Not talking about VRAM or unified memory. Regular DRAM.

There's been a lot of advancement recently on how to best manage MoE expert swapping (FreeToken is just one example).

Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

They did make as good an attempt as anyone... but still had to restrict emigration to prevent their population fleeing the workers' paradise.

Fair, many people do use the term imprecisely.

I doubt it. Which is why the cheaper devices being discussed won't provide backup power during an outage.

The discussion is about equipment that is designed to plug into the house wiring via an outlet, not a standalone battery that provides its own outlets. If you want to discuss an entirely different sort of equipment, then obviously the conclusions change.

How are you connecting to Slashdot from the year 2024?

If you have ~128 GB of RAM, consider Qwen 3.8 Flash + Freetoken. You'll only get half the tok/s as 27B but the quality is significantly higher than 27B - it beats it solidly in all compared benchmarks (for example, DeepSWE 1.1: 42,2% vs 58.7%).

Grok is a "discount model". It's cheaper than Claude Sonnet yet better than it. Doesn't compare to Fable or Opus, but then again, they're way more expensive models.

Note: I avoid using Grok - not just for the Musk factor, but because there are better options, e.g. GLM-5.3 and Qwen-3.8. Also, if you really want to save money, GLM-5.3 Flash and Qwen-3.8 Flash are amazingly good for their price range.

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

There are lots of businesses that are inexplicably still around.

Steak n Shake
Friendlys
Giordano's
Hooters
Many more

And they're welcome, as a business to swallow those aquisition expenditures, or fund their own Canadian content, or not do business here.

The list of developed countries that don't have domestic cultural protection policies is low. The US doesn't have one because of its size (or I'll throw you a bone - HOW AWESOME THEY ARE) - it simply doesn't need one.

Kind of hilarious in light of how pro-protectionist things have swung there. If the US audience started consuming predominantly anime TV, movies, books, etc overnight (purely just because of how good they are, right?) you'd bet your ass US would do the exact same thing.

What you don't get is that French is useful for many people - it just wasn't useful for you - and you project that because to you, personal experience is reality. Calling Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic more useful languages for living, identifying with other citizens, and employment in Canada is fucking bananas - and I'm married to a Taiwanese woman and speak some Mandarin!! Nothing you've said has changed my mind. Your points are noted, but still remarkably dumb.

so why aren't they given force adoption

I feel like we need a "take Murdoch5 to a real job" day or something. I'd literally pay to sit you down some time and explain how the real world works.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".