They work fucking fantastic, until they don’t.

If you have more than 3 brain cells to rub together maybe. But that requires recognition of the knowledge chain challenge -> experience -> learning -> knowledge. Hell even the last two (learning -> knowledge) seems beyond a lot of people.

Personally I blame our educational system. It does a shit job of teaching people to learn. It does a great job of teaching people that learning isn’t fun and should be avoided.
Combine that with ‘stranger danger’ and helicopter parenting keeping kids indoors and keeping them from unstructured unsupervised activities that lead to organic learning through experience, and you get 18yo’s graduating high school with virtually all of their learning being in school settings and virtually none of it fun. So they do it when necessary or when they don’t realize they’re doing it, and otherwise avoid it. It’s really sad.

I got lucky or maybe I just had really good parents. But somewhere along the line I figured out that learning could be a ton of fun if it’s on a subject you’re interested in and if the instruction matches your learning style. So I taught myself all kinds of shit, usually by diving face first into projects I had no idea how to finish and by the time I was done I was good at it.
Like in the early days of VoIP- ‘I’m bored so let’s download some sketchy open source bullshit and route all my phone calls through a random free provider in Washington State. Oh it only runs on Linux? Guess I gotta figure out how to make Linux work then.’ Add a bunch of evenings and weekends of fucking around and without realizing it I’ve now got a marketable skill. And that ‘sketchy open source bullshit’ became Asterisk, one of the most common open source PBX systems around today.

Thing is- if Claude had been around, and I used it, I’d just have said ‘Claude, I need to install CentOS linux, download the latest snapshot of Asterisk out of SVN, compile it, and set up an IP PBX. Write me a script’.
It’d think for 30 seconds and then give me the entire answer. And I’d learn fucking nothing other than how to copy and paste from Claude.

It’s like all the companies that are firing their junior engineers in favor of AI… they are shooting themselves in the foot. Where you do think senior engineers come from? Do you think they hatch from eggs, fully trained and experienced and ready for a technical leadership position? No you moron they start as interns or junior engineers and they gain knowledge through experience. Get rid of the junior engineers and wait a generation or two and there will be no senior engineers to direct Claude.

Depends on the situation. Not every place to live is walkable, or should be.

Past a certain level of population density- ABSOLUTELY. EVERYTHING should be designed with walkability in mind.

Below that though, cars can often make more sense. If you live in a suburb, there’s too much distance to walk usually, and too few people on any given route to justify regular mass transit.

Personally I’m a real big fan of ‘third mode’ transportation- bikes, scooters, powered skateboards, hoverboards, segways, etc. Things that go faster than walking, slower than cars, and (crucially) take up almost no pavement space. Get enough people on those and things can get better fast.

I’ve had this exact conversation in real life.

I do IT work. Someone who was a heavy AI user asked me ‘how was I integrating AI into my workflow’ as if it was a foregone conclusion that I AM integrating AI. I told him I wasn’t, that AI may be useful for finding answers to some things or photoshopping funny pictures but most of what I do is intellectual, specific to certain situations and requirements, which AI generally doesn’t understand. That I can’t risk AI making actual changes to my environments, so if I let AI write a plan and then I proof it myself and then do it, it’s easier just to do the work myself. So that leaves the only thing AI could do for me is writing, and I’m good at writing, so I overall have little or no use for AI.

Dude looked at me like I was an alien. Like he legitimately could not understand why an intelligent person would voluntarily reject AI. Like I said I rejected cars and I ride a horse to work. Does not compute. Here’s this supposedly smart person who knows more about tech than the next 2-3 people in the office combined, and this person is completely rejecting the holy grail.

Honestly she should sue for malicious prosecution. She was driving the vehicle legally with insurance, she proved that to the officer by showing her paperwork, and then, knowing that she had insurance and the complaint was baseless, the officer wrote the ticket anyway.

This should be an open and shut case.

Easy solution: Put a space heater in your bathroom!

Seriously, it’s life changing. Not the giant radiator ones or the dish ones, something with a fan that blows hot air. You don’t want to heat some little place, you want to heat the volume of air in the bathroom.

