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.

Or actually invite reporters to secret chats.

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.

I upgraded from a Pixel 5 to 6 a couple years ago due to the unfixable OTA hardware security bug in the 1-5 models.

Some days I'd like more storage but really I can't see what else a newer device would get me. LineageOS 23 is asking me to upgrade to it; I guess I should after the December patches land.

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.

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.

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.