Congratulations!

This is a lesson I wish I could teach other people in my life. I formed a polycule a while back and this has been the hardest part.

My wife and I both grew up on the poorer side. We got jobs and grew up faster than the rest of our friend group. Struggled through college together. Dealt with her eventually dropping out and being permanently unemployed because of a disability. Gave up on dreams like having children and taking vacations. I could sense that the housing market was rebounding in the mid-2010’s so we cobbled together enough money for a cheap house in an relatively rough neighborhood, wkth a monthly payment we could afford comfortably. Hopefully pay extra to pay it off early and save on interest. Slowly transitioned from buying everything cheap to buying stuff that was better value, but still not getting expensive stuff. Didn’t get a PS4 until 2019, and even that $199 slim model bundle with 3 games was still a significant purchase.

My career kept going and I hit 6 figures shortly after the pandemic. Which put our household in the top 1/3rd of income for our city. Still we stayed humble. Maybe go to a nice restaurant once a year. Order either pizza or Chinese or some other takeout once, maybe twice a month, as a treat. Paid off the student loans early. Took a couple vacations, but just long weekends spent in nearby cities we could drive to.

I learned to love the little things. Sitting on my porch on a summer weekend morning, the light filtering through the trees. Sipping some homemade iced coffee, eating some scrambled eggs. Watching the squirrels scurrying through the small bit of woods in my backyard, the birds flying from perch to perch, my cats chirping at it all from the window behind me. Playing guitar, not to make money or to try to be better than anyone else but just because it’s fun to do. Catching up on old videogames I bought used years ago and never had time to play.

Then we formed a polycule with another couple. They’re great people and I love the situation overall, but… They both grew up poor in the south, then moved to the Bay area and eventually started their own business. Then decided to move to a lower cost-of-living area and came to our small city. They make 4-5x what I do, probably in the top 5% of households in the city. They take a week long vacation roughly every 2 months, usually 1 or 2 of those trips each year being international. They usually go to an ultra expensive restaurant at least once a month. Go out to bars for drinks and order takeout a few times every week. Get their groceries delivered by one of those meal plan websites. Buys the latest AAA videogame on launch day. Watches movies in theaters as they come out. Constantly having packages delivering various trinkets and gadets and decorations.

The thing is… They don’t seem happy or at peace. They’re constantly searching for the next thing to buy. As soon as they come back from a trip they’re talking about how to be more extravagant on the next one. They seem more interested in finding greener grass than appreciating what’s under their feet.

I honestly am starting to think the anti-vaxx crowd has been astroturfed by pharmaceutical corporations in order to convince the general public that anyone who questions Big Pharma is some loomy who thinks vaccines cause autism wants to drink raw milk.

That’s why in rooting for a small mom and pop competitor to the space, like checks notes … Intel.

We’re fucked aren’t we?

What about 1870 then?

I never claimed Uber was 100% safe. There’s also plenty of cases of non-sexual assault and robbery. There’s way more cases of simple negligent driving resulting in injury and death.

Uber’s own data indicates 99.9998% of trips in 2021-2022 were completed with no safety incident. Now if you want to discredit that self-reporting as biased, fair enough.

What would you say is the threshold for justifying gender segregation? 99.9999%? 99.99999%? 99.999999%?

Transphobes will use any excuse to be transphobic.

I’m not sure what your point here is.

I’m comparing gender identity to other forms of protected identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.

I’m not making any judgements about any group being superior or inferior to another. You’re the one doing that. Being “physically imposing” is subjective and variable. There is significant overlap between the largest women and smallest men, and that’s just staying withing the confines of binary cis people. Not to mention… Guns exist. Cars themselves are weapons far more dangerous than any human regardless of gender.

Building a just society means we need to leave behind our biases and fears. To judge individuals not on the circumstances of their birth but the content of their character. That means discarding the luxury of pre-judging people, not just when it is easy, but also when it is hard.

I’m sure a lot of anxious Nazi’s got a lot of peace of mind in the early 1940’s too.

I sure a lot of anxipis transphobes got a lot of peace of mind when Trump banned trans people from military service.

Giving anxious people peace of mind it’s the point of segregation. That doesn’t make it right or good.

