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Comment Re: Temu missiles (Score 1) 312

Though we are not actively at war with China, this war with Iran has put immense pressure on all of Asia, as they get the majority of their oil from the Straights of Hormuz. Mean while, my gas prices in San Diego haven't even gone up a full dollar yet. I just paid $4.99 yesterday and a month ago I was paying $4.29.

On the other hand, the average gas price in the US has increased from $2.98 to $3.98, an increase of 33%.

Comment Is this true? (Score 2) 119

"For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding."

It seems like this statement is not true. Instead of providing a thin client for the phone, the car makers are going to duplicate the phone software in the car. This sounds far more expensive in terms of software development costs. Also, this has no effect on branding. The car is already heavily branded with the car make. I don't think the car makers care about sharing branding with Google. Instead, what matters to car makers is on-going subscription revenue, because that is what will justify the additional development costs.

Comment Re:But but!! (Score 1) 65

But the simple act of betting (which I think is stupid most of the time) should be a freedom we keep. Our constitution didn't strip us of the right to wager. Where does the government get the power to do so?

Does this thinking extend to the stock markets, which are arguably another form of gambling this is now heavily regulated. Are you arguing for the pre-SEC days where there were no required public disclosures and no prohibitions on insider trading?

Comment Re:This is what evil looks like - OH PLEASE (Score 2) 243

Even if all of that were true, oil companies are still not solely to blame for it all. And what would be the point in suing them?

Same as the tobacco companies.

Imagine what the tobacco settlement would have been like under the current MAGA government. Instead of a deal to essentially heavily tax cigarettes and allow the evil to continue (i.e., a win-win for everyone except for the people that are killed by cigarettes), the tobacco settlement would have been replaced by a government protection law with only a one-time lobbying cost. That would have also resulted in a win-win, where the tobacco companies get to avoid the settlement tax and the politicians get to pocket the lobbying bribes as well as the insider trading jackpots. Of course, more people would get killed by cigarettes and state taxpayers and employees paying health premiums would all lose, but they don't matter.

Comment Re:Why GPUs? (Score 1) 43

Serious question, why haven't they architected something better than GPUs for running inference? Surely something specifically designed for the task that could do it faster using less power? Something like Groq ASIC (that's just one I've heard of). Why aren't these the future and eclipsing the stop-gap that is GPUs because they already existed and were the best fit at the time?

The answer is that everyone is already doing exactly what you said. Groq is now essentially Nvidia, so even Nvidia is expanding their product portfolio. They offer GPUs (Blackwells and Vera Rubins), inference systems (Groq), CPUs (Vera), and networking (including InfiniBand and ethernet, where Nvidia now has higher data center networking revenue than Cisco). Currently about 70% of Nvidia data center revenue is from GPUs, and that percentage will drop when the Groq systems ramp up.

Comment Re:Nobody can afford them (Score 1) 43

The AI companies will pay with the money they don't have to put in the datacenters that haven't been built.

Yes, the AI customers don't have the money for all the data centers. Even the money-rich hyperscalars don't have the money and have to borrow. However, these hyperscalars are self-funding for the most part and borrowing is only for around 10-20% of their spending. They are being stretched, but a case could be made that they can "handle" the financial strain. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have a combined annual profit of over $350 billion, and their actual operating cash flow is over $500 billion.

It's the newcomers (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) that don't have the huge profits and cash flow. They have to depend on venture capital, private equity, circular "partnerships," etc. However, their levels of spending are far lower than for the hyperscalars, "only" in the $20-30 billion (each) range.

Comment Re:Where does the data live? (Score 4, Informative) 26

Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

Submission + - New Freenet Network Launches With River Group Chat (freenet.org)

Sanity writes: Freenet’s new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.

The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.

An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.

Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.

Comment False reasoning (Score 1) 156

"In its release regarding the changing product plans, Honda was shockingly blunt about its situation, saying that it was simply unable to deliver products that offer a better value than that of newer Chinese manufacturers."

This makes no sense. The only reason to build cars in the US is to sell to the US market. While there are a few minor models available in the US that are made by companies with Chinese owners, there is essentially no Chinese competition in the US market because the all major Chinese models are blocked. So, Honda should have absolutely no worries about competing with Chinese manufacturers today, and with likely future US politics, the same can probably be said many years in the future.

Comment Re:Anyone can sue... (Score 1) 137

the YOB expects most of those loses to eventually get reversed by "his" pet SCOTUS.

His record on that is actually pretty bad. SCOTUS tends to give him his way on shadow docket rulings but he's much less successful in the actual on-the-merits rulings. Granted that he's had a few incredible (as in "impossible to believe") successes like the ridiculous immunity ruling, but on the whole the court goes against him more often than not.

What's sort of interesting is that one of Trump's main failings with his executive orders or other edicts is an obvious lack of due process. Yet, his cronies on the Supreme Court use the shadow docket to act as wingmen to validate the lack of executive due process by essentially using judicial lack of due process. It's actually sort of fitting.

Comment Is he allowed to mention the agreement? (Score 1) 48

Can Sweeney qualify all his public statements praising the arrangement by saying that he is contractually obligated to praise the arrangement? If he's allowed to do so, that's the equivalent of commercials with annotations saying that the actors were compensated for their portrayals.

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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