Exactly this, and hardware companies are very skilled at creating artificial tiers.

Remember back in the day it was possible to patch nvidia GPU ROMs to change device ids? It would magically enable features that were not supposed to be supported on your device. You paid for it, they programmed it, but uses a paid switch, sorry upgraded model to enable those. (And of course they started encrypting that firmware).

For a very long time, for example, the "homelab" community had to play excessive dances to have their GPUs "passthough" to the virtual machines. Why? It was an enterprise feature only enabled in workstation or higher edition of the same exact chips (minimum 2x price). They finally relented, and enabled it without hacks, but the entire thing was a sh--storm.

Same with Intel + AMD and ECC. And of course the PCIe lanes. They have been relaxing a bit, since modern systems use 2 or even 3 storage devices over PCIe (nvme), hence we now have more lanes coming out of the CPU. But still not enough that it will run two full sized x16 GPUs on the same system. Again, market segmentation that is entirely artificial.

(HEDT is pretty much dead at the moment. Threadripper moved to the higher, more lucrative workstation segment, along with Intel's Xeon Gold).

The reason we don't have those are the subsidies in the first place.

New U.S. subsidies can cut the price in half depending on location, the article points out.

Good luck with that!

Back in Arizona, I was visiting a friend who was getting a price quote for exactly this to be installed. A dummy water tank that will be integrated with his hot water plumbing at home. And the prices, somehow started just over the subsidy levels. And given the subsidy was large all option prices were amplified as well.

(So, you could get a similar system in any other country say for $500 to $2,500. Here can't remember the exact number but say the subsidy is $3,000, then the prices were something like $3,500 to $10,000. I might not be exact, it has been a while, but should be in the ballpark).

That is why "we can't have nice things". Anytime there is a subsidy, the pricing immediately includes that (remember the $40 HDTV/ATSC conversion boxes)? And not only that, but can make the overall product totally unaffordable (looks at college with guaranteed loans).

I have actually worked in "explainable AI" for a while, and yes even for the "deepest" deep neural networks that are supposed to be black boxes there are techniques to explain "why" a recommendation was made.

However, it requires additional engineering effort, also usually along with preparation of the training for this task.

What is more? Most "Machine Learning Engineers" do not actually understand how the model works in the first place. Yet alone tackle this additional task ("I downloaded this sample model from Github, ran it on Google cloud with Colab on our CSV file, and yes it is working with 80% accuracy")

The question is, which one will a "lowest bidding contractor" for software do:

a. Spend time and effort, and also hire capable engineers to make their algorithms and AI explainable?
b. Dump a gigabyte of data in random floating points and say "that is all we can do"?

Actions have consequences, and many times laws that try to go against human nature backfire.

But let's take a step back. The reason we went to plastic was to avoid using paper, and save trees. Yet, paper is not only recyclable, but it is biodegradable. Even if you throw it away, it will decompose in weeks (compare to hundreds or thousands of years in plastic). And if you are so concerned, you can even compost them at home with food scraps.

Again, instead of banning plastic bags, which will most likely cause yet another disaster, let's undo all these, and ask to return to paper. If you really want to legislate, CA can easily ask paper bags to be offered for free, which will solve all the potential issues immediately.

I used to be a seller, and the "buy now" box is more than just the "lowest price". Otherwise, customers would be complaining about 20 other things.

To be featured there (trying to remember), you not only need to offer a good price, but should offer a good service, fast shipping times, low returns, and so on. I would assume this is a weighted sum of all these considerations, hence slightly higher price, but much better service vs. slightly worse shipping times but much lower price could balance out, and so on.

If you are really looking for the cheapest price, there is an option for that. But most likely you'd run into "just opened" shops, those with very low customer ratings, or fly by the night outlets in China that will take 3 weeks to deliver your item.

And hence, this is just another frivolous lawsuit. Amazon has many faults, but they would not be messing with their most important box.

Sorry, but reading comprehension should receive more focus.

Please search for the text of "California AB-205 Energy (2021-2022)"

You will land on the very same page (second result, from the official .ca.gov site)

So, they finally fixed their house, and making good on gaming, after that terrible Xbox One generation which almost bankrupted their gaming division, and caused massive layoffs back in the day.

