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.

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.

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

Before AI I replaced my flagship Android phone once every 2 or 3 years. Now I am not sure, how can I replace my phone if I do not want AI functionality in it at all?

Meh, this kind of crap is what peer review is for. As long as he learns his lesson I'd be fine with letting him keep going. I mean he's still going to MIT so he's not an idiot.

I mean we all act like he got away with this but he was caught during the initial process of peer review. The system really does work.

We all like to complain about how there's thousands and thousands of papers that are just garbage but here's the thing so what? If the papers aren't doing any harm and they're just sitting out there then it's not a big deal. It's not like we are spending all that much money on any of this crap. I'm sure you can come up with a number that sounds big because we have a 33 trillion dollar economy so yeah you could find somebody who maybe got a grant and did some bad research for a few hundred thousand. But in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal

I mean think about how much money we waste on other crap. Human beings are just wasteful creatures. And we kind of need to be to keep our civilization and economy going anyway.

It would be kind of neat to see the algorithms for AI hand it off to a GPU or one of the fancy cores on a modern CPU.

But I can't see that really happening because machine learning algorithms requires so much processing power and modern graphics do the same so you just don't have a lot of head room.

they'll do the same with this shit.

Yeah, us old farts won't cave, but the kids will just grow up with AI Slop as normal. They won't know what they're missing.

In the end, it's still a somewhat better search than Google (If it gives you links to original sources, which a lot of the LLMs do).

Imagine having such an immense vocabulary, and using it that weakly.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

160 mph is not that fast. French TGV has being running at 300 km/h for a while, and it is now dwarfed by Chinese high speed train.

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.