Goddamn it! What's with this ticket about the CSV import being broken?!

That "last 10 years or so" drastically underrates the length of the trend. It dates back to at least the 1930's. (Social Security Numbers.) It probably dates back further if I knew enough history. My guess is that it dates back to 1776.

There were and are other trends with countervailing pressure, and those tend to be stronger when population is sparse and not all land is owned. Also when processing and collecting information is more expensive.

That's a poor example of the point. The US system of measures is a historic legacy from it's British roots. It's more "I don't want to learn something new" than "not invented here".

We need to force these computers to join Psi Corps and obey their rules!

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Add to this that all of the applications I use on macOS or Windows are either open source or at least cross-platform anyway. As long as the apps don't change, neither does the way I work; not really.

If they do, they sure don't consider my use case. Gnome2 was pretty good, though, if not quite as good as KDE3. I find current Gnome unusable, and KDE4 isn't as good as KDE3 was, though it's integration with other applications is better. (FWIW, I prefer Mate, but secondary is xfce.)

IIUC, the evidence is that there are several different AI bubbles going on at the same time. They probably won't collapse at the same time, and even when the last collapsed AI will still be around. There are lots of jobs it's good enough at that it won't be replaced.

Yeah, there *are* AI bubbles. Groups of speculators are outbidding any reasonable return on several fragments of the market. But that doesn't make the actual tech go away, and there are domains were it's currently superior to any alternative.

Well...that's not really accurate. Many people WANT higher quality goods, even at a higher price, but they can't tell what they'd be getting, so they opt for the lower price. Higher prices don't guarantee better quality, they just allow it. But when the market is opaque, all that's penalized is higher costs.

You're ignoring the time lag.

Assuming your assumptions are correct, EVENTUALLY things would stabilize. But it can take multiple years to build a plant for making RAM. And it's a high risk investment, because while you're building it, other changes might happen.

D'oh, but DarkOx, I actually do agree with you on something: the license plates are there and they're visible in public. We don't need Flock to have our privacy compromised; everyone can do it.

We haven't denied our adversaries the capability; we're just trying to regulate their good intentions. That strategy doesn't work.

Flock is the symptom not the disease. People either need to demand anonymity and insist we stop displaying things like plates at all, and actually limit public photography, or just accept we will be tracked everywhere. There is no middle ground to be had.

Indeed. We seem pretty conflicted about that, so we're getting the worst of both worlds.

A lot of people are intentionally commiting crimes of various severity and they don't actually want police to have a more effective enforcement tool

This set of people is dwarfed into insignificance be non-criminals who are also being caught on camera. And the problem with that isn't false positives, it's true positives: non-criminal John Doe's car was spotted at a certain place at a certain time, so let's make that fact available on the market. That way, we can target him with ads, increase his insurance premiums, let his wife's PI know what neighborhood he had lunch in, let assassins when he's home, and let burglars (or his wife's rapist) know when he's not home.

The sheer amount of not-quite-what-consumers-need RAM that is going to be auctioned after the AI companies' bankruptcies will be unprecedented. Remember we're literally talking about an amount equal to what the entire consumer market was using. It's going to be a few years worth of the entire RAM manufacturing industry!

The scale of not-quite-right RAM we're going to see, makes me imagine (warning: red flag for talking out my ass) consumer motherboards specifically made for the mountains of weirdly-packaged cheap-but-fast-as-fuck RAM at hyperscale data center auctions. We'd end up calling them "AI bankruptcy rigs" or something like that. Yes, they'll perform differently (more throughput than you need, more latency than you want), but it still ought to be usable. IGPs usually included, I suspect.

And they will just be a product of the times; ten years later no one would want one and bankruptcy rigs would be seen as odd late-2020s relics; the lemonade from Sam Altman's lemon industry. It would be a dead-end tech. But during those late 2020s? Could be a neat-o opportunity.

Well, it can't grow in the same places, but bamboo into paper is already a thing. And it grows quite quickly in the appropriate environment.

Yeah.

They completely ignore panserpmia.

They just quote Isaac Asimov's writing from almost half a century ago (Europa). Ignores Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Mars; all of which have *BIOSIGNATURES* of a probability curve not too dissimilar to Europa.

They are likely a dilettante. Those folks do not do "prior art" research because they believe in the Auteur Myth.

  "An auteur is a filmmaker whose personal style and thematic focus are so distinctive that they are considered the 'author' of their films, a concept known as the auteur myth."

Real science isn't that. Real science is a rational discipline. The null hypothesis -- know what that means. Prior art -- know what that means. Mental biases -- know those, too; you'll see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. Science is the discipline of mind that ensures you're not just spewing random nonsense. You verify what you think; that's the discipline.

As Isaac Newton said ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), "nani gigantum humeris insidentes."

Ignore them.