> I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA.
In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.
The catch there is I don’t look for this stuff, as it isn’t a priority. I am happier not pursuing what advertisers want to sell me, as my time is limited. I imagine many folks are the same, based on it being a core problem advertising tries to solve for businesses.
I despise advertising, but anecdotally, I can think of three ads in the past week that informed me about products I didn’t know existed but would enjoy. I also learned about multiple new games releasing, sporting events that were happening, etc. The claim that ads are not at all informative is incorrect.
That being said, I also block as many ads as possible from my life, so the few I actively notice tend to be more noticeable.
> I struggle to understand so much hostility to this approach.
It's going to be really rough for a lot of folks as machines get better and better at domains that the human brain was exclusively useful for. I tend to view the hostility as a mix of both "unless we have proof this could all be hokum" and "we're going to lose a lot of what we consider makes humans amazing".
Compassion is going to be very, very important in the next few years. We're going to hurt, both internally and externally.
Very little of lifestyle products is about need. Folks will open their wallets for some combination of personal wants, exclusivity (or the illusion of it), or even something as simple as a coffee table discussion piece.
These sorts of "collectible clones" are pretty popular at the moment. A big part of it is nostalgia.
Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.
There are many great quotes by Nintendo folks about this approach. One of my favorites:
> I like to think of it like buying a car. Admit it. Your left brain looks at a vehicle in terms of the numbers. What's the horsepower? The towing capacity? The 0-60? That's our competitor's approach. But your right brain is different. There's only one question out there: sitting behind the wheel, where will this baby take me? In other words, do you want to go just a little bit faster, down the same streets you've always driven, or down a new road, to places you've never seen before? That's the difference with Nintendo DS.
Your points are good ones, especially since they emphasize that different people have different expectations of what a "button" is and isn't. Your points individually describe a button with a label, one with a toggle, an actual button, and a progress indicator. All of those things can be "buttons" depending on the user.