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Comment Re:Macroeconomics 101 (Score 1) 48

Hey, if you're feeling bitter about it, I'll help out by letting you mail me your 5090. I mean, it will be a terrific hassle for me, but I'm willing to suffer through it to take that burden off your shoulders. You have more than enough to worry about.

I like to help.

Hey, remember when the x090's only cost about a grand? You know, back before bitcoin when an x080 was around $800. Someday, I'm going to find the guy who invented bitcoin and I'm going to punch him in the face several times. Then I'm going to make him unlock his wallet so I can dump his holdings and crash the entire crypto market. I won't actually do these things, but part of me really wants to.

Comment Re:AI sucks. (Score 1) 48

I know how you feel. I was pissed about it in 2020 when bitcoin miners made getting a GPU damn near impossible, and damn impossible to find one at MSRP (which is now what the miners pushed it up to, thanks a-holes), now it's RAM, and thus also graphics cards.

It's really damn annoying to get screwed by market conditions. If it weren't for the other disastrous consequences, I'd be praying for an AI bubble to burst so these things can go back on the open market.

Comment I think it's funny (Score 1) 55

That people still don't realize they have a ruling class.

Your Masters want this and they are going to get it.

One of the old bugaboos with the right wing is the idea that you work the first 3 months of the year for the government.

But we know about half of the money in any given country goes straight to the top . 01%.

Nobody ever talks about the 6 months you spend working to pay for Bill gates's yacht.

Meanwhile my tax dollars paid for healthcare for people who couldn't afford it. I had a neighbor who had a kid that was only alive because my tax dollars and everybody else's paid for a surgery they need it. Pretty minor stuff but they'd be dead without it. Single mom with a $15 an hour job no way she could afford even a routine surgery like that.

The people at the top have class consciousness but us working stiffs do not. Down here in the trenches it's every man for himself.

Comment Re: Leviticus 19:28 nor print any marks upon you (Score 1) 192

Would you see a contradiction in someone putting their hand into a tank filled with piranha? It might seem like a bad idea, but does it indicate their hand is a separate entity? Or what if I let you delete my /. account? If I believed it would save your soul, I'd absolutely let you kill the extension of my self in this little universe.

Comment Re: Making a note... (Score 1) 91

I suppose you might be right about that, though I'd hope they weren't so stupid that they'd drive away all of their customers first.

Just another reason to reign in private equity I guess. I don't know why we let that happen again, they're just the trusts we broke a hundred years ago.

Comment Re:English (Score 1) 91

As I recall, they have a much lower rate of tone deafness than the rest of the world, and a higher number of people with perfect pitch. Similarly, the mutation that makes Cilantro taste like soap is much more rare in places where it is a common part of the diet.

Anyhow, you left out how "Lingua Franca" literally means "(the) French language", as they were the dominant force for a time. It remained the language for diplomacy well into the era of British dominance.

Note that most of the world uses the Latin alphabet, while the Chinese lexigraphy is an absurdity. Also, that analytic languages are mostly limited to China and its neighbors to the Southeast, and they suck. Synthetic languages, like almost all the rest, are far more flexible, expressive, and comprehensible. Plus, the rate of falling tones ending in 'ng', 'o', or 'eu' is much lower. I hate hate hate those sounds.

I just don't think it's likely that a Chinese language (Mandarin is dominant, they've suppressed Cantonese and the costal languages) will ever be the Lingua Franca. Look at the rate at which English adopted Japanese loanwords vs Chinese. Everyone knows what karaoke is, but what Chinese loanwords do we have? Some martial arts and Feng Sui?

Comment Because we like industry (Score 3, Interesting) 55

Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.

If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.

Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.

Your suggestion is logical, but I don't think you considered industrial use. That smelter or fertilizer factory will get impacted as well...distribution centers, even ice hockey rinks. Lots of industries use a lot of electricity...it's just they provide actual value, unlike this AI Rush. Most of these are the backbone of your local economy. Not everyone can be an engineer at a big tech company...someone has to make raw materials, houses, grow your food, etc

In my view, the AI bubble is a cancer we just have to accept and accommodate. TMK, investing in electrical infrastructure is not a bad idea. There's no way to separate pointless computation, like bitcoin or most LLMs, vs legit cloud computing, which we want to encourage. And as many have pointed out, once investors realize LLMs are not going to provide the value promised, all that cloud computing capacity can just be repurposed for technology growth that I would consider much more practical. Once the bubble pops...once all the servers bought are obsolete....you still have an upgraded grid and distribution system to support EVs or whatever technology increases our electricity consumption in the future.

The story here is that local suppliers need to step up to make demand. The answer is to shame them, not the customers who want to buy electricity.

Comment So, the opposite of Ingress NGINX? (Score 1) 37

If you aren't sure what I'm talking about - https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

An open-source project many depended upon, maintained by employees of Kubernetes, and dropped because neither Kubernetes nor anyone else wanted to fund it. And here is an open-source project people may come to depend upon, maintained by not a Steam employee, but fully funded by Steam because they recognize they, and others, will need it.

Is Steam the better company?

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