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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The thing is, this is happening precisely because manufacturers are giving a flying fuck. They’re seeing that the AI bubble is about to burst, and that this increased demand won’t last for long. So why spend tons of money on expanding production capacity when said capacity wouldn’t even be used?

    Not to mention that the current pricing bump is entirely on the OEMs, not the ODMs (ODM here being the DRAM manufacturers, OEMs being the RAM module manufacturers). OEMs have already bought and paid for the DRAM they’re selling right now, as it takes generally 2-3 months from manufacturing for the product to hit the shelves, and DRAM modules are usually bought at least 6 months, but usually 12-18 months ahead. Meaning these fuckers bought the DRAM cheap, saw the possibility of there being scarcity in the future, took a guess on how much they will need to inflate prices to reduce demand… And immediately jumped to those prices because if morons will pay £1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of £200, even though the production cost is still at £50… Well that’s just “good business” to maximise profits, innit?





  • You fight government overreach by civil disobedience, not by corporatist overreach in the same manner.

    If you give a free pass to corporations disobeying laws just because you personally dislike those laws, soon you’ll find all regulations are pointless because no corporation follows them…

    Also, there’s no such thing as “governmental overreach” in a well working system that is FOR the people and BY the people. You elect the representatives, you have a say in what laws get passed. I do agree that we could do with a refresher because the current forms of representative democracy are breaking thanks to (primarily right wing) political false marketing with no repercussions, and nowadays we do have a way to have people give direct input on laws and regulations before they get passed, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the government isn’t supposed to be some shady ruler class but rather a form of communal governance.




  • I hardly forgot about it, since I’m Hungarian.

    The Austro-Hungarian Empire (which existed only in the 1800s up to 1918), was preceded by a separate Austrian Empire and Kingdom of Hungary, which happened to have the same ruler (same person who had both titles) since the late 1500s. Habsburgs didn’t take control of Hungary until 1526, and even then, limited to the western bits due to Ottoman incursions, and full control wasn’t achieved until 1718. So using 1282 as the beginning of Habsburg rule within Hungary, or equating the Habsburg dynasty with the Austro-Hungarian Empire is quite misleading.

    Also, the Empire was hardly a world power, at least not to the level of Spain in the 1400-1500s, or the UK in the 1800s…

    I also doubt the US will fold into the EU. Canada wants in, yes, but that’s because the US is totally fucked at the moment. What I suspect will happen is a collapse of the federal over-state, resulting in a union similar to the EU - and potentially on friendly terms with it too - into which Mexico and Canada will be invited too, plus a mutual defense pact.


  • There’s been 3 similar empire collapses in the past ~600 years.

    First was the Spanish empire, in the 1500s, in a short 50 years they managed to go from the de facto world power, money reserve standard, to what you see them today - a country of little relevance, one of the many.

    The next one was the United Kingdom. In the 1800s, up until 1914, aside from the US, not many managed to get out from under the yoke of the British monarch. The British Pound was the money reserve standard, many times more valuable than the US dollar, they were a world power, THE world power. Up until WW1, which pretty much used up all the resources of the Kingdom, with tons of spending, natural resources wasted and so on… Come WW2, and what was left got burned up, India got out from UK control, other countries followed, import slowly stopped, in a short 20 years, the empire was no more.

    And finally the USSR. Same shit went down, but in a short 2.5-3 years instead of decades. Money devalued, resources exhausted, country dependent on import collapses when it can no longer afford said import.

    And the same shit is going down in the US, even quicker than in the USSR.



  • I’d honestly be so much happier if it was a permission request similar to e.g. accessing location or microphone access, for a number of reasons:

    • would be easier to manage as it would end up being a single interface handled by the browser instead of a per-website implementation
    • no differently worded, intentionally vague bullshit options that are designed to entrap the user
    • no struggle finding the enable/disable option after clicking either accept or decline
    • the ability to automatically provide a default answer that gets around to the fucking popup blocking 2/3 of the page




  • LLMs don’t just imitate human speech. They do much more in application - and that IS already displacing people, people who can’t just “find a new job”. People in call centers, (remote) customer support, personal assistants, and so on.

    And then we haven’t even touched down on how it’s changing IT. Software development alone is seeing massive changed with more and more code being AI generated, more and more functionality being offloaded to AI, which improves individual performance, allowing companies to cut down on manforce. The issue with that? There aren’t enough employers who could pick up those displaced people.

    Oh and then we haven’t addressed the fact that this AI displacement is also affecting future generations of these jobs. In software development, there’s already a shift from interns and juniors to AI, because it’s cheaper. This means that out of 100 fresh starters, maybe, maybe ten will get the chance to actually gain experience and progress anywhere, the rest are being discarded because AI is cheaper and “better” at those tasks.

    Previous industrial shifts have caused similar displacement, but those were slow processes. The most well known example would be the luddites going against the mechanical loom. While the luddites weren’t right about it, as handmade clothing has increased in price AND the displaced people were re-trained to manage the looms, that was also a slow process as the looms themselves were expensive, took time to replace manual workers, so not all textile factories could afford them, and demand was there for the increased capacity.

    Compare it with today’s AI shift, and there’s a clear distinction - within 3-4 years of LLMs showing up, we are on the verge of a potential societal collapse due to everyone and their mum trying to implement AI everywhere, even (especially!) in places it’s not needed. This speed, this adoption rate is simply not sustainable without planning for the displaced people. Because if UBI doesn’t happen, we’re truly looking at the most exposed bottom ~30% of earners (and even a big number of high earners!) not having any sort of income or the ability to get income, and things will mirror the situation a century ago, kick-starting another great depression but exacerbated by factors like much lower property ownership (yay private equity buying up residential properties to rent them out at extortionate prices), much higher cost of living, and so on.

    And we all know what the effects of the Great Depression culminated into. War, famine, ruin.