skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Project Glasswing: An initial update in ~comp
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Project Glasswing: An initial update
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Comment on Why Japanese companies do so many different things in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.
Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.
For most of its history, the advanced ceramics division was a rounding error on Toto’s balance sheet: the money maker, as it had been since the 1910s, was the toilet and bidet business. But we’re in a new era. Demand for AI is exploding, meaning that demand for the high-bandwidth memory that AI data centers require is exploding, meaning that demand for memory chips is exploding, meaning that demand for e-chucks is exploding. And so Toto’s advanced ceramics division is suddenly the company’s largest business, generating the majority of its operating profit. Toto’s leadership, suddenly awash in AI-driven revenue, announced that they would double down by investing hundreds of millions in expanded electrostatic chuck production: the toilet company had become, quite unexpectedly, a supplier to the semiconductor supply chain.
The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.
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Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured. The form of the corporation that we know and love in the United States—specialized, market-oriented, governed by shareholders—is just one form that the corporation can take; but it’s not the only way to coordinate capital and labor in a successful and profitable way. The protean corporations of Japan are best understood as a different species of thing altogether: better at some things, worse at others, but still highly adapted to their particular environment. And the things that they’re very good at turn out to be extraordinarily helpful for all sorts of things in which American companies tend to struggle.
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Here’s an illustration. Let’s say you run a factory. You decide that you want your lines to produce fewer defective goods: maybe you want to improve your yield from 95 percent to 98 percent. So you decide to invest in better training for your workers: maybe training now lasts six weeks instead of two weeks. This works, and now your yield is higher; but that change makes other things more attractive too. For example: now that your yield is higher, it makes sense for you to reduce your inventory, since fewer defects mean you no longer need a large buffer of spare parts to replace the bad ones. So now you’ve cut your inventory: but now it makes sense for you to shorten your production runs and switch more frequently between products, since without a mountain of inventory to work through you can afford to change what the line is making. And if you’re switching frequently between products, then it makes sense for you to invest in flexible, reprogrammable machinery instead of dedicated, single-purpose equipment. So one relatively small tweak shifts the entire calculus of what you do.
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So if we want to know why Japanese companies have one apparently unusual practice—why they’re so diversified into countless unrelated industries—we can’t really answer the question in isolation. We need to ask which bundle of practices they employ.
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And this means that Japanese companies strive to avoid financial pressure from outsiders. Relationships with suppliers are longstanding and entrenched: many Japanese companies have been working with the same suppliers for 50 years or longer. Outside investors seeking to interfere in this happy picture will find few avenues for influence. A standard Japanese firm’s board of directors is composed almost exclusively of the firm’s own senior managers; a large fraction of the firm’s equity is held not by outside investors but cross-held by other Japanese firms; and most of the firm’s financing comes from a single “main bank” that provides loans and monitors performance.
And as a result, Japanese companies don’t really try too hard to return profits to shareholders. Earnings are mostly reinvested, and investor dividends are kept low. For a long time, Japanese firms would spend as much entertaining the managers of other firms as they would on dividends to shareholders.
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And the complete Japanese bundle, I should say, ends up producing something with entirely different objectives and interests than the American bundle. The H-firm exists to make money, or rather to return money to shareholders; but the J-firm, run by its employees and largely indifferent to the interests of shareholders, exists simply to continue existing. That’s why Japanese companies are so protean and willing to change what they do. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a maker of handmade playing cards; in the 1960s, it was pushed out of the playing cards game by a wave of competition; and it spent several years experimenting with new markets—taxi services and instant rice, though contrary to the rumors not love hotels—before finding its way to video games. Fujifilm, which faced a near-total collapse of photographic film in the 2000s, simply used its expertise in chemical coatings and fine optics to pivot into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, LCD films, and semiconductor process materials.
And that basic impulse toward survival is why Japanese companies are so insistent on diversification. If you’ve made a commitment to keep people employed for life, then you need to create jobs for them if their current jobs stop making sense: indeed, you might need to keep them employed even if you can’t find anything for them to do. If you’re not very worried about profitability, and have lots of well-trained generalist employees, then it makes perfect sense to reinvest your company’s earnings by expanding into new industries: doing so not only allows your company to survive longer—your company’s portfolio of bets is now more diversified and thus lower-risk—but also ensures that you’re able to keep your surplus workers busy in one way or another.
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And this system, as it turned out, was really good at particular things. Aoki’s key insight was that the J-mode had a comparative advantage in environments of moderate volatility: situations where conditions changed frequently enough that rigid central plans would be outdated before they were executed, but not so radically that only top-down strategic intervention could cope. In an environment of stable, predictable demand, the H-firm did fine; in an environment of extreme disruption, where the whole product line had to be rethought, centralized authority was indispensable, and the H-firm also did fine. But in between—where the challenge was to make constant small adjustments in a changing but recognizable paradigm—the J-firm excelled.
