I think that's fair, although it feels like the tone has gotten harsher.

Definitely. I'm actually already seeing a little of that in late August. Nights are getting down to ~62F, which is managing to cool the house to the high 60s. I'm wondering if I could get a higher-volume fan for the laundry room to increase the air flow... I'm sure that by the end of September we'll have nights in the 50s but days will still often reach the mid-80s. That's when another benefit of having it automated kicks in. If I were just opening a bunch of windows before going to bed, there would be a period of time when the house got too cold at night. With the automated system, when the house gets to 62F it turns the fans off.

Of course, as we get into winter, I pop the laundry room fan out and fill the gap with an insulated pillow of the type they sell for filling swamp cooler vents.

Speaking of swamp coolers... those have historically been fairly effective in Utah, thanks to the dry air. My first house had just a swamp cooler and it was honestly fine. I've actually thought that it might make sense to have all three: passive cooling, swamp cooler and central air. With a smart system deciding which to use when. You don't want to use the swamp cooler a lot on days when the A/C might need to run, because it raises interior humidity, which the A/C then spends a lot of effort extracting. Maybe... have to consider the cost of buying and installing the swamp cooler.

It's possible. My prediction is that they're not going to find any evidence of collusion, that all of the DRAM manufacturers simultaneously shifted production to AI chips in response to clear market demand, not because of any agreement.

Yes, there was collusive price fixing 25 years ago, but the companies got slapped pretty hard for it -- not just cash fines but prison sentences for executives. I think that prior experience makes it less likely that they're colluding now, not more likely. Once burned twice shy.

These are all the reasons those of us who live in suburbs give when we're asked why we don't live in the downtown core of cities.

One correction: It didn't have anything to do with discovery. Discovery was complete when the judge put the trial on hold to allow the deal to close. What happened was that Musk realized that proceeding with the trial was dumb because he was going to lose and be forced to complete the transaction regardless, and possibly on worse terms than he could get by just doing it. Avoiding the public spectacle of the trial was also a consideration, I'm sure, but not discovery... 10 days before trial discovery is already done.

That's too strong. Appeasement does work sometimes... when it works we usually call it "compromise" or something similar, though. There's a book "Appeasement in International Politics" that examines a large number of cases where it worked and where it didn't. The author lays out a number of criteria that influence whether it works.:

1. When the opponents aims are limited and grievance-based.
2. When the concession addresses the grievance
3. When the conceding party is strong, so the concession is a choice
4. When concessions are reciprocal and limited.

That said, Trump's aims are never limited. That has become clear. It wasn't necessarily obvious that was the case early on, though.

Maybe? There are some pretty good arguments that it did pan out in 1939. It didn't prevent the war, but it gave the British time to build out radar coverage and ramp up production of hurricanes and spitfires. Britain may actually have been better off going to war in 1940 than they would have in 1939, so appeasement may well have provided a useful delay.

It's both. Advertisers very much want to advertise things you want to buy, to either trigger a purchase that you were holding off on and might forget about or (more often) to direct a purchase to a specific product or brand, rather than a competitor's. Advertisers also want to push purchase ideas to you, to tell you about things you might want to buy that you didn't know about, or often just to build brand awareness or brand vibes so that if at sometime in the future you're interested in something, you'll pick theirs.

Advertisers really don't want to pay money to show you ads for stuff that you simply won't ever buy. That's a waste. And the ad algorithms often screw it up and deliver wasted ads. That lowers the value to advertisers, making them willing to pay less per ad, which lowers the value to ad distributors. They'd very much like their ads to be better.

Larry Page used to say that the project of building good advertising wasn't done until every ad resulted in a purchase. That would actually be a kind of ad nirvana for advertisers, who would be willing to pay a lot for a guaranteed sale, ad networks, who could charge a lot for an ad, and even consumers, who would never see any ads except for things they wanted to buy (even if they didn't know they wanted the thing until they saw the ad -- indeed those would be the most valuable ads, since they would convert a guaranteed non-purchase to a guaranteed purchase).

