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Isn't that commonly called anti-competitive practices?

It would fall under the category of exclusive dealing.(1) Exclusive dealing is never per se illegal, but it can be as a matter of judgment before a court.

ASML would argue that it's legitimately justified because

  a) there is mutual coinvestment (ASML owns 25% of Zeiss semi optics division) and thus there is symbiosis / shared risk not a simple exclusionary supply contract
  b) no viable alternative customers exist for Zeiss so it doesn't matter
  c) EUV litho is so tightly coupled to optics that having a single supplier is a technical necessity
  d) the market was CREATED through innovation and investment across ASML and suppliers, rather than exclusionary conduct (cf. the difference between "a monopoly" and "monopolization")
The affordance of a monopoly also prevents free riding. ASML and Zeiss spent billions of dollars and decades co-developing very specific, custom-tailored technology. If a competitor could simply walk up to Zeiss and buy the lenses that ASML spent billions helping to develop, the competitor would be free riding on ASML's investment - and creating a chilling effect for future innovation.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing


yes, but it has been given the blessing by the western governments.

Isn't violating export controls a crime?

(Also in the US you can still be prevented from leaving the country for a tort (civil matter))


It does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"

A lot of SVG animation uses JS for some reason. It would be interesting to see if sanitisers strip CSS and SMIL animation, I don't see any security reasons to do so.

You'd lose a lot of useful features, like SMIL animation.

But you'd gain adoption. A fair trade.

Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.


You are missing the timeline factor here.

2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off

2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution

2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.

2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)

At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?

also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"


2025 - You start using Amazon S3 with pre-signed URLs and serve those directly to your customers. Great, now your customers are also locked into AWS.

That. Also add the parts that engineers are terrified to their bones of moving elsewhere because they don't know how to use anything else and will act as extension of the salesman to make sure they don't need to learn anything.

I had many conversations with a former boss about the Azure sales team. They would come in, say they can do it cheaper, simpler and better — he was immediately convinced.

I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.

A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...


They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius

I save 75% on electricity vs diesel

AWS has been (blatantly) using Microsoft method of making their way in. Redis, Elasticsearch, whatnot, all follow the same procedure: 1. Here is a managed service. 2. Here is a fork of the managed service where we manage the server (you don't see) with 15% off in price/credits. Easier backups with clicks etc. 3. We are dropping support of managed-X, move to our fork. 4. Due to the market conditions, our forked service is now 50% more expensive. 5. Ah also, you cannot export/download your backups because they are in proprietary format. 6. Locked-in.

You'd be wrong to laugh at them, because different cars of the same general size can indeed vary 50% or more in fuel efficiency. It's fair to be skeptical of promises of huge savings, and question why your counterparty would benefit from giving you those savings, but sometimes there's a good reason.

Name one example of a 2026 car with the same size, fuel type and class where the difference in mileage is >=50%

I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations


The 2026 Toyota Corolla GR has 22mpg combined, and the normal 2026 Corolla has 35mpg with gas or 50mpg with a hybrid powertrain.

It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)


> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

People who know the tech, no

Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.


The stasi could only dream of the kind of surveillance the NSA et al has today.

Or Facebook or Equifax.

Honestly, nothing could make me trust yet another centralised and closed source social network.

>I don’t believe that the government should police what types of computers I can build.

They already do, one of the reasons it's so hard to make a smartphone is all the FCC regulations on radios.


That’s not related to the subject at hand, which is regulation preventing anti-competitive practices in monopolies and market failures. I thought that was clearly established, or you need to be over-prompted

Doesn't give much information about how they were generated


The example they gave of 4d splats used a room with dozens of cameras, and it only talked about the software used for 3d, not 4d.

For the outdoors examples on that site I can only assume they used dozens of drones?


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