• 37 Posts
  • 3.54K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle





  • I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

    I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

    Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

    Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

    But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.


  • If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

    If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

    That’s what Oxycotin was.

    If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

    Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article







  • The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.

    Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you’ve got 1.4B people you’re going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India’s Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil’s semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for… decades. Russia’s so sanctioned that they’ve got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.

    I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there’s an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that’ll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.

    I just wouldn’t hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You’re not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldGiant Credit Card
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    Wonder who’d finance that?

    Saudi Arabia

    I can only see companies solely interested in stripping anything valuable from a pair of husks, or foreign investors looking to effectively own a great portion of the American cultural sphere.

    Netflix is legitimately looking to consolidate streaming services into a functional monopoly. There’s a real value add in capturing all those HBO subscriptions and turning them into Netflix subscriptions. Plus, the benefit of adding the Netflix catalog to their own exclusive platform is self-apparent. Given the Netflix model for making movies - make one movie and reskin it a hundred times - this would be incredibly bleak for the HBO property set.

    That said, Ellison has a ton of money coming in from his friends in Saudi Arabia and Softbank. And the Saudis really do seem to believe the future of their country is just a thousand data centers propping up a feudal style caliphate. Manipulating the world’s largest military through their idiot-boxes seems to be a winning formula for global hegemony, so there’s also plenty of value-add for The Kingdom.

    So you’re probably right on both fronts.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldGiant Credit Card
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    Trump seems like he’s waiting for the two companies to compete at lining his pockets before he makes a decision.

    Very possible that Ellison’s near-trillionaire dollar parent company can win in a slugging fight. But that cuts into his position to corner the market on national media, just as his inflated Oracle valuation is running into slightly-more-skeptical-than-a-goldfish Wall Street investment.

    Meanwhile, Netflix only has $400B in equity to throw around, but appears to demonstrate some real value-add in consolidating with the other non-Disney Streaming Service that actually makes money. This isn’t just a vanity project for them.






  • If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.

    If you change “have” to “keep” it is clearer in both instances. The second interpretation is clearer because it puts the consumption verb first, which implies this action precedes the subsequent verb. But the underlying statement holds true in either instance.

    The example of “antisemitism” (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.

    The joke of “antisemitism” is that Semitic People include Arabs and modern day Ethiopians/Somalians, two groups who are very explicitly and unapologetically persecuted by the Israeli state government. They do not include Eastern European expats who came to the Levant by way of Philadelphia.

    Modern Western media describes an antisemite as a kind of anti-white racist critical of other western Jewish people in elite social circles. But the actual historical antisemitism - the one Henry Ford railed against in The International Jew and spammed across post-WW1 Europe after getting his brain cooked by Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is rooted in Christian Nationalism and anti-Immigration conspiracy theories that fit far more neatly with post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism and Cold War hostility towards the Third World.

    The manipulation of language in this instance is a very deliberate effort to judo-flip the very idea of bigotry. You turn social energy aimed at pursuing an equitable and egalitarian society into an excuse to segregate the population and persecute poor immigrants and minorities.