Then maybe the West shouldn’t have spent 50 years selling the PRC the rope they’re using to hang them with.

Even some of the near east is starting to think about what happens when the goo runs out. Only the US is doubking down.

Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

Culver’s is… interesting.

I find I don’t like the paper-thin style burgers much (though the fish sandwich is probably the best fast-food fish sandwich on the market) but it always gives the impression they’re trying a little harder. The restaurant always seems clean and a bit of effort was done on the appearance, like they’re still in 1978 and taking the family for a sit-down meal there might be an option.

OTOH, the customer base seems to be people who have been going there since 1978, but that could be my location.

They’re opening a new one 3km from my house, next to a McDonalds that hasn’t made a single order correctly since it opened in ~2015, so it will be interesting to see how the market shakes out.

I think the choice of automatic-only may be less conspiratorial and more streamlining the product to broad tastes.

If only 10% of buyers choose the manual, it probably adds a fair amount of manufacturing and supply chain complexity to service them, which might drive up the cost for all models.

It’s like how most US carmakers don’t offer many diesel models.

Now, the ratchet of interior features… Plenty of people don’t want a huge monolith of an infotainment system with 14 speakers, but it’s standard and you can then be upsold the premium one with 25 speakers.

One thing that dawned on me… maybe CSD and some of the “new” window management paradigms (tiling, card style, etc.) are symbiotic. If you aren’t using the title bar for manipulating the window on a regular basis, you feel free to ignore or outright scramble it.

It creates a clear heirarchy of information too. The system owns the title bar, so any operations there are system operations.

At one point browsers did something similar for security awareness-- real permission prompts, etc. were set a few pixels over into the main UI to establist that they were “real” and not part of the page content.

Most of the time, we’re not so starved for pixels that we have tp be stealing from the title bar.

Hell, we lived thtough 640x480 desktops without even the cheat of hamburger menus.

Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.

It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.

I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.

I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

On a high level, you can get a cleaner like Deoxit D5 in a spray bottle. Most pots have a slit in them so you can spray into them, then turn the pot through its range a bunch of times. It’s worth a try as a start. Obviously do it while the unit is unplugged.

If you want to consider a more aggressive rebuild, like a capacitor replacement, maybe find a cheap old amplifier at the thrift shop to use as practice for desoldering/resoldering.

You might be able to connect the BT to one input on the amp, like the tape input, and the CD to another.

From what I understand, some modern drives effectively encrypt everything at rest, but have the key on file internally so it decrypts transparently. This allows for a fast “wipe” where it just destroys the key instead of having to overwrite terabytes.

I want to see the camera that will stop white-collar crime.

I’m surprised there isn’t more of a crowdsourced solution-- community maintained block/allow lists and pluggable tools.

Part of the reason filters suck right now is that they’re sold to turboprudes and people pushing compliance solutions that will placate litigious turboprudes. So you get blocking all of Wikipedia and .edu/.gov because three pages have an anatomical diagram of a breast. The kids are frustrated, normal parents have to keep unblocking legit stuff, and nobody wins.

If you could pick from easily managed lists sponsored by groups you personally trusted, with responsive appeals systems, people might be more willing to use them.

The ad-blocker ecosystem has a lot of precedent for how to work this stuff.