in America. You can chart a direct line from when smartphones and the internet got cheap and widely available and the decline of religious extremist churches in America. Specifically the hyper-political mega churches that were created and built up by billionaires in order to trick people out of their property and jobs.

That's a good example of something like a one laptop per child having a direct tangible effect in a positive direction. Albeit not as a charity case but just as a consequence of cheap electronics. You went from people having a single source of Truth in the form of a corrupt preacher to being able to Google everything the corrupt preacher tells them.

It also means that all the rape and pedophilia the churches have been actively hiding gets around really fast. I suspect social media has a impact there too.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

I had two family members with major health problems hit right around 2008 one of which survived the other of which died.

I wasn't fully recovered financially until around 2016 which is when my kid hit College and suddenly I had the pay for them to go through college. Not being a psychopath or a piece of shit I stepped up and actually paid for them to get through college. Because if you're going to have a fucking kid you should make damn sure they can actually support themselves in this fucked up world and have a decent life.

I have only just now recovered from that Financial blow only to have the fucktards that are the American voters put Donald Trump back in charge so that he can promptly collapse the economy.

Trump is likely going to get a third term unless he dies of old age or senality gets him. And the economic fallout from that is probably going to be the end of me.

Basically I've gotten one gut punch after another with just enough to keep me going until the next kicking the balls. Which is the quintessential American experience if you're not a piece of shit baby boomer who pulled the ladder up behind them because they hate queer people and are scared of brown skin.

There is nothing more American than I got mine fuck you. What's funny is is the age 50 to 64 Boomer types who got the tail end of the New deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great society are about to get a huge punch in the balls from their god king Donald Trump.

They are all over the Internet freaking out right now because he's bankrupting them and making them homeless. Every single one of them says the same thing, I voted for Trump three times and I will vote for him again but I don't understand why this great man has destroyed my business or my job or taking my health care away or murdered my kids or whatever horrible thing Trump did this week.

Out of maybe a hundred of them that show up over on the Reddit leopards eating faces for him one or two of them have the presence of mind to say they probably shouldn't have voted for trump. Probably. But fuck it feels good to vote for Trump doesn't it? Stick it to those fucking God damn liberals right? So fucking sick of them telling me what to do right?

This website is full of those fuckers. They keep their mouths shut and try to soak up mod points because they know what they're doing is wrong but they can't stop it because it feels so fucking good and that 12-year-old boy who doesn't like being told what to do kind of way.

We have too many people disconnected from the economy.

Brexit absolutely destroyed the UK economy but you wouldn't know that if you're an elderly pensioner who voted for it because as the saying goes I got mine, fuck you. At worst you had to sell your Spanish summer home.

The same goes for the billionaires who used to just be lowly millionaires.

Both groups basically have all the political power, the billionaire is because of their money and the old people because of their numbers.

So you get a lot of public policy that is basically guaranteed to destroy everything because why the hell not?

The billionaires want absolute power and to build monuments and Dick ship rockets. The old people want to revel in their Petty bigotries and look back at the good old days without acknowledging the help from the government that made those days good.

Both sides have basically screwed anyone under 50.

Eventually although the billionaires will get away with it the old people might not. Especially the ones in the 50 to 65 age group.

My rent stopped going up. Like full stop.

It's painfully obvious this is cost consumers hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The frustrating thing is as usual it's a settlement where they don't have to give up any of the ill-gotten gains. All any of these crooks ever have to do is hold out until there is a republican in the White House and then run it up to a federal court. It worked for Microsoft.

Seriously go read up on their antitrust lawsuit. They just dragged it in court until Bush Jr got in charge and he gave them a sweetheart deal that included a significant expansion of their presence in public schools.

Interesting. I can shoot raw directly to my Android internal storage, although it isn't fast enough for 4k60 10 bit without compression.

As long as some little bitch keeps modding down my factual posts

A huge portion of their revenue is from AI data centers and there is going to be a huge push to create custom built hardware specifically designed to accelerate those workloads. You saw the same thing with Bitcoin where custom hardware was built and it outperformed gpus.

This means that a few good pieces of custom hardware have the potential to completely wipe Nvidia out. This is especially tough because everything is still consolidated into a handful of monopolies and duopolies that the couple of companies that are going to rule the roost for AI within the next few years will have more than enough resources to build their own custom hardware to do it. And they aren't going to like being dependent on an external company like Nvidia.

Nvidia may be able to stay ahead though by monopolizing engineers. It'll cost them literally hundreds of millions of dollars but it's doable.

I do Wonder though how long the wage arms race will last. Usually big companies like this don't like to get into bidding wars for talent and before long they are making deals at country clubs. Golf is a popular game for that because you're out in the open where it's harder for people to overhear what you're doing.

Is to give access to information that otherwise just wouldn't be there. If you're in a position where you can actually measure academic performance then you probably have a semi-functional public school system and you don't need programs like this.

These programs work well in intensely impoverished areas where the school systems have broken down or just never existed in the first place and information isn't available. Places where you're lucky if the kids are taught to read.

But it's going to be a really shitty two or three years. Eventually though the build-out will be done and will be in bailout territory where we're burrowing out Banks who loaned these idiots money to spend $1,000 on a 64 GB ram kit.

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

What's changed is that in the early days flash memory was one bit per cell. Now most consumer grade stuff is multi level, so instead of a single threshold voltage that separates a 1 from a 0, there are multiple thresholds that each represent a different binary code.

SSDs sometimes have to re-read blocks with different voltage thresholds to get good data, and make use of error correction on top.

Presumably age related degradation is worse for multi-level flash.

Twitter used to do this with the verified badges, but then Elon started selling them and they became the mark of someone stupid enough to give him money for a blue tick.

It's not a bad idea in principle. A simple cryptographic certificate that government agencies can use to validate their messages. The hardest part will be the UI. Making sure it is clear and not easily spoofed.

Indeed, I've lost count of how many attempts this has been now.

All the extraneous bullshit Microsoft added to the start menu is always lurking in memory for performance reasons.