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But catch-up growth, by definition, has to end: at some point you’ve caught up, and the challenge at the frontier is not only to refine what’s already known but to invent what is not known. And paradigm invention is precisely the sharp discontinuity for which the J-mode has no particular gift. Consensus-driven, horizontally coordinated organizations are very good at refining what already exists: but they are very bad at deciding what should exist.
That basic weakness is why Japanese firms are so dominant in some domains and entirely absent in others. Japan excels in automotive manufacturing, machine tools, industrial robotics, optics, and precision materials: domains characterized by incremental refinement. But they have very little to add in software, internet platforms, artificial intelligence, or electric vehicles. The architecture of the Japanese firm is built to perfect a domain through progressive advancement; it’s quite poorly suited to sharp discontinuity.
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Why Japanese companies do so many different things
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Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYou still benefit when the company has a good quarter and the stock goes up. It’s been almost a decade since I left Google, and I still benefit. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the work...You still benefit when the company has a good quarter and the stock goes up. It’s been almost a decade since I left Google, and I still benefit.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with the work that I actually did, but I don’t see how that matters.
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Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt's true that at a large company, the work that most people do day-to-day is unlikely to affect the stock price. But it does mean that when the company does well, you do well, so you can cheer...It's true that at a large company, the work that most people do day-to-day is unlikely to affect the stock price. But it does mean that when the company does well, you do well, so you can cheer when the company has a profitable quarter instead of feeling alienated because the company is making money and you're not.
Of course there are a lot of other ways that management can alienate workers, and layoffs will definitely do that. But profitable, growing companies can do other nice things for their employees too and send a consistent message.
It was before my time, but HP was once legendary for treating their employees well, and Google was that way too in the early years.
Another thing about Silicon Valley is that you know that even successful companies don't necessarily last. A physical sign of that was that Google's main campus was built on SGI's former headquarters. Facebook's old campus was formerly a Sun campus.
So, it was pretty obvious that those were the good times and that I should enjoy them while they lasted.
Nowadays the vibe towards tech companies is so negative that there are commenters on Hacker News trying to tell me I was exploited. Like, just no. There's a lot of injustice in the world and there are much better targets for your sympathy than rich retired tech workers.
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Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentSomething like this is common practice at Silicon Valley firms. Employees become shareholders via stock options and RSU’s and directly benefit when the stock goes up.Something like this is common practice at Silicon Valley firms. Employees become shareholders via stock options and RSU’s and directly benefit when the stock goes up.
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Comment on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentMaybe LIDAR has weird reflections off water? Whatever it is, I imagine they will take a few weeks or months to fix this and it will stay fixed. It doesn’t seem like it would be as difficult as...Maybe LIDAR has weird reflections off water? Whatever it is, I imagine they will take a few weeks or months to fix this and it will stay fixed. It doesn’t seem like it would be as difficult as kangaroos.
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Comment on Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
Samsung Electronics will distribute about 40 trillion won ($26.6 billion) in bonuses to chip division employees this year after striking a tentative agreement with its labor union, according to Bloomberg. Using the proposed terms and analyst projections for 2026 operating profit, Bloomberg calculated the average payout at 513 million won, the equivalent of about $340,000. The total average compensation across Samsung was 158 million won in 2025, per a company filing.
The agreement, subject to a union ratification vote running May 22 through May 27, calls for Samsung to direct 10.5% of operating profit into stock bonuses along with a separate 1.5% cash component, according to Bloomberg. The program runs for 10 years, contingent on the company meeting profit thresholds. One-third of the stock award can be liquidated right away, with the rest parceled out in installments across the next two years, Bloomberg reported. The first payout is expected in early 2027.
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The deal ended a standoff that drew intervention from South Korea's president, prime minister, and labor minister. A strike that shut down chip production could have cost the economy as much as 1 trillion won daily, with losses potentially multiplying to 100 trillion won if in-progress semiconductor wafers were rendered unusable. Samsung's shipments account for nearly a quarter of all South Korean exports.
Workers had pushed for bonuses tied directly to operating results and the removal of a cap that had limited payouts to half of annual salary. The union's original demand was for a bonus pool equivalent to 15% of operating profit. The settled rate of 10.5% was enough, in JPMorgan $JPM +0.34%'s estimation, to push Samsung's total performance-linked compensation to about 12% of operating profit for the year, Reuters reported.
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Samsung chip workers to get $340,000 average bonus in AI boom
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Comment on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.
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But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said its fleet those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.
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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
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Comment on Colorado approves balcony solar, requires utilities to accept meter collars in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
Colorado is the latest state to approve plug-in solar (also known as balcony solar) after Gov. Jared Polis signed HB26-1007 into law.
