I'm surprised no one has responded to this (though granted it's probably due to the language barrier of the source Chinese video). This article is about a fairly comprehensive survey of over 36 cars on the Chinese market of level 2 driver assist technology (ADAS) on an actual highway. Interestingly Tesla did the best, even over cars like Mercedes C class and other cars with LIDAR as well as the local brands. One alarming trend the article notes is that there was a wide range of crash avoidance behavior even between the same car likely due to the machine learning, and that also makes explaining the differences hard. Hopefully someone with more background on ADAS systems can watch and post what they think.
Same here. NSF funded my grad research and I have the same feeling. Seeing this nation eat its seed corn to fund some bullshit tax cuts makes me sick. None of this is theoretical. Talked to a Stanford prof two week ago- her DOE grant is on hold. Talked to some UCSD profs- and they said they only admitted just over half the number of grad students as last year due to funding uncertainty. I fear my kids might have to go to another country to get advanced training, and that next generation of American tech entrepreneurs will be fewer or lost.
Problem is PE stresses a company out such that they don't have runway to adapt. In the end, the consumer is still less well served by fewer choices and higher prices.
As a parent, I can assure you that the market for Toys 'R' Us still exists. The problem is that to become a TRU requires a lot of capital. More than anyone is likely to risk in 2025.
It's sad. I would love to take my kids to a 90s TRU.
Worthwhile high capital business models are pursued all the time. The problem is that the business model is no longer competitive. If it was competitive it would be competing.
> I'm saying the market for what TRU provided had disappeared
The market still exists, doesn't it?
Kids still exist, kids still play with toys.
People simply buy toys from Amazon now, not TRU.
Just like people buy electronics from Amazon, not Best Buy/Circuit City.
And shoes from Amazon/Zappos, not Payless.
Seems like most retail markets still exist, they've just been cornered by the giant "Everything Store".
IMO, physical toy stores should be competitive to e-commerce with the right strategy. Simply going to the store could be an exciting adventure into itself, with higher fidelity discovery than a screen provides. Esp. post-COVID where people are opting more for analog/offline options after online/lockdown burnout.
Claiming TRU's market disappeared feels similar to claiming the bookstore market disappeared, yet Barnes and Noble had a well documented and surprising comeback by shifting strategy:
meaningless statement without quantity. kids don't play outside or with each other at the same rate as they did 35 years ago. video games and smart phones are vastly replacing physical toys.
The market exists at a far lower valuation. 90% of the sales will go to Walmart/Costco/Target/Amazon/Aliexpress/Kroger/etc, 10% will go to the remaining businesses.
You might go to the local toy store every now and then and pay 2x or more for the same toy just so your kid feels the ambiance of shopping in a toy store or supporting a local business, but the majority of your purchases will not happen there, certainly not enough to supporter the huge Toys R Us stores of the past.
In the UK the toy chains The Entertainer and Smyths both expanded to fill the market, both usually seem to have a decent amount of footfall. Toys are an interesting product as the target market is, for the most part, not an online shopper.
PE isn't trying to turn the company around in these cases, or at least only trying to do that; when the company is truly doomed PE is trying to maximize the value obtained before it expires. They're serving a useful role in the capitalist ecosystem.
Consider that technology may have moved on, and there are other better ways to communicate with journalists: https://www.nytimes.com/tips e.g. Signal and to read NYTimes e.g. high quality VPN.
I don't see how an ordinary non-technical user could obtain access to a "high quality VPN". I'm not sure a technically skilled user could without a lot of work to setup some sort of chain of anonymous proxies.
Derek Lowe in The Science blog "In the Pipeline" says:
"No one has ever ripped into scientific funding like this. The Trump team has attacked it as if it were some evil imposed on us by an invading enemy, and the damage is so large and so widespread already that it’s hard to even explain."
"When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. . .This isn’t about politics — it’s about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible.
It seems that the biomedical field is hit a lot harder both in that article and in the Stats News article linked: https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/19/trump-funding-freeze-gra.... For STEM the big question is whether how NSF overhead reduction and likely even DOE and DOD grants will be impacted. As these funds are needed for promised tax cuts its like those cuts to those grant programs will happen too IMO.
Was reported earlier on HN (via Krebs) but now confirmed by NYTimes. What is different is this is being spun by the administration as an initiative to bring Russia to the negotiating table. It also says a lot of the offensive operations are being run by the UK and Canada. It's been out long enough that Rubio was asked about this on the Sunday talk shows.
I personally think the administration is trying to rationalize all this to their Republican supporters, and defense hawks, and to cover the fact that this is to appease Putin as Krebs says. On the other hand the Doge efforts are creating massive vulnerabilities in the .gov services.
