Well there’s definitely socialist dynamics in FOSS development. Most drivers in the Linux kernel were implemented because someone needed them, not for profit. The same is true for most things in the Debian repository. Also people generally own the means of producing that software. How do proprietary systems produced to maximize profit compete with software written to just work and cost nothing? FOSS is doing software product dumping! :D And the rest of the software economy has grown tremendously as a result. Imagine having to pay good money for a compiler. There were huge barriers back in the day.

You’re obviously not wrong on the relationships between these variables. There’s however use value in just-good-enough, easy-to-write, bloated software in that it could enable value creation and higher efficiency elsewhere. E.g. a shitty, power-hungry computer vision program that frees up 20 people from doing visual quality inspection of parts in a factory. These people can then do the manual work needed on additional lines, thus increasing the labour efficiency and output of the factory, and lowering the cost of the production per unit. Which frees up resources elsewhere in the economy, increasing the effect. All of which could more than offset the inefficiency of the original program and then some. Of course capitalism won’t necessarily select for these use cases for bloat. More likely than not we’re producing bloat that doesn’t offset anything. But in a non-capitalist environment, such bloat might very well be desired. Especialy if you’re trying to develop at speed that allows you to create deterrents before the US decides to liberate you from non-capitalism.

I would have never guessed that introducing resource constraints increases efficiency of resource use.

ODT was right there… but it wouldn’t have fulfilled the theatrical purpose. 😄

This is so fucking bad.

Well he certainy knows what he needs to do tactically in order to continue the genocide. And we gotta keep ourselves informed about the new weapons of hasbara.

I’d imagine they could have a few spread out boats further and further behind, each with its own cell hotspot, beaming WiFi all around, so that they have to be jammed simultaneously to stop the livestreams from capturing the attacks.

Yeah, that’s curious. I’d think they’d be prepared with Signal at the very least and some backup self-hosted channel, as well as cameras and backup cell hotspots.

For a time, until aggregate demand craters and the economy enters a depression.

It’s nice to see that Hinton isn’t playing apolitical.

The pub key could be enough to check if an app was signed with the private key.

Do you think they won’t have a provision to revoke developer’s signing keys for reasons they determine? If they don’t, the whole malware-fighting angle would be meaningless. Once developer’s keys are revoked, their apps become uninstallable on Android that ships with Google apps. They could also easily uninstall apps signed with revoked keys.

I assume they’ll do this using chain of trust where they give signing keys to verified devs so that the apps don’t have to be signed by Google, but Android can still check if an app was signed by a Google-issued key.

E: Looking at this it says:

Register your apps

You’ll need to prove you own your apps by providing your app package name and app signing keys.

So you give your keys and I suppose they allowlist that package and keys. That means they’ll be able to revoke individual apps as well as dev keys.

I don’t think it’s about the data. There’s not much volume here. I think instead it’s about blocking apps they don’t like. Like some pesky ad blocking apps for YouTube. They know more people would reach for YouTube adblockers as they keep increasing the ads on the free tier as well as the price of the Premium tier. The way to prevent that is to make it extremely difficult to install such apps.

“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,” he asked

This guy won’t last too long in his position.

Say what now

Informative & fortunate.

State planning and funding those plans. Taiwan, S. Korea and China (among others) have all planned their chip manufacturing capabilities and appropriately funded their development. Instead of relying on markets and firms to decide to do it, their governments decided that chips are strategically important input to their (and others’) economies and directed funding and labor to create those production capacities - education, machines, factories, etc. Critically we also used to do this in Europe and North America but we decided we’ll let the market make those decisions based on profit alone since the 80s. Turns out that the market had somewhat different ideas for making profit. Which is unsurprising since chip design and manufacturing is inherently long-term affair while threre’s plenty of profit to be made in short term lower risk bets. We still have an edge on the design side but I think it’s a matter of time till planners overtake us on that front too. You see what’s happening with Intel, laying highly skilled people off, investment banker directors considering selling their factories to TSMC, and the America First government proposing a foreign takeover instead of directing public capital and setting long term goals.

