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Comment Nvidia is in a high risk position (Score 1) 15

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.

Comment The point of one laptop per child (Score 2, Informative) 18

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.

Comment Re:Not really new information... (Score 2, Interesting) 38

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.

Comment Re:Fix the Headline (Score 1) 7

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.

Comment Re:This feels like a band-aid solution (Score 1, Troll) 49

I'm guessing it's mostly due to add-ons installed by third party software. There are APIs that let third party stuff hook into Explorer, and the current situation is an absolute shit-show. Because there are so many old and broken ones, Explorer loads them to see if they crash, and if they do it loads them again in compatibility mode, and if they still crash it gives up. Once loaded there are no limits on how slow they are to start up or operate.

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