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.

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.

What resources are we short on?

Argumentum ad homimen. If you can't actually point out what's wrong with the arguments, you haven't refuted them.

Or if, you know, we developed ways to generate and use that don't produce carbon dioxide emissions, and ways to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it, then we wouldn't have to slaughter billions and return to a subsistence lifestyle.

Can we maybe try a carbon tax for a couple of decades first? We can always do the murdering later. Given the birthrate trends, if we wait a century the population will crash without doing anything.

Until the AIs have actually taken control there's still room to try to figure out how to align them with humanity. I suspect we are running out of room, though. Fast.

Well, that does tend to produce about one baby per month on average.

The point is that the best way to eliminate abortion is to make contraception easy, effective and cheap.

That quote was in the article, but the article title was about a four-day work week. Kamelia Aryafar, the author, clearly thought (correctly) that AI would allow engineers to get a week's worth of work done in less than a week and then thought (incorrectly) that this would mean developers would respond by ending their week as soon as they had done that.

What actually happens, of course, is that if you can get done in one day what used to take five, you now do five weeks' worth of work every week.

Fundamentally, productivity isn't the constraint on working hours. If that were true, Keynes' expectation that we'd be working 15-hour weeks would be true. What constrains working hours is the limits of human ability to remain attentive and focused and the demands of human life, and those constraints turn out to be roughly 40 hours per week. A little more or less than that depending on the person and on the nature of the work.

Increasing productivity has never really changed working hours, it just increases productivity, which makes us all wealthier. Yes, all of us, including the workers -- if you believe all of the gains accrue only to the bosses or owners of capital you really need to learn more about what life was like in past decades and centuries.