The really sad thing- a ground soldier forward deployed on a battlefield eating MRE kits in a trench would get a significantly better meal than this.

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Please understand that this is not due to any sort of bubble. Especially not with memory.

OpenAI has themselves purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory production for 2026. The negotiated in secret with two different manufacturers, announcing the deals on the same day. Neither manufacturer was aware of the other, and both have said if they were they would not have made the deal as it sent a significant percentage of the world’s memory production to one customer.
More interestingly, the deal was not for memory chips. It was for finished wafers, which themselves have to then be sliced into hundreds of individual chips, which each need to be tested and packaged in the black casing we call a chip. As far as I am aware, OpenAI has no capability to do this. Which means they may have purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory output only to throw it in the garbage and keep it from their competitors.

My understanding however is that this deal was for 2026 production. Go to next year, there may be an improvement.

We’ve been walking past an awful lot for very long. We got comfortable. We got lazy. The Framers set up a pretty good system for us and after WWII and Vietnam and the civil rights movement, we basically all decided that we had fixed our society and government and we could sit back and crack open a cold one.

The biggest one is we have to get rid of engagement algorithms. All the major platforms show you content more like that which you interact with, which is usually things that piss you off or things you heartily agree with. This creates bubbles and prevents exposure to new ideas and different thinking people. And when you have that for a few decades, it greatly reduces empathy for your fellow man.

Go back to like the '90s or so and politics was dinner table conversation, the sort of thing that would be discussed in friendly company. Because it was understood that while you and I might disagree on what the best path for America is, we both understand that we both want America to be great.
But go forward to the early 2000s, 24-hour cable news, internet, echo chambers and bubbles started to form. And both sides politically took advantage of this, drummed up the rhetoric and no longer was it ‘we are better for America’ it became ‘the other guys don’t believe in what America stands for and anyone who supports them is not American’.
This killed the discourse. No more respectful disagreement, no more opponents shaking hands, it became a fight to the death for the future of the country in the eyes of many voters.

This is not just politics. It’s every issue. It’s how we have our discourse now. Respectful debate is dying. Whatever the issue is, you either agree with me or you’re awful. And that is what we need to fix.

We need to promote empathy, mutual understanding, and respect for those we disagree with.

“The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” --Lt. Gen. David Morrison, former head of Australian Army.

Amusingly he was talking about a situation where male soldiers were sexually assaulting female soldiers, while a larger group of servicemembers knew this was happening but did nothing to stop or report or prevent it.

He’s 100% right though. The standard this school board walks past, and thus the standard they accept, is one of their own sexually harassing a teenage girl.

Every one of them that laughed or snickered or whatever should be removed.

Saving you a click:

But then Barrett asked: What about slaves who were brought to this country illegally and against their will, as many were? Surely some of them still “felt allegiance to the countries where they were from” and intended “to return as soon as they can.” So wouldn’t their children be excluded from birthright citizenship, too?

This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.

Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.

It is not ‘LLM companies’. It is OpenAI. And not from buying memory either. Last year they made two deals with two major memory manufacturers, which together meant they were purchasing a significant percentage of the world’s memory production. And they negotiated these two deals in secret, each company not knowing that the other was in discussions, and announced the two deals on the same day. They weren’t even buying memory chips you can put in a server, but finished wafers with memory chips printed on them. These wafers then have to be cut up into chips, those chips have to be put in packages, themselves tested, and then soldered down to memory modules. As far as I know, OpenAI has no ability to do this. So it seems likely they purchased a significant portion of the world’s memory production just to drive up prices and keep their competitors from having it.

Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.

The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.

I don’t understand. I learned in school that America is the only important country in the world.

I have known a few Marines. They will not appreciate this initiative.

This is not a wise course of action.

I think this doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t just okcupid, problem is the data. Any company they sold face data to should be required to delete it, it should be treated as receiving stolen property that must be returned. The users of the site did not consent to have their faces shared with the database companies, so the only true redress for the users is to get those faces out of the database.

East Coast here, it’s not even midnight for another 4 minutes!

I don’t know if I qualify as an audiophile or not… I like expensive headphones and high resolution audio but I’m not one of those idiots that pays $10,000 for an HDMI cable.

I listen to music to enjoy it. The only thing that really stops me enjoying it is if it sounds like shit, which 99% of the time is because it’s some badly encoded lossy stream being played through a shitty Bluetooth speaker on SBC codec. That is not what music is supposed to sound like.

Give me some basic appointment that correctly reproduces what the artist created, and I’ll be happy. That doesn’t have to cost a fortune, you just need a lossless stream with a half decent DAC/amp into decent headphones, and you’ll be blown away. Spend like $300 on a pair of non-wireless analog headphones, $50-$75 on a USB DAC, and by a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. It’ll change how you think about music. But it doesn’t turn you into an asshole.

In concept, he’s right.

Democrats have spent far far far too much energy focusing on controversial wedge issues like gun control and trans issues.

If they focused on the issues that virtually all Americans can get behind, things like fixing our healthcare, getting corruption out of Washington and other parts of government, holding large corporations to account when they destroy our economy and ruin the environment, and overall making life and upward advancement affordable for average Americans, they would absolutely clean house in every election.

Instead they spend a ton of effort on things like gun control (which does nothing for their base but only alienates rural moderates and Republicans that might make the switch), and spend a ton of time getting bogged down in debates over stupid shit.

When that happens if they had a half a brain they would be doing table flip moments like why the fuck are we talking about which bathroom somebody uses when millions of Americans can’t feed their fucking kids? Why are we obsessing over what kind of ID gets you into a voting booth when the middle class is dying? Why are we wasting billions of dollars in Iran when the same money spent here at home would fix healthcare or hunger or education? Are our own citizens not worth the time or expense? And why do we have national policies that encourage a CEO to amass more wealth than all of his hourly employees combined?
And if any of these things are important to us, why then could the Republicans as a minority grind the government to a halt under Obama, forcing us to negotiate with them, why can’t we do the same? Why aren’t we doing the same?

Get a bunch of Democrats to say this every time, every camera, every interview, and that they will stand up against their own party when it doesn’t work to fix this, that’s how you win elections.

I think this is true with a lot of companies. Microsoft is a good example. Whoever is responsible for the current state of Windows 11 should be turfed as rapidly and efficiently as possible both for the good of Microsoft and to send a message that this sort of thing is not wanted anymore.

I really can’t believe this got the green light. GitHub has, or perhaps had, the trust of most of the open source world. It was used by everybody. This is so fucking short-sighted, it’s signing away your stock portfolio for a popsicle. Whatever couple bucks they get from this ad is worth absolutely nothing compared to the trust and good will they have flushed.

Agreed. Going public about something like this is very stressful. I am surprised more of them haven’t been unable to go on to the point that they shoot themselves twice in the back of the head before jumping out of a building in the exact moment the triple redundant security system happened to be rebooting.

Real tragedy when that sort of thing happens…

It is frustrating that we as a nation keep rooting around in a dead guy’s files while ignoring what multiple living women are saying under oath.