You will absolutely be allowed on the counter when you follow the same rule that humans follow for working on the counter- wash your hands/paws with soap and water first.

Not into that? Then you stay on the floor.

I think it depends on what happens.

My hope is there’s a clean election and enough MAGA types get voted out that Congress can meaningfully oppose the White House.

I am concerned there will not be a clean election. That Trump will find some way to get ICE or National Guard involved in elections, that there will be reports of tampering, and a significant population will feel their votes were not properly handled. THAT is a recipe for unrest, which sadly would give Trump more excuse to use force.

I could see a situation with a dirty election, Democrats demonstrate over their votes not being counted, and either radical subgroups or agents provocateurs will become violent. And then Trump claims force is necessary to stop the ‘radical violent leftists’.

That would not be a good day.

A great many of us are. It’s not easy to push reasonable candidates when our schools are doing a crap job teaching critical thinking skills and an awful lot of people have attention spans measured in seconds not minutes.

All 100% valid.

Our problem is a lot deeper than politics. Painting with somewhat broad strokes- our education system does a shit job of teaching critical thinking and analytics, but does a great job of teaching kids that learning and research are boring and not fun and should be avoided when possible. Then we bathe these kids in a fire hose of short form videos (which we’ve exported worldwide- sorry :( ) and the result is generations of kids who don’t research anything and can’t pay attention to anything for more than 90 seconds.

The result of that is that overwhelmingly Americans get election-related information by ‘push’ channels- TV, news, advertisements. Independent research into candidates is not common. And the crap we have now is the result- not just Trump but a Congress that’s too focused on re-elections and thus has no idea how to wield power or when it should be wielded.

We’re in a bad state. It took multiple generations to get into this crap and it will take multiple generations to dig ourselves out- assuming we as a nation even have the wherewithal to realize that digging out is necessary let alone the willpower to do it. I love my country, but I’m fearful of our future, especially over the next few decades.

Honestly I worry that USA will end up like the film Idiocracy and the rest of the world will just build a giant wall around USA to keep us from screwing anything else up :(

There’s no excuses. America prides itself on government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. So yeah, all of use share some responsibility for this crap, whether we voted for the current government or not. I mean no excuses here.

I hope you would understand though that there are some of us who have never voted for the current government, have never supported it in any way, and in fact have always opposed it to varying degrees. That doesn’t excuse such people from a certain amount of collective responsibility as a nation. But I think that there’s a difference between ‘I voted for Trump twice and I donated to his campaign and I persuaded others to vote for him but now I regret my actions’ and ‘I never voted for him, I always opposed him, and now I oppose this’.

I don’t claim to be opt-out-able. I never voted for the guy, but I also gave him a lot more benefit of the doubt more than others, including in my online postings. My only point with this post is to disavow the current actions and statements of the government, and to say that there’s lots of Americans who love Canada and support Canada and don’t support the crap coming out of Washington.

Not just one American sees this. There’s many of us. I fear not a majority in that regard, but many.

and I strongly fear … we won’t be able to.

Unfortunately I’m pretty sure we can’t. That’s not to say we won’t try- we will. But what happens next will largely be due to luck.

Our education system is shit. We are doing a shit job teaching kids critical thinking and analytics skills. We are doing a fucking fantastic job teaching kids that learning and research are boring and tedious activities that should be avoided when possible. Then we bathe them in a diet of short-form videos (which we’ve exported- sorry :( ) and throw them in a world where it takes two incomes just to keep the lights on. And then we expect them to take time and effort to use critical thinking in elections.
Then we act surprised when this doesn’t result in the best leaders.

Fact is for almost all elections now, the majority of people rely entirely on information ‘pushed’ to them- candidate ads, TV news, etc. Either that or they blindly support one party or another and vote for everyone that party puts forward without consideration for the individual candidate.

The result is a system heavily biased against honest candidates, at least for the Presidency.
Because you start out with the primary elections in your party, which most voters don’t participate in. That means to win the primary you have to win over the people who do vote in primaries, which are mostly wingnuts and old people. Then you have to make a mad dash for the center in order to win the general election.

Every now and then a decent human being makes it through and gets elected. But luck plays a big factor in that.

And while the immediate task might be pushing MAGA out to the fringe, really taking back the country and getting good leaders is much, much, much harder.

No AI here. Why do you call this AI?
If you think my writing style is AI-like please look up my user profile on Reddit. I’ve been writing the same way since long before ChatGPT was a thing.

And no I don’t feel better. My ‘guilt’ is irrelevant. My country isn’t on fire. I just see something being said in my name that I strongly disagree with so I say nope that’s not me.

I strongly believe that any group will be judged by the actions of the loudest and most visible subgroup, unless the rest of the group distances themselves from that subgroup. So this is my small act to distance myself.

You have every right not to accept my or anyone else’s apology and I sure as fuck don’t blame you for it. If after the CA wildfires someone had said the same thing to us as our neighborhoods were burning we sure as shit wouldn’t smile and pat them on the back and say ‘its all good’ even if one random idiot from that country apologized. In general, it’s not up to the person apologizing to dictate how the wronged party feel or react.