We’re cooked

It happened slowly over time. 🥲

I need to watch this again.

Well not just. It’s a web app that connects to a shell running on a VM, running on your phone.

Oh nice, I think I recall reading about it. I hope it works. Apart from making China less dependent foreign semiconductors, it should drive down prices across the board.

So these are at the level of 2022’s NVIDIA, but consumer more power due to the higher manufacturing node. That’s pretty good. The article says yields are low which is not great but that’s a relatively independent development from the chip design itself. Any rumors on whether anyone in China’s closing in on an EUV machine?

I wonder if some of these execs see the potential long term decline and self-isolation of the US and consider having to move out of the US altogether in order to be able to maximize international profits as those are probably expected to grow. With that said, the equation is different for say Nvidia and Meta. While Nvidia could move to a China-friendly destination, even to China itself, and become a blessed corporation able to sell around the world, the same won’t be possible for Meta. Meta’s product depends on the local population. They can’t operate out of Singapore and sell a good around the world and into the US. And both the European and Chinese markets have much stronger regulation on Meta’s operation than the US. So if they move out of the US, there’s no upside as EU and China won’t let Meta go wild with people’s data. I guess that points to a distinction between firms for which the large userbase is the product and firms which make a traditional product, be it software, service, or hardware.

Thanks for the info!

The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.

Anyone know how the power density compares to a conventional uranium PWR? In other words, are these machines substantially smaller or larger than a PWR for the same output?

Black Mesa was so good, it made me cry. 🥹

The Half-Life series

• Black Mesa instead of Half-Life. It’s an extremely faithful remake that’s absolute joy and I would play it instead of the original now that it exists. Not only the graphics are updated, but also the last chapter of the original game which got rushed to meet deadlines is masterfully completed in Black Mesa
• Half-Life 2 and it’s subsequent episodes

If it got great WiFi reception, that would be a killer.

Elon Musk’s automaker has been backsliding in China for the past five consecutive months on a year-on-year basis, according to data from the country’s Passenger Car Association. Tesla’s shipments plunged 49% in February from a year earlier to just 30,688 vehicles, the lowest monthly figure since way back in July 2022, when it shipped just 28,217 EVs — and that was in the middle of Covid.

☺️

She goes out to talk about topics she’s not well versed in without doing enough research and says outright wrong stuff. In general, scientists who specialize in a field are often no better than a layman in the fields they have no background in. She’s not the only one who does this. Some scientists merely share uninformed opinions. Others do it for money. They build a persona that is imbued with trust by their existing expertise then they use this trust to keep pumping out other material for profit. That’s Sabine. Also Jordan Peterson. No they’re not the same but the scheme is. Laymen don’t know any better and absorb the material, correct or incorrect, since they don’t have the background to recognize when it’s bullshit.

Sabine is an idiot but she’s probably not wrong today.

This is nice but it appears to be around A55 performance which is similar to the SiFive cores. I’m eager to see high speed cores that match the upper end of the ARM core range. And if they’re happen to be open source…

Link?

Give us Banana Pi with SMIC-made, fast RISC-V processor. That’ll be the beginning of the end for ARM and all the report you need to show.

It’s okay, all they have to do is get a bid from another Big Tech company that doesn’t have home stuff like Amazon. Failing that, there’s always private equity. 🥲

An open source CPU, somewhat competitive with good ARM and x86 cores would be a groundbreaking achievement.

I didn’t assume that. While that’s one interpretation of my comment, there are others.

Well in capitalist countries there’s also the problem of distribution of the value created by automation that displaces workers. So workers have the incentive to not automate since they’re often left out of the value the automation produces.

Is it an official Chinese policy to pursue automation as a means of dealing with population decline or is it just the obvious solution?

Probably a coincidence and/or got some scoop from Meta specifically.