Turn that on 15mins before you shower and getting out becomes totally painless.

This exactly.

Manifest V2 is not just a plugin, it touches a LOT of the code. Keeping it in the codebase will become increasingly difficult for any 3rd party.
But this isn’t just about Manifest V2. It’s about the very concept of choice- if Google decides you don’t get something, then nobody gets it. Call it open source if you want, if all rely on Chromium then edge, vivaldi, opera, brave, etc are just reskinned Chrome with extra shit.

It’s sad that Firefox and Webkit are really the only other choices. I wish there was more. Sadly these days it’s all about fast javascript and that’s not a super easy thing to build.

For lack of better choices, I agree that Firefox and its variants are what we should be pushing these days.

Shocking, but not surprising.

The more I think about this, the more I think it’s a really big problem how much Web surfing runs on Chromium. While standards are far more prevalent now than in the days of Internet Explorer’s de facto monopoly, the end result is similar- just as MS had control of the Internet through IE, Google gets a lot of control through Chromium.

The recent removal of Manifest V2 is a perfect example. A change literally nobody wanted forced upon the whole world. And while others like MS may be keeping the Mv2 code around, that won’t be tenable forever.

The problem isn’t Mv2 or uBlock or anything else. The problem is control. That one company has the ability to disable something millions of users want, across multiple browsers, because they say so.

And thus the more I think about it, the more I conclude it’s important to get as much browsing OFF Chromium as possible.

Thing is- it’s the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).

You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.

Don’t forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don’t look like anything in particular to someone who doesn’t know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it’s got a lot of advantages over alcohol.

Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).

Disney didn’t use Steamboat Willie for a while, they didn’t lose it…

I’m not claiming Twitter is great.

But this is obviously going to fail, always was obviously going to fail. It’s a PR stunt, nothing more.

Twitter will sue them, they’ll settle for giving up the name and some token fine, and hopefully they’re on the map. Or, their hail mary long shot will pay off and they’ll get to call themselves twitter in which case holy shit they’re golden. That’s the strategy.

It’s stupid- they’ll lose in court and I doubt whatever they offer is more compelling than what’s already out there.

Very gradual. One thing at a time. The site has gotten more scripty and ‘modern mobile friendly web’ ish.

Yeah it was started as a host for Reddit because everything else sucked. And they did stuff nobody’d have considered, like you could get a full gallery of NSFW content, and the embed link would give you a straight JPG without any ads or frames or anything. Sure it had its own community but that stayed out of the way.

Now that’s the main focus.

In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.

But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.

It’s funny really… what was the quote? You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

Imgur was started back in the day to provide a no-bullshit image host, because all the others were too corporate / too monetized / too much bullshit/enshittification. So MrGrim started Imgur to fix that.

Then MrGrim took a bunch of VC money, and they eventually sold out, and now the result is the sad shell of what it once was today.

Is this a surprise?

Semiconductor production is a national priority for China.

This 100%.

HBM has massive profit margins. It’s also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.

China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory ‘only’ 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, “They give us a price every month or something, and they say ‘you can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again.” Source interview. If China says ‘we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs’ and the quality is decent then it doesn’t matter if it’s slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.

And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there’s less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.

This was easy to predict.

Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It’s happening.

The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.

While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I’m proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.

So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.

Never underestimate me how out of touch business management can be.

There’s a saying- corporate consultants are people who charge millions to tell you what your employees and customers have been trying to tell you for free.

I think the problem goes farther back than that. That might be when it got worse, but the place where Google search started to lose its way (IMHO) was when they removed + as an operator so it wouldn’t screw up searches for Google+ (their social network at the time). That was the first time they truly put something else ahead of search.

It was also before 2019 that Google search stopped doing what you told it- trying to infer what it thought you meant rather than what you typed in. Verbatim mode makes that better but it’s still not perfect.

I don’t think anyone’s made a better search though. And to be honest I don’t think it’s possible anymore without MEGA resources.