(Larry's comment ignored brand awareness advertising, obviously).

The status quo is obviously very far from that situation.

Shutter? You think they're going to spend $500B on fabs and then just shut them down? Their boards would be eviscerated. As for "repurpose", sure, they'll manufacture whatever will generate the most profit, but with a fab capacity glut that will definitely include RAM.

That wasn't my experience, though perhaps it was just my workloads.

I didn't use OS/2 until Warp, some years later, and only because I went to work for IBM.

No, supply will increase. What you're not considering is that the manufacturers are building fab capacity like crazy right now. When all of that capacity hits (in 3-4 years), prices will crater. We've been through this whole cycle many times.

I remember the first big one, driven by the launch of Windows 95. MS-DOS could use memory above the 640K mark only with significant pain and complexity, but Win95 could address it directly and really liked having an insane amount of RAM... like 16 MB!!. Freakin' hog. My NeXTstation only had 8 MB and it blew those dumb PCs out of the water... anyway, I digress. RAM prices spiked, but within about 18 months (fabs were simpler back then) they went through the floor.

Not so much the raw materials as the fab space/time, but yes.

We have pretty extensive history of how this goes; there have been a half-dozen DRAM crunches in the last ~40 years. What always happens is that prices explode, manufacturers build out massive new capacity (which takes years, and as fabs have gotten more complex it takes more years), then all the new capacity goes into production at about the same time and RAM prices crater.

And we're definitely seeing the same processes at work this time. Between Samsung, SK Hynix, TSMC and Micron there's almost a trillion dollars of new fab construction going on right now. When all of that comes on line, it's going to provide a massive boost to output... and RAM prices will almost certainly drop precipitously, losing all of the recent gains plus whatever normal decline we'd have expected, plus some more.

When? Probably around 2030. 2029 if we're lucky, though we might see a little softening by 2028. Definitely not this year and almost certainly not next year.

It could happen faster if the AI bubble bursts before then. I wouldn't hold my breath.

I'm sure that will comfort the grieving family. Q: "What happened? Why didn't you answer when I called 911? Why are they dead?" A: "Don't worry ma'am ... it's just a design and implementation issue. I'm sure they have the system still working in Heaven. I hear they don't have any idiots who think that blaming everything on the engineers makes sense up there"

Microsoft never follows anyone's conventions, usually reversing the standard when possible. They use "\" rather than "/" as filesystem separators, for example. In this case there is StandardCamelCase, and then there is microsoftCamelCase. Microsoft does not capitalize the first word or syllable, but they redefine the term CamelCase to "PascalCase" despite the fact that it originated in earlier languages like Smalltalk and Mesa, and just call microsoftCamelCase CamelCase, despite the fact that it can be confused easily with Hungarian Notation (staring the variable name with a type specifier.) They do all of this to try to keep market share, so that it becomes more uncomfortable to move to systems that actually follow standards. If all if this is confusing, that was Gates' intent when he began this kind of shitfuckery 4+ decades ago. His legacy of standing in the way of progress in computer technology continues into the present day. It is *never* about what is good for the customer or developers, and *always* about what generates more money and greater lock-in.

Users decide what applications they install and use, or they get a system administrator to do so. Since you said "your computer" it is fair to say that "you" are both the user and administrator. You can't explain it further because you don't even understand what you are saying. If you are running an OS that forces you to use AI then you are using the wrong OS. Furthermore, you aren't force to set up your applications to use AI running locally on your computer. Finally, you can enable and disable service, even on Windows. If you are going to try to snarky at least be right.

It would absolutely have been more accurate for me to say "even more extremely dangerous." Good point.

I'm not sure you know what a user is or what it is that a user uses.

"So by that logic your computer became a piece of crap over night because an application platform deemed it so."

What logic? I can't find any of it in your comment.