It should then be nice to have billions coming in both from existing part of the company, and the new Activision Blizzard King arm. Hence no need to lay off people right?

(Checks back two days ago).

What? Why are you letting go almost 2,000 people when things are actually sunny? Revenue is up. Console sales are up. Daily actives are up. Everyone is cheering your recent success. And you reward hardworking employees with a termination slip? And to add insult to injury with a government mandated minimum possible severance package? Nothing like "years of service x2 x salary", but only "what is required by law" (it is 2 months Federally in USA).

Something is really off here.

It is literally in the text of the law:

The bill would require the fixed charge to be established on an income-graduated basis, as provided, with no fewer ...

I don't know, it is all over the social media:
https://www.reddit.com/r/solar...

The news:
https://www.cnet.com/home/ener...

And the state legislature website:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca...

Really, who would believe this?

Even if the industry were not to fail, California has enacted new rules to ensure their demise.

https://calmatters.org/environ...

Basically they made several, terrible changes (someone! has to pay for all those wildfire settlement costs)

1. They added a large fee (based on income) just to be connected to the grid. And in most cities it is practically illegal to be off-grid (and also very expensive anyway)
2. They changed the payout formula. Normally you'd generate solar when the demand is peak (Sun it at the top during noon time), and use electricity when demand is low (nighttime), using the grid as a "battery". This worked at "retail" rates, so basically you'd be selling power to neighbors in leu of power plants, and buy back at the same rate. This is no longer true for new installations (and older "grandfathered" ones lose status if you upgrade your system)
3. They entirely broke the formula for "multi-family" homes. Even during daytime, consuming the solar you generate has a cost for you (they take it as wholesale, but sell at retail)

Anyway, there are probably other things that I missed. The idea was "those who can afford solar are wealthy" and those are targeted as cash cows to pay for those billions PG&E came up short.

And the results are as expected:
https://www.latimes.com/opinio...

Exactly this.

OpenAI needed lots of A100 cards (which cost $15,000 in the used market alone), and Microsoft had a bunch of those in their Azure datacenters. (Google, AWS, Oracle, and many others also do). Why they chose Azure but not others? Who knows, maybe they negotiated better, or maybe they did not want to risk working with a competitor (Google/Deepmind), even though MS seems to have started competing with their in house AI efforts.

Anyway, not everything has to be a conspiracy.

As for the academia? It is their fault to be falling behind. Time and time again, they rejected even publishing the basic fundamental work (including the famous PageRank paper back in the day), and the management prefers to spend hundreds of millions on sports stadiums instead of hosting their datacenters. (Do you know our research team had only 10,000 CPU hours per year back in the day? In a large company an AI team would spend that under an hour).

People need alternate controllers. Especially as we age. At the same time cheaters will use them to their advantage and making online games much less fair and fun.

And I think there is an inverse correlation with age here. When younger we don't actually need "help" with accessibility (at least most of us fortunate enough). But many of us are steered towards cheating in games, usually for bragging rights that we usually don't deserve.

Though, as we age, we need hardware support to keep up. My hands for example start aching in long gaming sessions. (Not to mentioned reduced reaction ability, but let's put that aside for now). But as we mature, we also no longer care about bragging, but just want to have fun. And here cheating by others (now) make it extremely frustrating to participate.

This is an interesting conundrum.

This is a sad day, but the mini robot did a great job over there.

It was the first time we flew something on Mars. At first, noone was sure it would even properly unfold and set up, let alone work. But it worked beyond its most optimistic mission parameters.

Did I wish it continued forever? Yes.
But everything has an end.

The good thing is, its success will enable future missions to have more and better flying machines over there.

Context is important. Yes people download old packages, this happens all the time.

You can for example still download Debian Jesse packages for an older system where new kernels are not available for one reason or another:

deb [trusted=yes] http://archive.kernel.org/debi... jessie main contrib non-free

Do you want to keep this server running? Yes
Do you plan to migrate to a new release? As soon as possible
Do you open this one to the Internet? Of course not

And the last one is the most crucial part.

And unfortunately NPM (JavaScript) packages are even more fragile against upgrades. Yes, I want latest and most secure version. But at the same time, I might have preferred my internal application to continue running without spending weeks (or more!) porting to the new fancy release of the library, which has decided to break all backwards compatibility.

Again, context is important.