackney though. It's far more expensive.

Sorry for being unclear. You said, if it's still a mess in December then you would admit it's doomed.

I wouldn't be so quick to give up on it. If the plan makes sense and steady progress is being made then not all kinds of messiness would deter me.

For instance, many people complain about Android apps not being ready for the desktop form factor. This isn't ever going to be solved completely because not all mobile apps make sense on a laptop. This will remain messy forever and people will complain forever but I don't think it matters.

What's far more important is whether a $1,200 Googlebook is suitable for creators and developers. It's too expensive as a media consumption device with good phone integration. This is where I see the greatest mess conceptually right now. If there is a plan to support this audience then it hasn't progressed very far yet. I think Google should make it clear who the target audience is and what they plan to do to make it work for them.

In any case, December is not a realistic timeframe. I would hope that the biggest issues can be ironed out within 6 to 12 months. What I want to see is strategic clarity, good communication and steady progress even if it's a bit messy.

QQQ and SMH add the chip-making and memory layer the S&P under-owns

Semis are ~20% of the S&P 500. Do you really call that "under-owned"? Compared to what?

I see that you're going all-in on AI. I understand that. I believe AI is a revolution not a fad. But the reason why semiconductor stocks have risen so much is partly due to a supply shortage which has caused margins to skyrocket.

Micron's gross margins have traditionally been near zero. Now they are 75%. Even if revenues will stay permanently higher than they used to be (and I think they will), margins will not, because high margins attract new supply. Memory chips in particular are a realtively simply component that will be commoditised.

Nvidia is a great company that will do well, but their 75% gross margins are not sustainable either. They hail from a time when there was no alternative to Nvidia (because of CUDA) and almost all GPU use was training rather than inference. Mass market inference will not permanently pay anyone 75% margins.

So while I believe in the AI story in the long run, I think we are in an extremely unsual phase of this development. Capital investment in this technology is at historical extremes as a percentage of GDP. Only the railroad boom in the late 1800s is comparable and could yet be dwarfed by the AI investment boom.

I'm not predicting a crash and I have no idea about timing. But while you can ignore normal business cycles when your investment horizon is 10 years, I think you cannot ignore the historical dimensions of what's going on right now. This is highly unusual.

In my opinion you are way overexposed to semis. You're doubling down procyclically on the one part of the AI industry that's currently profitable. If AI is to succeed then others will have to benefit from it as well and semiconductor margins will need to come back down to earth. Maybe not this year or next, but it's not going to take 10 years.

What kind of mess? All operating systems are a mess in one way or another. For me, the questions are

1) Does the concept make sense?

2) Is Google strategically behind it or is it an experimental project by some googlers?

3) Are they making progress fixing clearly incomplete and buggy parts?

I think there are different different kinds of giants.

When people build a product that's mostly a wrapper around existing, well tested, well maintained, battle tested libraries, adding very little code of their own, then there is very little code to maintain as well. The chance of bugs is relatively low, exactly because almost the entire codebase is provided by a stable giant.

On the other hand, when people LLM generate a million lines of code, building humungous projects, the chance of bugs is much greater and there is an ongoing maintenence burden that will be too much for most people who can generate a one-off codebase. This is a rather wobbly giant with severe mental health issues.

Perhaps this distinction will disappear over time as LLMs get better. But at this stage, I'm more inclined to trust code built on the first kind of giant.

Yeah that's pretty astonishing. Our flat is almost 25 degrees right now with no heating since last winter. But don't ask how we survived the heat waves 🤣

The phasing out is happening now. In 8 years time ChromeOS will be gone.

It makes no sense for a consumer to buy a Chromebook today. It's legacy technology that Google will be putting as little effort into as they possibly can. All of that effort will serve the needs of corporate customers managing fleets of Chromebooks.

They will certainly be hoping for it, but unlike with bonds, companies don't have to guarantee the future returns of stocks. People are buying stocks at pretty elevated valuations right now. It's not the worst time to raise equity. But the window may be closing soon as huge IPOs are already under way.

Few British companies are going to be paying 8.5% on their debt, if they can avoid it. This means that British companies may struggle to get the investment they need to grow and become more efficient, which the UK government desperately wants to happen.

They could raise equity instead or at least stop buying back shares.

That doesn't work if the name gives you away. I can only hope and trust that most doctors will be able to make a clear distinction between political conflicts and their moral and professional duty towards the individuals in their care.

In my last submission, I was rejected because code in the app could, under weird circumstances, write to ~ instead of the iCloud entitlement. This bug was uncaught by us, Apple identified it. From a compiled source.

I'm not convinced that this requires reverse engineering. They could have used fuzzing.

The number of affordable flats created in the new-build is not the complete picture though. People moving into non-affordable homes are moving out of somewhere else. You have to look at the whole chain and consider the effect of new supply on home prices more generally.

But let's compare this scenario with one where each new building has, say, 50% affordable homes. What this means is that you have to find someone who is willing to subsidise the affordable homes, otherwise they're simply not getting built.

Not getting built is the default. So unless you have a plan how to raise those subsidies, you're effectively voting for not building at all and therefore not even benefitting from the affordability effects in the first scenario.