I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!

First Street very likely doesn't have some magic model that can predict the future better than anyone else.

When you get a mortgage you have to pay for a flood survey. Even my house 700' above the village where the bank is.

Your flood risk is absolutely predicted by the flood history of your location. The bank writing the mortgage has the skin in the game which is why they make the buyer pay for the flood survey.

It sounds like First Street might be liable for damages based on pseudoscience if these Realtors bring a case. It would be interesting to see them present solid evidence that they prospectively beat the existing flood models and survive a cross-examination.

If they've published a peer-reviewed paper then I missed it.

Hostile design is often a sign of libido dominandi, not just laziness.

SmartTube has probably hundreds of settings you can tweak to improve usability and accessibility. The developer clearly has a user-first philosophy.

You have Revanced for Android but Apple doesn't allow such things.

It has some excellent accessibility improvements over stock.

Cheaper to just pay the bribes.

In America it's known as K-street. Or "donating" to an Inauguration Gala. Or hosting a high court judge in a European palace for a couple of weeks. Or giving decision makers absurd private sector salaries when they 'retire'. Or giving the Governor's wife a $200K no-show job. Pick your branch, there's a way.

In India the system is less formal.

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.

It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?

That speaks to fantastic logistics. There are anonymous folks out there who did a great job and deserve a ridiculously generous Christmas Bonus. :gallant bow:

That's what I just said.

It's simple economics.

Degrees, undergrad or grad, have to be measured in terms of:

1. Raw cost
2. Opportunity cost during the time you go for the degree
3. Time left in your working life in order to recoup #1 and #2.

Once upon a time, for the cost of a few summers working, and a part time job during the school year, you could afford to get a college degree at a public university. The cost was reasonable, and the boost in career opportunities outweighed the lost income during the 4(ish) years you spent in school. If school suited you, this was a slam dunk.

Then at a certain point you needed loans in addition to working to get through undergrad. Rather expensive ones too. However, if you were in state, you'd get a discount. The cost went up, but the boost in career opportunities outweighed the higher cost and the lost income during the time you spent in school. Again, if school suited you, it would take longer for the benefit to show in your life, but if you expected to work for a few decades, the difference in earning power and job opportunity (especially during an era where the US was hollowing out alternatives to white collar jobs), would pay off.

At some point, the raw cost and the opportunity cost reached an equilibrium point with your ability to recoup the cost over your working life... and people started noticing that the bet that they were taking - that they'd remain employed long enough post-higher education, at a rate of pay better than what they would have had without the degree, was not as solid as they would have liked.

One wonders if during this time period, if there had been a competitive alternative to higher education tracked in US schools, such as apprenticeships (normally starting at the start of high school), whether we would have hit this "crisis" of higher education. I think with viable non-college career paths, which would have paid from the onset, and provided an applied pathway for schooling (you still need an education even as a plumber or welder, it's just not credentialed as a college degree), there would have been checks against runaway college costs. The lack of competition, coupled with railroading students K-12 onto a college track, allowed colleges and universities to respond to increased demand by... raising prices.

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

I too bought memory in April to avoid tariffs. I had to run a stupid python program to generate a dataset that required 96GB of RAM for a delayed project so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. DDR4 was still a good value at that point (it's a problem that can run overnight, performance wasn't too important).

But how are the tariffs limiting the manufacturing supply capacity of RAM factories in East Asia?

Do you have a mechanism to propose?

Do you think they're making enough to meet demand but then blaming tariffs to justify jacking up prices? All of them? It would be an interesting conspiracy but is there any evidence to support that theory?

> How much is this problem is down to AI and how much to beautiful tariffs?

What mechanism are you thinking of where tariffs could limit supply of VRAM from East Asia?

Simple price increases, sure, definitely, but this is described by manufacturers as a supply & demand problem.

Do you have a different angle we should consider?

Tell them, "I got an invention that'll eliminate half of all the jobs in the world, then my investors get to keep all the money we used to pay them!"

You simply missed the entire (sarcastic) point, as expected of you.

If they're making so much content then if it was any good wouldn't the locals buy it? So why is this law needed?

It seems like at least one of the three claims is untrue:
* That there is lots of local content
* That it is any good
* Or that the law is needed

Perhaps it is just an attempted money grab aimed at foreign companies?

So you're saying it would be ideal if Disney was forced to push streamers specializing in local content out of business and become a local monopoly?

In your hypothetical, lots of families can in fact afford the $23/m, so Stan would still get a lot of business.

In your proposal they're mostly redundant.