Gonna be a problem if you want to run a modern web browser.

Which is frustrating because there's no reason a script-enabled rich text viewer with networking should require this much f---ing memory.

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

It's a mixture. Intel licensed their designs to AMD for a while so IBM could use AMD as a second source. Later they became competitors. There's no evidence of "reverse engineering", which isn't even a bad thing (reverse engineering is what you do if you want to create a 1:1 compatible version of a product without copying it - you basically create as best you can documentation of how something should work, and then use the documentation to create a design) or of stealing it. And why would they steal it and then reverse engineer it? Rather at some point when they stopped getting licenses AMD just... made their own version based on Intel's public specs. As have a number of companies, using various degrees of reverse engineering, including NEC, Chips and Technologies, Cyrix, VMT, VIA Technologies, and even IBM.

Furthermore, the chip in your PC right now, be it Intel's or AMD's, is mostly an AMD design, with some legacy Intel design crufted on. That's right, AMD, not Intel, came up with the 64-bit ABI that most of us have been using since the mid-2010s. And Intel licensed it from them. It's AMD's technology now.

Does that mean Intel are the good guys after all? No, this is corporate bullshit. Neither AMD nor Intel are inherently good or bad. Intel foisted some pretty awful CPU architectures on the world before coming up with a non-mediocre one in the form of the 80386 (cue the idiot I argued with the other day who'll claim the 8086 is a modern CPU and works the way modern CPUs do and does not have a ridiculous architecture - you're still wrong!) because they didn't know what they were doing after FF left to found Zilog, but had the market dominance, mostly through mindshare, to get their CPUs everywhere.

AMD were responsible for the bulk of the "runs a little hot" CPU wars in the late 1990s/early 2000s, where AMD pushed power sucking cooling-system-overworking CPUs to try to beat Intel's performance... but then Intel decided to ape them until the Core architecture, so Intel's not a good guy there either.

Both have made mistakes and tried to paper over them. Both have fired people who didn't deserve it. Both are, ultimately, sociopathic corporations.

Unlike Motorola. Which they still made CPUs. ;-) 68000 FTW!

> Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41,

What? This is what passes for financial literacy these days? Do they think that the stock price of two equal companies is equal?

Maybe Berkshire Hathaway Inc, stock price $716,299.99 at the time of writing, can buy both of them, and use the money in the couch to buy Apple? I mean, if that's how the stock market works...

For those who really do think this is a thing, look up "Market Capitalization". That, divided by the number of shares, constitutes the share price, and is the market cap is considered the stock market valuation of a company. AMD does have a higher market cap at $355B to Intel's $253B, but those numbers are within 30% of each other, not nearly 5x.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.

I don't think it's directly related to IQ. I also don't think it's restricted to chatbots. A lot of people are willing to accept the opinion of any authoritative source that they've accepted. Think religion or political party. Once they accept it, they stop questioning it's proclamations.

Note that this also applied to those who accept the proclamations of scientists or compilers. Once you accept an authoritative source, you pretty much stop questioning it. It's been multiple decades since I really argued with a compiler...unless it was a known bug from a source I trusted. I generally just assumed that I misunderstood what the language meant by that construct. (Of course, the few times I really didn't accept it, I eventually turned out to be wrong. Oh.)

Garbidgecollect surfaces etc...

Not really. I was in a factory in Shenzen 25 years ago that was able to spit out ~20 5MVA transformers per week with basic equipment and minimal staff. The only components brought in from outside were bolts and insulators. Doubling capacity only required equipment worth roughly the cost of one transformer.

Solid state solutions are an order of magnitude more complex.

Oh yes im pissed off that proton and cedega are in the news but im not and there dead ans burried. Looking at some of the changes made to direct3d it seems steam os requires that apps dont count activex instization and it wouldnt suprise me if it forced software nulling of buffers because thease some things that make strict directx 3d slow and by passing them gives substantial performance increases unfortunally someone put me in a cardboard coffin before i was able to roll this out when i wrote dirextx9 for vanilla wine many moons ago. So, im going to revisit direct3d with levels of strictness vs performance with some of the features being able to be rolled out across the entire activex architecrure in wine. I also wrote a text literal pdf importer and some other funky stuff along the way so you should soon be able to edit pdfs with a text editor instead of current vecror implementations the lengths someone has gone to to prevent the release of this are outstanding so hopefully its as disruptive as direcrx9 for vanilla wine was back all those years ago. If you find my corpse somewhere you know why.

There's at least some evidence on some level that the C-suite class actually believes all this bullshit. Hence the mandates forcing people to use AI and giving people bad performance reviews if they don't use it.

This isn't to say there hasn't also been a lot of redundancies blamed on AI that wouldn't have happened anyway, I've said as much myself, but certainly we've had plenty of cases where the C-suite have assumed that AI can fill in the gaps.

I think once the AI bubble pops, rehiring skilled workers will be a necessity for those companies that didn't bankrupt themselves.

Might very well be the opposite if all the non-AI companies betting on AI suddenly have to go on a hiring spree to rehire the people they thought they could replace with snake-oil.

It'd be nice to get back to Biden's full employment again.

Assuming the hype is real, I wonder if it's possible to train these algorithms on machine code, or if they need the semantics and expressiveness of a HLL.

Yeah well, we can't all be a person who doesn't understand how things work. Kudos to you for being simple minded!