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

Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?

Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.

Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.

So, I don’t see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.

Even if you’re not up to DDR6, there’s money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you’ll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you’re already in the business.

Black, White, and Red All Over

Been saying that about a lot of these rich, reactionary fucks.

DARE promised me that five years of crack would put anyone in the ground. Meanwhile, Mike fucking Lindell is currently running for governor in Minnesota, fully coked out of his gourde. Dude’s been rolling deep in that powder since the 90s.

I feel extremely lied-to.

I don’t work at Amazon, but we have a similar system. I’ve gone all-in on a couple of subordinates saying they deserved a 4/5 for this or that work. And because they were new-hires, I eventually got the grades punched through after a bunch of hemming and hawing.

Also advocated for my own higher-than-average marks on a few occasions. And just arguing the case gave me the grade as often as not. If everyone in the department had been as stubborn and insistent, I don’t know that they’d have given the whole floor these grades. But the squeaky wheel…

I’ve got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too “just-so”, the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.

Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that’s sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he’d just written “Twitter” instead of “Amazon”, I’d have taken it at face value no problem.

Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked “Maybe we’ll do this in 2029 if we’re not busy with something else”? Equally likely.

Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.

price gouging laws only restrict predatory price increases on essential goods during officially declared states of emergency

I mean, maybe there’s something in the fine print I’m unaware of. But do you think this Instacart model turns off for a neighborhood hit by a hurricane or wildfire or flood?

I don’t see AGs offices zealously enforcing laws at even this scale, so its something of a moot point. If your DOJ is owned and operated by crooks, they won’t be going after their friends and co-conspirators anyway. And Instacart is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley crowd, which have been successfully paying off politicians left, right, and center since the Clinton Administration.

It creates a situation where an AG’s office with limited manpower and prosecutorial capacity needs to selectively enforce the law in order to shock the public into general compliance. Less “everyone is guilty” and more “too many people are potentially suspect but only a few of them have cases that could actually hold up in court”.

USAs generally hate trying cases that get tossed out or lose at trial. So they try to focus on cases they know they can win - either because the defendant can’t afford quality legal council or the case is so air-tight that a jury will easily convict. Incompetent USAs can quickly get themselves into a position where a defendant can get top flight defense and the prosecutor has to juggle a bunch of gaping flaws in the case. OJ Simpson is one classic example of such a case. Luigi Mangione may end up being another.

New customer discounts, student/senior discounts, etc. The problems arise when the nature of the reason they got a discount, or even the very fact that they did get a discount are hidden.

I’d argue even these arbitrary discounts are bad from a public policy perspective. What you’re describing is a hodgepodge of marketing and PR, intended to cultivate a loyal customer base with an eye towards maximizing revenue in the future once your client list is fully captured.

The better questions to be asking are “how much resources does it make to create Product X” and “what material benefit does the client receive from consuming Product X”? A high price is justified when a product is difficult to produce and highly beneficial to consume, on the grounds that the higher price subsidizes capital investment that bring production costs down long term.

But what Instacart is doing isn’t adding value to a product or pricing in cost of production. The website is instead trying to maximize the marginal profit on the purchaser. It’s the AI-equivalent of you asking “How much is that product?” and the vendor replying “It costs as much money as you have in your wallet.”

There’s no incentive to improve efficiency or maximize throughput in this model. It is entirely a zero-sum game of taking the client for as much cash as the vendor can possibly extract per transaction.

It’s not illegal, but it’s incredibly unethical and really should be illegal.

Funny you should say that because Price Gouging laws are absolutely a thing on the books. And overcharging an individual customer relative to the median historical price is a textbook violation. The question isn’t whether these actions are illegal, but whether any state AG will press criminal charges.

Says so right here.

I asked the Supreme Court, and in a 6-3 ruling they agreed that police tying a person to the bumper of a car and dragging them to death is within the constitutional purview of the executive branch. But a mayor-elect giving a neighbor advice on navigating the municipal bureaucracy while awaiting a green card is felony espionage and a clear and present danger to national security.

I requested clarification, at which point Samuel Alito reached under his robe, grunted, and began flinging feces at me while ICE agents swarmed in firing tear gas and demanding the press pool disperse.

Trump: “Look at how cool my good friend Pete Hegseth is! He’s killing the drug dealers and the terrorists.”

Media: “Damn, did you just post video of your Sec Def committing a war crime?”

Pete: “No! No! Not a war crime! I didn’t say that. This is fake footage. But if it was real, it would have been a very cool thing to do.”

Media: “Trump, is your Defense Department leaking doctored videos of military exercises?”

Trump: “Democrats! The Democrats were already doing this. No crime! Fake news. I don’t even know this Pete Hegseth guy. Never even seen a video.”

Media: “Okay, well… I guess that’s that. Back to polling the midterms.”

ICC: helpless shrugging

Yeah, that image must be photoshopped.

It’s this guy.

My Polymarket Bet isn’t printing. We’re still waiting to hear if Milo Yannapolis was right about him just being in hiding and saying racist things under a rock all day.

Except the Far-Right bends back along the Z-axis to Cis again, I… think that’s right.

On the one hand, he is a very old man.

But on the other hand, this shit is incredibly boring.

I’m genuinely aghast when I see these long-table high profile Trump photo-op board meetings. Like, I would fucking hate to be at that table, if for no other reason than waiting in a long line to kiss the President’s ass when you’re worth multiple billions of dollars would feel so humiliating.

But I guess that’s the real path to power. All that “hustle and grind” is just getting up at 4am in the morning to whisper “Yes” into the ear of the guy higher than you on the totem pole.

Cis <–> Trans

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.

“ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world.”

List of accidents and incidents involving military aircraft (2020–present)