Presumably this has been quietly going along while Musk’s neurolink shitshow has been getting the headlines. Here’s to responsible usage of BCIs like this, and never letting whatever neurolink is and wants to become (seems torment nexusy to me) anywhere near any of our brains.

Doing God’s work ! (says the agnostic). This will be such a big win for the fediverse.

Douglas Adams. Came across a signing and by random had borrowed the hardcover of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish (with the hologram on the front) and took it as a sign. Paid off the library…

Or, people’s retirement funds via IPO. If you can change your plans investment strategy for your good and societies.

Sony has all sorts of other (evil) reasons. I’m saying it’d be a build it and they will come thing, as were CDs originally, it’s very existence would create use cases.

Just because it’s not your use case (and maybe you’d find a use if it was available), doesn’t mean it’s not a common one. Market opportunities get missed all the time. People have been making do with offline HDDs, which is a waste of their potential, and they’re now victim to the RAMpocalypse price hike too.

Just as an example, people would probably take a lot more video with their oh so capable phones if there was somewhere to put TBs of it cheaply.

Honestly, the world is crying out for a new consumer offline backup media, hasn’t been anything since BluRay. Even just whacking a USB3 onto LTO5/6 and not having it cost the earth for drive or media would sell like hot cakes.

Something a lot nicer is cooking in China (Microsoft has been sitting on it as Project Silica for years now). That looks to be a 360TB CD sized disc good for 10000+ years cold storage, currently $30K writer and $6K reader, but that was the case with CDs too once.

I can see why our corpo lords and masters wouldn’t want us having a device that let us fit all of Netflix in the palm of our hands, but whoever mass produced it and brought the price down to reasonable would make an absolute fortune. Here’s hoping the latter greed wins out, it doesn’t seem like the drives are made with any sort of unobtianium. A new era of CD burners would be highly welcome.

Love the background, what is it?

Heartily agree. I was trying for objectivity, personally you’ll take my general purpose computers from my cold dead hands, and I will encourage everyone I can to support it.

I take some solace from the general pendulum nature of the process (and societal evolution in general), this too shall pass. Doesn’t mean we don’t need to fight. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

Thing is, most of those data centers and video GPGPUs are dark and will likely stay so. The cards will be obsolete by the time the centers are built, the power sourced, they’ve been sued and injunctioned etc., etc. . (reminiscent of all that dark fiber left after the OG internet bubble pop)

The RAMpocalypse is mostly market manipulation courtesy of SamA grabbing 40% of global supply (of wafers, not even chips yet) from two of the three memory companies on the same day. In a better (the old) world he’d have been put in jail for this and fraud already.

Which is to say, the demand is mostly fictional and FOMO and the big three memory companies are leaning hard into it because profit, and, the price never comes all the way back down, also a win for them. They make huge profit (hence making 5 year price fix deals with stupid people) until the Chinese companies ramp up production and the game ends. The actual RAM may or may not actually end up used, depending on when the bubble pops and what happens after.

Just rampant greed doing what it does, SNAFU.

China makes their own I believe.

Yup, was going DDR5 this year, got a new bike (Marin Larkspur) instead, such a good decision, renewed my love of cycling, having a ball.

Yup, there’s a cycle between centralization and edge. Started with centralization, mainframes, went edge with the first PCs (and game consoles) and ever since corpos have been trying to pull it back to the center in waves. Thin client, cloud compute, arguably phones (as apps processing in the cloud), Geforce Now, AI. So far it’s always gone back to the edge for most of the population, except for niche cases (or not in the case of phones). As internet gets faster and more reliable the chance of it sticking longer in the central zone increases (IMO).

Only thing I’ve found that handles large libraries, it has it’s own engine to index songs, whereas the Android one bugs out on large (5K+) libraries in my experience (a while ago). On gOS it recognized as paid if you left Play Store up for a week (couple years back now), has been fine ever since, even though I removed play store and Poweramp’s network permissions.

ITT ‘get hired back for more’.

That wasn’t the goal, it was always hire someone else for less later while making this quarters financials look good and workers more desperate and fungible. Sucks for long term viability and institutional knowledge, but shareholders are happy now, C-suite gets bonuses, AI is just this years excuse. Just late stage capitalism working as expected.

Kagi seems well regarded as a search engine, dunno I use my own SearxNG which takes hits from multiple engines (Marginalia is one of my mains). Occasionally I fire up a local LLM and pipe it through SearxNG via vane when I’m fighting slop for current issues. (Slop vs Slop, sigh, but at least I get references I can hand check).

For specific interests there is often a specific forum where knowledgeable people gather, if you find it you’ll get good results, e.g. Endless Sphere for eBikes and batteries and such. It may be reddit unfortunately, before: is your friend where useful. There are high quality but still accessible magazines out there, e.g. Quanta for maths and Knowable for more general science.

With academic papers have a look at the impact factor of the journal, high impact is highly competitive and quality is usually higher. If you’re dealing with heavy jargon, translation is something LLMs are actually sot of good at, use them to see if the info you want is actually there before wading through the jargon yourself to check / understand deeper.

IMO Snopes.com is a good source of truth on popular things that may be BS.

Your last point is an example of a statistical phenomena called a long tail. It also applies to search engine results ironically.

Another thing that comes into play is the XY problem where you think you know what you’re looking for, but it’s actually a specific case of a more general problem, and hunting just keeps turning up bad results. Good to let things rest, or ask a question somewhere.

There are useful tools that can help you as well, I like Obsidian for note taking, but there are many, while Zotero for organizing papers and Calibre for books are pretty invaluable. No good finding stuff out if you just forget it in a month, and once you have a large library running grep over your own stuff can often turn up useful info right at your fingertips.

Ha-Ha

Somebody Else’s Problem ;)

Sandman was the art I recognized, read it, take it upon you. The Lucifer show is derivative, and fun, highly recommend.

Wow, that was a screed, (a worthy one) and yeah, an engineering degree should be special IMO, as perhaps a (pure) Math one. should also be. We have a tendency to regard you lesser, in self defense, but that professional responsibility is significant, a more elegant weapon from a more civilized age. I do apologize, the steam age thing was out of line (but meant with heart, trains rock, and IMO is where ‘engineering’ started) has it’s roots.

Thanks mate.