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Legalizes plug-in solar with safety guardrails. The new law legalizes plug-in solar generation devices — typically one to four solar panels plus an inverter, designed for simple self-installation by homeowners or renters in a yard or on a balcony. It requires that devices meet rigorous product safety standards, closing a gap that previously allowed unsafe products to be sold in Colorado. It prohibits utilities and HOAs from unreasonably blocking the installation or use of these devices.
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Cuts costly interconnection barriers with meter collars. The law requires the Public Utilities Commission to update interconnection rules by December 31, 2026, to explicitly allow customer ownership and use of meter collar adapters — simple devices installed between an electric meter socket and a utility billing meter that provide immediate interconnection of customer-owned energy devices. Meter collars reduce or eliminate the need for expensive electrical panel upgrades, saving families between $2,000 and $5,000 per installation and avoiding panel upgrades that can cost up to $10,000. Colorado’s investor-owned utilities — including Xcel and Black Hills — are already using meter collar technology. This law makes access universal and statewide.
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Expands access across all utility types. The law extends these protections to municipally owned utilities and electric cooperatives, ensuring that families across Colorado — not just those served by investor-owned utilities — can benefit.
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Colorado approves balcony solar, requires utilities to accept meter collars
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Comment on AI is killing the cheap smartphone in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
In 2026, the International Data Corporation, which tracks the smartphone market, predicted that worldwide smartphone shipments would fall 13 percent, their largest single-year decline ever. The crash would be most intense in Africa and the Middle East, where smartphone shipments would fall by more than 20 percent, and would be concentrated in the cheapest end of the smartphone industry. This shock represented not a temporary blip but indeed “a structural reset of the entire market”: a huge share of the world’s population is getting priced out of smartphone ownership.
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The catch with HBM, beyond the difficulty of producing it, is that it is enormously wafer-intensive. It is not just that you are stacking a lot of dies together. Because of all the peripheral circuits and all the vertical channels, a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does. Every gigabyte of HBM produced is, in effect, three gigabytes of commodity memory not produced.
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The rational response, for the memory makers, was obvious: pump out more HBM. And so they reallocated a massive amount of capacity. In 2023, HBM accounted for 2 percent of the memory makers’ wafers; in 2024, 5 percent; in 2025, 10 percent; and by the end of 2026, the share is expected to hit 20 percent, with an additional 3 percent allocated toward high-density DDR for AI servers. And so in the space of three years HBM went from a peripheral product category to the very core of the memory industry. SK Hynix, which had been first to reach volume production of the leading-edge HBM node, saw its HBM revenue increase fourfold in 2024 alone; by the end of that year, HBM accounted for more than 40 percent of the company’s DRAM revenue, up from roughly 5 percent two years earlier.
But even this reallocation hasn’t been enough. Demand continues to outrun supply, and the memory shortage remains one of the defining features of the AI buildout. (It has, in turn, produced all sorts of workarounds, like quantization or DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention.) So heated has the race for memory become that at the end of 2025, executives from hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google were reportedly “practically taking up permanent residence in Korea” lobbying Samsung and SK Hynix for allocation. More than 30 percent of hyperscaler capital expenditure is now going to DRAM alone.
This has been fantastic news for the memory makers. In 2025, they earned a collective $70 billion in profit; in 2026 they’re expected to earn more than double that amount. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are now among the most profitable companies in the world.
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And that repricing has had a stark effect in poor countries. In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026: surging memory prices resulted in a “forced premiumization” of the Indian smartphone market. But in the poorest markets, such premiumization isn’t a possibility. In 2025, 81 percent of smartphone shipments in Africa were in the sub-$200 category: as smartphone prices surge, many African consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely.
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Even Apple, the king of the electronics world, is starting to feel the bite of memory costs. Apple traditionally enjoyed significant bargaining power with the Korean memory makers, negotiating long-term agreements to smooth prices out for years at a time; but now the memory makers are the ones with the leverage. When Apple’s latest long-term agreement expired in January 2026, the memory makers refused anything lasting longer than a quarter at a time. In February, in order to secure supply at all, Apple agreed to pay Samsung a 100 percent premium on the LPDDR5X memory destined for the iPhone.
And so the pricing pressure on Apple has grown massively over the last six months. Over the course of 2025, the 12GB LPDDR5X chips that power the iPhone 17 Pro had increased in price by 230 percent; without its long-term agreements to protect it, Apple would face the full brunt of the memory crunch. In order to cope, Apple has announced a wave of delays over the last few months. The iPhone 18 standard model has been delayed to spring 2027; the new Mac Studio was delayed from summer to fall.
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AI is killing the cheap smartphone
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Comment on I made my own Reddit alternative in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkSome of the shared links are actually YouTube videos; it might be a good idea to call that out on the front page, so you can tell before clicking on them? More generally, one of the problems with...Some of the shared links are actually YouTube videos; it might be a good idea to call that out on the front page, so you can tell before clicking on them?