That said, I would point out that ‘2/3 of the USA is MAGA or non-voters’ is not accurate.

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker See here
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin and here
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/politics/trump-maga-base-shrinking and here Overall only 4 states currently approve of Trump. And overall every single gender/race/ethnic group disapproves of him.

If the Presidential election was held today he’d lose to a moldy sandwich.

American here.

Please know that this does not represent the average American on the street. When we had big wildfires Canada sent firefighting aircraft and crews and support staff and it saved lives. We haven’t forgotten that, even if our ‘leaders’ have.

These statements are beyond shameful and they dishonor all of America. The American people do not feel this way or agree with these statements. Trump does not speak for all of us or even most of us, especially in this matter. Speaking for the average person on the street- we do not want to annex Canada, we do not want to threaten you with tariffs, we love Canada and we want good relations with our friendly northern neighbors.

Stay safe. And I’m sorry we are sending threats instead of fire crews.

Most welcome :)

In some ways yes. Older designs on older nodes use older equipment- less precise, easier to build. There’s actually a lot of PC builders who are building machines on DDR4 mainboards because the memory is more affordable. A couple of DDR4 mainboards have been ‘un-discontinued’ as a result.

For a desktop or laptop PC, the difference of DDR4 to DDR5 often doesn’t make a huge difference. So you get a last-gen chipset and RAM and you get a decent machine without paying $thousands extra.

Most welcome :)

No they can’t. Building a fab costs $10-20 billion and takes 2-4 years. And that’s assuming you have the people, the expertise, and the IP to be able to produce memory in your new fab.

Now Valve is privately held, 50+% owned by GabeN, so real numbers aren’t public. But it’s estimated to be worth around $20-40 billion. That’s why he can afford to spend his time driving around on yachts and submarines. That means if Valve wanted to, they might be able to get into the business.

But from a business POV, it’d be a HUGE risk. You’re betting basically half the company that you can go in with ZERO experience in semiconductor manufacturing and start making top tier memory, AND that by the time you can bring it to market there’ll still be any demand for it. That’s a BIG risk. And given that they’re making money hand over first selling hardware built by others, it’s not a risk they have any need to take.

The problem is it’s not quite so easy.

If this was making things like cars or toilet paper, where the design and manufacturing methods are well understood, that’s exactly what would happen.

Making computer chips was well understood. You take a slice of single-crystal silicon, dope its surface with something, use a photo mask and a light to etch off the doping where you don’t want it. Repeat that process a few dozen or a few hundred times to etch transistors into the silicon, then slice it up into chips and package them.

Machines that do this are readily available.

The problem is, we made those transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

Then we ran into problems like how to etch features on the silicon that are smaller than the wavelength of light. And we found solutions to that. And so we made the transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

So now to create a current-gen computer chip, you need a process called EUV- Extreme Ultra Violet. Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, so when you want smaller wavelength to etch smaller features into the chip you eventually go from red to blue to ultraviolet and eventually to extreme ultraviolet. Problem THERE is there’s no EUV bulbs available, and if there were they’d be useless because atmospheric air absorbs EUV, and even if you do it in a vacuum glass absorbs EUV too so lenses don’t work. So you can only manipulate this light with mirrors, which have to be ground to an absolutely insane level of precision.

The resulting machine is quite impressive. You have a giant cavity kept in perfect vacuum. In one side you have an EUV source- that’s a little machine that dispenses a tiny 3-micron droplet of molten tin. As the droplet falls it’s hit by a laser to blast it into a pancake-like shape, then by another much bigger laser that vaporizes it. In the process of vaporizing it releases EUV light. So by blasting 50,000 droplets per second, you have a mostly continuous EUV light source. This light is reflected by shaped mirrors carved into the surfaces of the vacuum chamber that reflect and focus the EUV into a linear beam. Below that (also in vacuum) you have the mask and the silicon wafer, and by moving them back and forth under the beam you etch features ‘smaller than light’ into the chip.

The result is a chip with current pathways less than 100 silicon atoms wide. And if you want to make current-gen computer memory, that’s the only way we’ve got to build it.

EUV machines are pretty much only made by one company, ASML. They’re the size of a double decker bus, they cost a fortune ($200MM+), and they’re in insanely high demand. Like I’ve heard of a guy getting hired by a company for over million a year simply because he’s friends with a purchasing manager at ASML and might be able to get the company that hired him a build slot.

And it’s not just buy the machine and hit ‘start’, there’s a ton of other stuff involved. You need machines to make the photo masks, you need an ultra-clean cleanroom, you need a robotic facility where cassettes of wafers can be whisked from machine to machine with no exposure to even clean room air. And this is all highly specialized stuff, you don’t just call 1800-fab-4you and place an order.

Bottom line- even for a company that already has experience in current-gen chipmaking, setting up a fab like this costs $15-20 billion. And it isn’t just ‘sign a check and come back tomorrow’, the process of building a fab from the project being approved to the first wafer coming off the line is 2-3 years minimum.

