Is this Gen Z humor?

I’m half-serious.

I understand that and I agree the approach under these assumptions must be needs-based. I’m saying, that it’s worth examining how much of this new phenomena is needs-not-met vs falling prey to a new kind of profit-driven entertainment. I have no idea what the numbers are. Could be mostly unmet need. It’s not necessarily following the same dybamics as drug use.

While that’s often true, there’s also cases where for-profit corporations create predatory products that create their own demand and social problems with it. Like the online gambling explosion in North America.

Our choices always affect the ones around us.

This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

I think it’s interesting to notice that this is not AI-specific. He kinda alludes to that in a different context but I think it’s important for people in the industry (and any industry really) to understand. This is driven by the incentives built into the system. Specifically the competition for profit. Whenever there’s a thing (technology, process, method) that promises significant profit, everyone and their mother jumps on it. For the simple reason that if they don’t, they’re getting replaced by someone who would. For the simple reason that if they don’t jump in, capital is going to leave their company and enter another one that promises to jump in, and therefore has higher expected profit. This can look as simple as large investors dumping your shares for the shares of a different company, sending your stock price in steep decline. Everyone competes for capital which requires competition for growing profits. Capital goes where the expected profits are higher. Without capital, firms can’t hire people and buy what they need to conduct business and create new products. This incentive makes it very difficult to avoid a situation like the one above. We’ve seen this in corporations with the move to the cloud, with outsourcing development to CHWTIA and so on.

Little Marco abt to designate them as anti-tech extremist terrorists. This is gonna get interesting given how many people are aligned on this.

In case you think I’m joking.

Here’s the standard Corsi-Rosenthal box instrucrions: https://corsirosenthalfoundation.org/instructions/

There’s no need for 2" filters. 1" works fine to filter a large room with the standard box fan in several minutes. That’s also what the standard guide recommends. Couple of days ago at the peak smoke in Toronto it got the PM2.5 from 50 to 0 in under 10 minutes.

Availabe for download on the 27th, for those with the hardware to run it.

A bunch of non-technical family members have been on Ubuntu for a decade. I’m only involved in LTS release upgrades and hardware failures.

Oh that’s easy, unless they’re rich. Costs are gonna keep going up and at some point they’ll start asking questions about cliff climbing. 😄

Using well made screwdriver bits, replacing them when worn. Never had a ph head stripped since I started doing that. I’ve more Robertsons stripped in that time. In fact I’ve grown to dislike Robertson.

Why is it the worst part? If the EU admin does not represent its constituents, it should be threatened. Otherwise it ends up being undemocratic rep of various business interests.

Windows 7 ran well on machines that ran Vista barely usable. Vista deserved the hate it got.

Folks who’ve used Linkwarden and archivebox, which do you prefer? Is one a superset of the other?

This, make a partition thats a few gigs smaller than the drive, add the partitions to the storage pool instead of the raw drives.

No idea. AliExpress has some direct manufacturer stores and also resellers. Haven’t used Temu. I tend to find a manufacturer or a brand that people buy and like, then buy from their official store or reseller if no official store. For example Toopre bike tools are fairly well liked - https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-toopre.html.

Don’t think about drives in terms of reliability. Consider them a consumable in your storage system. The storage system should insulate you from the exact drives. Run a ZFS mirror or RAIDz2. Swap drives when they fail. The exact brand and model shouldn’t matter.

aren’t people entitled to revenue of the brand they build?

Perhaps no. Take the capitalist system at its best - the brief periods in an industry when a competitive environment delivers good products at low prices. That kind of environment means competitors can very easily start producing an alternative of what the other guy is producing and undercut their prices. This is the desired status quo that actually delivers wealth for most people. In such status quo, the firms that make things can only make as much money as to pay their costs and salaries with little leftover for shareholders. Conversely - the vast majority of society gets more things and has more money to buy more other things, instead of padding the pockets of shareholders. This is what competition is and obviously firm owners, large or small, don’t like it.

The fact that we can’t make a whole lotta things in (Canada) without costing 3x what China makes it for is a separate but related issue. Personally I think it’s got a lot more to do with how much money Canadian firms make at various sides of the supply chains. People like talking abt cheap labour but Chinese labour isn’t nearly as cheap as it used to be and labour isn’t the main cost in a whole lotta things. E.g. in automotive, labour is 10-15% of the cost and if we assume free labour the Chinese cars are a lot cheaper than 15%. The rest is tools, machines, and parts like nuts and bolts. A Canadian-blessed machine screw set from my local hardware store costs $20. A significantly larger set from AliExpress (not the cheapest place in China) costs $2. This speaks to the profit margins involved in the two screw sets. Most of our industries have gone past their competitive stages and are now largely consolidated into 1 to several firms so they can extract significant profit margins. I think the avg for North American corpos is 10-15%. In China that’s about 5% and the state-owned sector which provides a lot of inputs operates as non-profit. Margins across suppliers for a product stack like compound interest and the price grows exponentially. If you have a product that starts at $1 at the beginning and you have 5 suppliers till the final product, you get $1.28 with 5% avg and $2.01 with 15% avg. If you have 10 suppliers you get $1.63 vs $4. The difference between the two is also exponential. The exorbitant profits of our industries make it not only too expensive to make things here, it makes it very difficuly to even attempt anything by people who don’t have significant capital.

So yeah, the answer is def in-house manufacturing for more than one reason but for it to be viable, shareholders have to make less, a lot less. If we get to such a point, down to just the difference in price of labour, I’m pretty sure we’d be able to easily handle that. The state we’re in at the moment is def not healthy but I don’t think we’ll solve it by protecting shareholder value while keeping domestic worker salaries low - a reflection of the high margins. When margins go down, either prices would go down, or wages would go up, or both. Both make it possible for more people to buy the domestically manufactured product. In other words the in-house manufactured product won’t be 3x market price in real terms anymore.

The next level is getting it straight from AliExpress, skipping the 25% Bezos Yacht tax.