More generally, one of the problems with multiplayer games is that you need multiple people to try them out properly :-) I've tinkered with writing an Internet forum, but then built myself a link-sharing website where only the admin can post links. There's still plenty of work to do, but it's much easier to deal with. For socializing, I repost the links to Tildes and I might add Bluesky eventually.
I also imagine releasing the software someday so other people can run it, and then they could somehow connect and we could share links, but the problem with that is that it would be a multiplayer game.
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Comment on An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry in ~science
skybrian Link ParentThis gets into whether mathematical proofs are invented or discovered. In some sense, the information was already implicit in the axioms. But that would be defining creativity in such a strict way...This gets into whether mathematical proofs are invented or discovered. In some sense, the information was already implicit in the axioms. But that would be defining creativity in such a strict way that humans don't do creative work either.
I don't follow the math, but if the mathematicians say it's sufficiently original to publish in a top journal, I believe them.
It seems similar to the situation with AlphaGo. This proof apparently needed some cleaning up for understandability, but maybe that won't be needed in a year or two?
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Comment on Google Search as you know it is over in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentChatGPT in "thinking" mode does a reasonable job too. I imagine that for Google's AI overview, it's based on the results of just one search, good or bad, while the others do multiple searches,...ChatGPT in "thinking" mode does a reasonable job too. I imagine that for Google's AI overview, it's based on the results of just one search, good or bad, while the others do multiple searches, refining the query if the first one didn't work very well.
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Comment on An OpenAI model has disproven a central conjecture in discrete geometry in ~science
skybrian LinkThey got nine mathematicians to improve and comment on the proof and they're all saying nice things about it: Noga Alon: Thomas Bloom: W T Gowers: Daniel Litt: Arul Shankar: ... Jacob Tisimerman:...- Exemplary
They got nine mathematicians to improve and comment on the proof and they're all saying nice things about it:
Noga Alon:
The solution of the problem by the internal model of Open AI is, in my opinion, an outstanding
achievement, settling a long-standing open problem. The fact that the correct answer is not n^
1+o(1) is surprising, and the construction and its analysis apply fairly sophisticated tools from algebraic number theory in an elegant and clever way.Thomas Bloom:
Perhaps tempting fate, on 16th April I included this problem in a blog post on www.erdosproblems.com titled (somewhat tongue in cheek) ‘Top 10 Erdős Problems’. [...] While I believed that AI would make some progress on at least a couple of the problems in that list eventually, I did not expect this to happen just one month later!
If the result of this paper was a proof of the unit distance problem, that would be truly incredible.
While I was still very surprised to hear of the this result, this was dampened slightly when I
learnt it was a construction of a counterexample [...]On examining the construction, it becomes more clear how people had missed this before – it
requires the confluence of several different unlikely events [...] The AI met all of these criteria, and its success here echoes previous achievements: it often produces the most surprising results by persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore [...]Still, while perhaps not the proof of a conjecture that we had hoped for, no doubt this construction and the ideas involved will have a major impact in discrete geometry.
One aspect of this proof should not be overlooked: while the original proof produced by AI was
completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many
other mathematicians involved in the present paper.W T Gowers:
In any case, there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI
mathematics: if a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics and
I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation.
No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that.Daniel Litt:
This is the first example of a result produced autonomously by an AI that I find exciting in itself,
as opposed to as a leading indicator.Arul Shankar:
I had not encountered this problem before seeing the proof from OpenAI, and I found the proof
to be a clean execution of a very beautiful idea and quite well written up....
All the same, I would consider this to be a very "human" proof, though a extremely ingenious one.
Jacob Tisimerman:
This is a really impressive piece of work, and I would accept it for any journal without hesitation.
While it’s true in the final solution that nothing is all that surprising, there are many
ways to attempt to set this construction up ... It’s always tempting to look at a completed
proof and declare it obvious after the fact.This may indicate one way that AI systems have an edge: it’s not just that they can try all known
methods, but they can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without
getting overwhelmed. Of course this is not yet robustly true, but this may be a foreshadowing event.Melanie Matchett Wood:
I had not heard of this problem before hearing of the solution from Open AI. I find the argument
to be a beautiful application of number theory to a natural, concrete question.[...] I believe if the level and type of human expertise that is represented on this note had been assembled to find a counterexample to this conjecture a month ago, and those people put in similar amounts of time working on it tha[t] they did to reading and thinking about Chat GPT’s solution, the mathematicians would have found a counterexample. However, without the claimed proof by Chat GPT, there is no particular reason anyone would have tried to look for a counterexample, assembled a group of experts with the appropriate expertise, or that the experts would have agreed to turn their attention to this problem.
From the article:
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