Now here’s the bigger problem- semiconductors are always a cyclical market, or at least always have been. Demand (and thus prices) goes up, demand/prices come down. So if you invest $20 billion when prices are high, then in 2-3 years when the cycle is at its low nobody’s gonna be buying your output. And of course, adding more chips to the market will affect market prices (supply and demand). So companies that are building fabs have to look 5-10 years ahead to determine if they’ll get ROI on a fab before they build.

And that brings us to the next issue- with AI, we’re in uncharted territory. The computing market has been pretty well understood since the early 90s. There’s demand for PCs and laptops and servers and gadgets, and it goes up and down and new products come out that changes the mix of what’s ordered, but the cycle more or less continues. Up and down.
Then AI happens. And suddenly we have near-instant, unheard-of levels of demand. And it’s all for current-gen top-shelf stuff- HBM (high bandwidth memory) and GPUs and specialty silicon like NPUs.
Now there are more fabs being built. But it’s also starting to be better understood that AI is a bubble, which almost certainly will pop. So if you’re a DRAM maker and you spend $40 billion building a fleet of new fabs and then the bubble pops, you’re gonna be fucked. That’s why you don’t see everybody+dog diving into the DRAM market face first.

Okay here’s what I don’t get.
Awesome little gadget, good DAC, and the only Bluetooth codec it supports is SBC? No aac, no aptx hd, no ldac, no LE Audio?

Actually I would say the the one who goes to extra health should be whoever at Apple made the decision to use the patent encumbered HEIC format as the default for iPhone photos.

There are plenty of open picture formats that do the same thing without a patent tax.

Focusing on the Xbox side- the sensationalist headline masks the real story.

Most of these job losses aren’t layoffs, they are studios being sold or spun off and many/most of those people will keep their jobs.

And on the Xbox side at least, this is a VERY good thing.

Hard truth #1: Xbox is losing money, and MS will not keep subsidizing a money-losing division forever. Xbox needs to be profitable if it is to continue.

The Phil Spencer / GamePass strategy was to adopt the Netflix business model- buy a ton of indie studios, crank out tons of games to fill up GamePass, everybody subscribes. Put simply, this plan failed. A couple AAA games and three pages of games you’ve never heard of from publishers you’ve never heard of is not a compelling value proposition to a gamer who has finite gaming time. Especially when you’re already planning to play other AAA games being released.

The other problem was a stupid organizational structure. Apparently some parts of XBOX had 14 (!) levels of management. Asha wants to cut that to 3-5 levels (which IMHO is the right call). That means a lot of project managers and department heads and the like who don’t really add much overall value but cost a lot and make changes take exponentially longer.

Combine this and you have a large, top-heavy organization that’s producing games that aren’t selling consoles and aren’t selling GamePass subscriptions. Something had to change, and this is it.

Personally I think XBOX is in a better place today than yesterday. The resulting company won’t be trying to develop every game, they will be focusing on bringing in exclusives and hopefully focused on good first party games like Halo. And with much lower costs, hopefully they will be much more profitable to the point that XBOX has a profitable future.

Yeah it’s awful.

I actually found the best peanut butter at a local store. They have a machine that looks like a drink dispenser but it’s full of different kinds of peanuts- you grab a jar and push the button and it grinds the peanuts into peanut butter right there in front of you. Resulting machine looks something like this.
There’s a few different options like plain, honey, spicy, etc. I just get the plain one and stir in some salt when I get home.

If you let it sit for a while it separates (the oil comes to the top and solids sink) but you just stir it up and it’s fine.

Funny thing is- flavor is actually a good bit better than most of what you get in the jar. And there’s zero bullshit, just peanuts and salt to taste which are all you need for great peanut butter.

I’ve not been able to find any solid intel on what actually happened to the wafers.

Thing is though- cutting wafers and packaging can be done at any fab so in theory they could find an older fab with excess capacity and pay them to do some of it.

Binning however requires some more specialized equipment, that from what I understand is more specific to the type of chips you’re making. This is where you test each individual chip- out of a wafer you’ll get some great ones, some good ones, some bad ones, and some that don’t work at all. Thus ‘binning’ is taking a stream of chips and sorting them into bins by their maximum speed, stability, etc.
You might find a fab that has the equipment to bin DRAM chips but not the means to manufacture those chips. Still it seems an odd use of resources to get into the chip production business when your core business has nothing to do with chips.

I’d like to see a lawsuit like this against OpenAI.

They bought a combined total of 40% of the world’s 2026 memory production- not as usable modules, but as finished wafers. Those wafers have to be sliced into individual chips, which are then tested (binned) and packaged into modules, which themselves get mounted on a PCB with some support circuity to make a DIMM.
OpenAI (as far as I know) doesn’t have the equipment to do that.
So chances are those finished wafers are either in the trash or sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Question becomes- to what end? To drive up prices for other AI companies? To manipulate the market and then sell those wafers in small batches at great premium?

IMHO- unless they can show those wafers have been processed packaged and put in servers, they should also be sued.