Cite?

What conflict of interest? DCar Studio has money and wants advertising, the influencer wants money and can provide advertising. I see an alignment of interests, not a conflict.

Funny, today I was forced to deal with a phone tree system that wanted to hang up on me at any whiff of a plausible path to hang up.

Point being that even without LLM magic, they have already been making it supremely hard to get things done. The old standby of hitting zero or saying representative over and over again would not budge this system. I thought for sure when I got it to prompt for payment information and if I screwed that up, *surely* that would escalate to a human, surely they want my money. Nope, hung up when I failed to provide the payment info in a timely fashion either.

DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.

If they went 150% yesterday, and another 150% today, then within a month they will have stockpiled all the RAM in the world.

In Google's case, they're under quite a lot of FTC scrutiny, operating under two consent decrees, and they have an employee population that isn't known for keeping their mouths shut. It's possible that Trump's FTC might not act if he were paid off, but a leak would definitely generate a lot of press.

I'm saying they may not be given the same offers that the suppliers were formerly giving them. If a supplier sees that nVidia will absolutely buy a huge supply of memory, then they will demand a comparable commitment from other customers. They will divert capacity to the customers that are willing to make the biggest and most certain commitments.

So Lenovo may have had to commit to bigger orders, or just be left out of getting enough to keep shipping their systems at all. If supply is constrained *someone's* orders are getting delayed, and the bigger orders get priority.

To the extent it might be a gamble, it could be a very short term gamble. Companies try to adhere to 'just in time' supply chain and carry very little advance supply, since investors heavily penalize carrying any sort of inventory over time. So as one example put it, maybe they extended stock from 30 days to 45 days, assuming that the memory market won't get better for at least a couple of months, which may be what the suppliers are forecasting.

In this case a false denial would put them in violation of two FTC consent decrees, and would almost certainly leak (Google employees are not known for keeping their mouths shut), so it would be a particularly stupid thing to do.

The point is to explicitly extend android to be more 'laptop/desktopy'. So it's still a linux distribution, and looks like it won't be *really* distinct from Android....

They might not have had a choice. The memory vendors getting sweetheart deals from AI supply chain might require other markets to increase their commitment or get nothing.

So the choices might be either stockpile or not have any supply at all for their mainstream product. It's worth a risk of overpaying for memory when you have no other viable option.

Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.

Do they, or could that stuff be on the surface? Pump cold water down, get hot steam back up, run it through a heat exchanger/condenser, cycle it back down again. Or maybe something other than water. You'd lose some heat to the shaft walls, but that could be acceptable.

I think all the maintenance-required parts you're talking about are where the heat is transformed into electricity, plus the safety-related monitoring of the core. With this design, it seems like all of the turbines, etc. will be at the surface, where they can be easily maintained, while the safety-related stuff just isn't an issue. Rather than designing a core that can be controlled and ramped up and down, with this system you'd designed the core to just operate at a continuous steady state for its operational lifetime until the fuel is used up, at which point you just fill in the hole.

You might make the core self-moderating so that if it gets too hot it will ramp down the fission so you don't have to worry about stoppage in the flow of water resulting in a meltdown or similar, but that would only be to reduced the likelihood of the core damaging itself before the end of its useful lifetime, not because there is any safety concern with a meltdown that occurs kilometers underground.

All of the stuff other than the weights is basically just scaffolding, though. Necessary, but the stuff that makes it "intelligent" is all in the weights.

Oh, for dialog it would suck. I'm thinking more about commanding 'sidekicks' to do certain things. Like voice command saying: "Bob, get up to that ledge (while pointing your crosshairs indicating the ledge) and provide cover with your sniper rifle". Today you can't direct non-human 'squad mates' with that level of specificity, so they do their specific scripted things or vaguely adjust their behavior in accordance to your vague command based on a press of a directional button. Natural language command of NPCs could open up possibilities to fix long-standing annoyances/limitations with NPCs trying to actively contribute to these situations.

For dialog, you lose the ability to be confident that the correct information has been conveyed to the player. So you can use it for background dialog for NPCs with no actionable info, but that dialog is going to be pretty pointless and particularly painful if it's hard to tell if an NPC is just background or has actual information for you.