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.

Amen to this. There’s a very few couple of good ones, but for the most part the Old guard Democrats really need to go enjoy their long overdue retirement and let some new people with new ideas and new energy carry the torch.
The old playbook isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t resonate with voters. It doesn’t address the major problems with our country.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This is a tough question, I think to answer it you have to know if those simulated beings have actual consciousness / sapience or if that is just simulated.

Quite true. Iran has been both an embarrassment and a thorn in the side of the West since we created the current regime. And after all who cares about a few more dead brown people there’s plenty more where they came from right?

Would absolutely love that. Just split the two. Unknown Worlds cut loose, existing publishing agreements severed, they walk away with a developed game and their IP. Free to contract with Krafton or anyone else to distribute the game, or they could just self-publish pretty easily.

Sadly I doubt that will happen but we can always hope.

I hop back and forth.

For temperature, Fahrenheit just makes more sense because a human useful range is basically 0 to 100 instead of 0 to ~30.

For measurements I use a mix. Feet and inches are useful for medium size things, but below a quarter inch I use millimeters because fractions of an inch is just a fucking mess.

Quite true there is absolutely a place for both in all situations. And it’s why I hate absolutists who think gui’s are some sort of disease. GUIs are discoverable and intuitive, You can lay out all the options for the user so they know what they can choose and make the right choice. CLIs are powerful and scriptable, easy to automate.
Neither is bad.