We switched from TSMC to Frito-Lay and passed the savings on to you!

They used to say something along the lines of “you don’t buy a drill, you buy a hole.”

Any tool, whether a widget, software, AI, or labour, is a means to an end. This might be something coherent, like “we bought sheet metal to make tortilla presses, which we can sell for more than they cost to make” or a a rejected Bond-villian vision like “if we acquire all the potassium in the world, they’ll be forced to declare our boss the next king of eSwatini.”

Specifically, right now, the “end” seems to be “if we vapourize enough cash, investors will buy our stock becsuse we’re the most True Believers in the current trend.” I’m not sure, but the potassium plan might make more sense.

The optical turning point is here for a lot of things.

The non-US world is seriously considering Chinese cars, which was always a high burden to clear (see Japan and Korea getting their manufacturing together enough to field a competitive product)

I suspect we’ll see some flailed attempt to block Chinese RAM from the US market (cf. The router fiasco) but this one might have enough corporate inertia to sail through. When every business in the country can’t afford even basic 16GB office desktops, Intel, Dell, HP, and Apple are probably going to be making compelling arguments to their captive legislators. This might be the only way to avoid huge losses on their non-datacentre product lines.

Use a shared external source of randomness, like one of the shortwave “numbers stations”, to seed an agreed upon algorithm that simulates shuffling a deck and dispensing the cards. You’re running the same code on the same data, so you could show the cards you had seen after each hand to confirm everyone is in sync.

Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

All the best firms continvoucly morg these days.

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

I think she did a poor job of saying what she brought to the table. I understand not wanting to throwJoe under the bus, but opening some daylight on policy would have given her a chance to deflect the affordability problems the last months of Biden had, for example.

During thr gold-standard era, 1GBP was around 5USD, but a halfpenny was 1/480 of a pound, so a little more than a cent. The large-format cents issued up to 1857 were similar in size to the halfpennies of the late 1700s.

Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.

I have a 7900X3D and the Peerless Assassin 120 worked well. I swapped for a Zalman CNPS20X because you could get it for next to nothing at the time; it’s not much better (the RGB fans look neat but it’s so big it doesn’t fit well in some cases and the fans are prone to chattering noises at specific speeds)

The benefit I can imagine for an AIO is that it reduces cramping around the CPU, so you can essily release RAM or the GPU slot clip. But I suspect VRM cooling suffers; some vendors made an add-on fan to compensare IIRC.

It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.

I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.

I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

On a high level, you can get a cleaner like Deoxit D5 in a spray bottle. Most pots have a slit in them so you can spray into them, then turn the pot through its range a bunch of times. It’s worth a try as a start. Obviously do it while the unit is unplugged.

If you want to consider a more aggressive rebuild, like a capacitor replacement, maybe find a cheap old amplifier at the thrift shop to use as practice for desoldering/resoldering.

You might be able to connect the BT to one input on the amp, like the tape input, and the CD to another.

The Orville has a great take on it too.

There’s an episode where they bring in someone from a scarcity-era planet and she’s freaking out about how they have replicators and future medical tech, and the crew explains to her that if the technology were airdropped on her world, thry wouldn’t be socially ready for it and it would just become a means of further stratification.

I see a Roadmaster wagon. To the used-games store!