Right, what the free market wants to do is levelize our standard of living with our low-cost competitors, or import all the chips from them (with the security and supply risks that entails).

Simply shaming Intel for seeking government handouts does not solve our problem - how to maintain a domestic industry including internal competition rather than government choosing the winners and subsidizing incompetence.

You mean MS has outsourced QA to AI. I would think volunteers would have found that issue quickly.

Depends on what "preview” means. If it means an alpha build meant to be internal, such a bug is fine. To me this build was meant to be shown and tested by customers and closer to a beta build. Nothing ruins testing like the inability to test anything.

One time my company was asked to test some software for a supplier. The software would not run after install on any of our computers. There were no errors displayed to give us hints about what could be wrong. Despite weeks of correspondence with their development team, we could never get the software to run. After the testing period was over, they sent us a questionnaire. Unfortunately we could not answer most of the questions as we could never get it to run. One final question was about the readiness of the software for production. We said the software was not ready for production.

The development team was not happy about that and emailed asking for reasons why we said that. I assume their supervisors read the questionnaire responses. We told them that any software that would not work after weeks of correspondence and no hint about what to fix was not production ready. They responded they had since fixed all installation issues in the latest version. We answered back that we could only test the version we were given and that version did not work.

I did not say that. The OP specifically said there were no "Unix desktops." Read the thread.

"We are letting sociopaths run amok." That is literally the definition of capitalism.

No, that is neither literally nor figuratively the definition of capitalism. How can anyone take anything you say seriously when you make such patently dumb claims? So where do all the sociopaths go in other forms of economic models?

From here in my comfortable chair it's hard to judge how bad the situation is, vs. to what extent it might be a form of protest by somebody who just doesn't like self-driving cars. There has been vandalism and harassment of a few types, from setting them on fire to calling dozens of them to the same place at the same time to cause gridlock. In San Francisco there was a huge flap because a waymo ran over a cat.

OK, it could be argued the government is the problem in the first place, since laws are a big part of why production here is economically nonviable. The problem is how specifically to solve that? Each law is there for a reason. It's easy to dismiss regulation broadly but harder in each given case.

If the US as a whole were a good place for this, a happy market solution would be for Intel to be eaten alive by another American competitor until either regains its competency or goes away. But surely you can see the national security risks of the more likely outcome - our supply depending on potential adversaries, including all the chips in critical infrastructure and defense hardware.

For most of my early life, Intel was about process engineering, not CPU engineering. They were usually a year ahead of other manufacturers so even if their CPU design was lacklustre they could win on the manufacturing process.

Then they lost the lead there and now their problems with CPU designs have caught up with them.

Intel sacking white men and replacing them with DIE hires was widely discussed over the last decade, along with predictions of the inevitable end result. Which is now clear to everyone.

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

That is the basic problem, they don't. Mass-producing semiconductors in the USA without subsidies is not economically viable. The CHIPS act (or equivalently, tariffs) is an effort to tip the financial scales in favor of maintaining domestic production, for national security (so we can't be "cut off" by other nations). But such a scheme will not work if it is not executed in a financially predictable manner.

No-one I know on the right want to spy on everyone's phones.

It's a government thing, not a left/right thing. Governments want to spy on everything all the time because they're authoritarian scumbags, regardless of whether they claim to be left-wing or right-wing.

I mean, it's not a right-wing government pushing Digital ID in the UK. It's a left-wing Labour government who claim to be the socialist party of the working man and have been trying to force ID cards on the British people for the best part of thirty years now. Nor is a right-wing EU government pushing software to spy on every private message.

I think I'd rather be nuked than starved.

A couple of hundred years ago a big volcanic eruption threw masses of dust into the atmosphere and blocked out the sun to the point where there was famine over much of the planet because many food plants couldn't grow.

Now the tech bros want to do that artificially because they're so smart they know exactly how to control the weather.

They're going to kill us all.

I would guess weight is more of a consideration for consumer passenger airplanes than military ones. After all, airlines do not have magazines anymore to save weight.