It’s shocking to me how so many people I know who are woke as fuck and quick to shout down any bigotry are so quick to drop all of their principles to hate men.

Segregation never works, and only serves to foster fear, hatred, and division within society You cannot define what a “woman” is in a way that excluded trans-women without also excluding some cis-women with them Your gender identity is what you say it is. Others should do their best to remember any pronouns or name changes Crime is too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to statistics, which are often used by racists and bigots to justify racist and bigoted policies It’s racist to cross to the other side of the street when a person of color comes walking towards you on the side you currently are on. It’s up to you to “Men” are evil monsters who cannot be trusted and need to be locked away

It baffles me how so many people can have all of these ideas, including the last one, and not see the cognitive dissonance there. It’s succumbing to fear and hatred, the same methods of divisive propaganda that has harmed every other group.

Uber stopped doing then, but their own data through 2022 claims that 99.9998% of rides ended without a safety incident.

Most sexual assault is committed by abusers who know their victims, not random strangers.

The vast majority of sexual assault is by people who know the victim, not random strangers. This is Uber trying to capitalize on fear to sell a more “premium” product they will inevitably charge more for, not actually helping anyone.

I can’t help but I imagine JK Rowling tweeting some day about how she used this feature and was appalled to be driven by a trans-woman.

A lot of white people are afraid of black people. Should we let people choose their driver by the color of their skin? Their ethnicity? The language they speak? Their sexual orientation? Their religion?

Discrimination is bad for everyone else, but somehow for men we just say “eh they have it coming”.

Autism is severely under-diagnosed in women. Probably just a coincidence…

The part where people with better material positions consolidate power and influence, and exercise that power over the meek.

Or the part where greedy fucks “make their own decisions” that don’t factor in externalities or the impact they have to the common good. Resulting in things like the destruction of our natural environment and ecosystem.

I was a good boy who didn’t do drugs until adulthood, and I have medical marijuana now. The feedback I’ve gotten from pretty much everyone who did drugs in the 90’s and 00’s vs today is the same as your experience. The “weed nerds” have spent decades in their labs and the state-by-state legalization has greatly accelerated their progress.

Even my pharmacist warned me when I first got my medical card “if this is your first time using medical marijuana it’s a lot stronger than what is usually on the street, so watch out”.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that article is just typical fear mongering BS. It keeps the eyes of parents glued to the screen and consuming ads. Doesn’t even say what “spice” is. Articles like this are basically broiler-llate and come out every few months. Notice how they manage to blame social media, and how they don’t mention any adults using it at all.

I found the wikipedia article on these things more useful and less biased. Spice seems to mostly refer to a designer drug that is similar to THC, but is not THC. And while it is often used to lace marijuana or mixed with weed vapes, it isn’t just weed.

It’s like hearing about people adding PCP or LSD to weed and freaking out about how dangerous weed is. Like… Yeah you shouldn’t buy drugs from some random guy on Snapchat.

• owned by Israeli billionaire
• based in the UK, subject to UK laws
• chief tech officer was previously the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange company and was convicted of fraud for stealing from it

DOGE would not have happened under Biden or Harris. Millions of people are dying because of cuts to US AID.

Venezuela would not have happened. Like, how crazy is it that you lost a handful of the most egregious things Trump has done recently and yet somehow invading another country and kidnapping their leader a couple months ago doesn’t make the cut? I don’t mean that as a criticism of you, just how much insane shit Trump has done.

Cuts to Education have been and will be devastating for years. Shutting down tons of science and information-gathering agencies. Economic data is going to be non-existent or useless for the foreseeable future. All the lovely anti-trust action Lina Khan was starting to do under Biden has been erased. All the work Jessica Rosenworcel was doing to restore Net Neutrality under Biden has been erased. The Republican party is about to pass a bill that will disenfranchise both trans people and women. The EPA has been gutted. Trump has given and cut off funds to states, both for regular projects and disaster relief funds, based on how they voted for him, while Biden (and no other president I am aware of) has done anything like that before.

So-called “communists” have a tendency to become EnLiGhTeNeD cEnTrIsTs.

For those who don’t want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it’s planning to buy

So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren’t buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They’re buying it so that no one else can.