“The massive ceramic connector and 10 inch thick cable immediatelly make obvious that the USB-D connector has been designed from the ground up to be able to power the latest generation of Graphics Card”

Ah right.

In Portugal in general use “propaganda” is definitelly just the political stuff whilst “publicidade” is definitelly just the commercial stuff.

Mind you, maybe before those two concepts were more merged: I know that in legal terms the political stuff is explicitly called “Propaganda Política” since I’ve done paphlet distribution for a political party here during election campaigns and the rules for putting “political propaganda” in people’s mailboxes are different than for “publicidade”.

This is going to be huge when it blows!

For me the problem use to be it having gone from “Our product is great and here’s why” style of adverts to the psychological manipulation shit (image of beautiful woman seducing handsome man, queue name of perfume).

I’m fine with people trying to convince me but detest when they try to manipulate me.

However the recent tendency to relentlessly shove it in front of me ALL THE TIME does get on my nerves - it’s like getting constantly harassed by a shameless salesman with no respect for other people.

Neither “anuncios” (adverts) nor “marketing” (yeah, we use the English word) are the same as “propaganda” (its spelled the same as in English but said slightly differently)

Is what you describe a Brasilian Portuguese thing?

I literally dropped my Internet Provider which had a Net+TV+phone packet when their TV box got enshittified with Ads.

Got me a different, Internet Only, provider and made my own TV box from a Mini-PC with Linux and a wireless remote control.

Interestingly, I ended up paying 1/3 the price and getting 5x faster internet relative to the previous provider, so thanks for trying to shove adds on my face Vodaphone!

Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle elements of politics and policy - since I lived there from before the Crash until Brexit.

I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:

In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.

After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owners above all:

• Interest rates were lowered to 0%, thus protecting lenders (i.e. those with the money to lend or ownership of Banks which in the modern system can de facto create money: if you don’t believe me, read the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy” from the Bank Of England) from debt defaults, also indirectly protecting Asset Owners by avoiding asset firesales from collateral confiscated after a default thus avoiding the associate asset price falls, most notably for Land and Housing (in the UK the Housing bubble never really stopped being inflated and Land Ownership is the core of Old Wealth)
• Banks were unconditionally saved by the state taking a share in them. That Public share was then put under management of a group made up of bankers “so that the government doesn’t interfere in the market”. De facto pressure for changing from the very practices that had cause the Crash was removed and most of the people having the blame for the failures of the Crash kept their positions of privilege.
• All this was paid by most people through Austerity. Public services were cut, Social Security (aka "Benefits) were reduced, salaries stagnated. The poorer one was the worst they got hit.

By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.

This was roughly how things went for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth is anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since that “growth” told by official GDP numbers is mostly asset prices going up.

This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.

I expect the plans of the billionaires who are cozying up with Trump is exactly to end up richer via this process.

A lot of countries in Europe already have their own country-wide payment systems.

What we’re seeing now in Europe is the stage where those multiple country-specific systems become interoperable and a new international payment system appears.

Canada only needs the kind of thing which has been not just available but actually dominant for decades in countries like The Netherlands and Portugal.

At least in Europe housing is at the moment proportionally to incomes just as bad as in the US.

Totally agree on Health, though.

Having lived in a couple of countries in Europe, from The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote system and a thus a multitude of small parties to Britain with a First Past The Post system like the US and thus pretty much a Two Party System, I’ve concluded that at least in Politics stability is just like standing water - it invariably turns into a swamp.

We need some amount of constant change to bring up and flush out the rot that innevitably accumulates in the murky waters of a system were power is always in the hands of a subset of people who are all in the same social circles, went to the same schools and whose sons and daughters marry each other.

Not “Daily Revolution”, just regular change so that any funny business going on outside the public eye risks being brought to light, destroyed and the guilty people punished because power has changed has to people who aren’t mates of the crooks that did it.

That’s my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller.

HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.

Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing!

You heard it here first.

Invest Now!!!

Worry not, some of what’s perfectly fine nowadays will eventually be forbidden because how harmful it is for people, from micro-plastics that are being found even in men’s gonads to the excessive amounts of nitrous oxides emitted by diesel engine that kill over ten thousand people per year in Europe alone.

We probably still breathe and eat a lot of highly carcinogenic shit, just different shit from back in the days when asbestos was considered a great fire-proof substance.

Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

Mate, I have a Masters in Electronics Engineering and a partial degree in Physics.

I just didn’t want to pull the authoritativeness card out, so instead tried to explain things to you from basic principles.

You’re either confusing some other application with what I was talking about - which was the emitters used in LED light bulbs, the ones which look yellow when they’re switched off, the yellow stuff being the phospor - or you mentally over-generalized something you heard, either to an area were it doesn’t apply or missing the required context to make sense.

Every accusation [is] a confession

That is indeed something which has been very visibly and very often proven, again and again and again, in the last couple of years.

I reckon it was always so, but we just forgot it during the period after WWII and the ressurging of the far-right.

Yeah, even cheap microcontrollers nowadays with support for clock functionality have an ultra low power mode were the only thing running is the clock crystal and the clock functionality which uses so little power that it can run for years from such a button battery.

The thing could do the same as my stupidly cheap alarm clock that has some batteries as power backup and just keep on counting time without displaying whilst mains power is down so that when mains power comes back up it still has the right time.

The extra $1 for the hardware needed for it is hardly going to matter next to the overal cost of anything but a stupidly cheap microwave.

I have a stupidly cheap microwave which I bought a few years ago (because I moved homes and the last one, a rental, included a microwave) and it has no clock.

In fact, it doesn’t even have the simplest of displays - the entire user interface is one analog rotary control for power and another for microwaving time - the latter rotating back by itself at a fixed speed - plus a bell that dings when the second control reaches the zero position.

If I want to know how long till a microwaving operation is finished I just look at the position of the second rotary control.

Sometimes simpler is better.

The “funny” thing is that anybody thinking that a mere 5 years ago would have been deemed a conspiracy nutter.