They're called "enrobers." (humor)

When Russia began attacking Ukraine... it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation.

FTFY. Based on how the Russians started whining when Ukraine had the nerve to shoot back.

It is at this point that I will make this about politics and purposefully pursue the "yet you participate in society" vibe.

How can you possibly advocate against $POLICY and then say "If $COMPANY had done what I advocate against, things would be better for all of us" without that meaningfully affecting your view of $POLICY?

Please forgive me, I don't want to make this about politics per se and I don't want this comment to come off as attacking or give off an "and yet you participate in society" vibe, but...

I was under the impression that you were nominally on what we would call "the left" and that "vertical integration" was one of the seven deadly sins, economically speaking. Given a large amount opposition to that in the western world over the last thirty years or so, how was anyone supposed to plan for the situation we're in today?

(On another note, from an economic rather than political point of view, if you look at how AMD and Intel have functioned over the last 10-20 years, AMD's choice to divest their fabs seems to have been a very good decision on their part and I say this as someone who thought it was a terrible choice and a death knell for the company at the time).

Not sure how you can put "AI companies bought all the fucking supply of everything for three entire calendar years" on "gaming companies." I saw some guy on reddit the other day complaining about Microsoft reducing the amount of storage for 365 family subs and urging everyone to sign some petition to reverse this as if a. there was any chance of a reversal or b. that enterprise storage costs increasing by a factor of four over the last calendar year might make this both a reasonable move on their part and something beyond control.

I realize that Microsoft at least is part of the problem here with Copilot/Azure/whatever else along with their OpenAI investments, but it doesn't change that "the consumer electronics market is now fundamentally different than it was just a year ago." Moore's law isn't going to be making things cheaper anymore and everything with RAM and/or flash will be getting more expensive on an almost monthly basis until at least 2029 (note, that's not saying "things will get better then" but only "things will continue getting worse until at LEAST then.")

The fuck kind of crazy shit is this?

My 15yo will play almost any game on any platform at any time. Yep, she plays on her phone and her tablet but she also plays on her xbox and switch. She has a school issued laptop for her classwork and uses desktops in classes that have/require them.

My 8yo plays on her tablet and my wife's phone, but has no problem using a Switch controller (be it a joycon, pro controller, or the two joycons on the charging base together). She plays puzzle games with my wife, minecraft on her tablet and the switch, and she really likes Mario Kart (she likes 8 a lot more than 64). She doesn't have a 1:1 laptop at school yet (other than during Covid, they don't do this until middle school here), but they pass out laptops at school as required for day assignments.

I don't disagree that kids do a lot of their gaming on mobile devices, but this idea that they don't know/play other games or that they "don't understand how to use a controller or a laptop" is fucking insane.

Disagree. A large part of why costs are through the roof is that the product mix has shifted from heavily favoring general use parts like SDRAM to more specialized parts like HBM. Most of this production is going right to the end customer rather than middlemen. What you're likely to see when/if this bubble pops is a lot of nominally useless (in the short term) hardware (for general compute) being liquidated and that what middlemen are sitting on is still supply constrained for the immediate future and holds its value.

Detroit got rid of sedans because they weren't making enough margin (note, not "weren't profitable," just not enough margin). If anyone thinks the likes of e.g. Dell are going to actively subsidize their client business from enterprise margins, I cannot imagine that they are native to this reality.

We're extending our lifecycles in an attempt to protect ourselves from the rising costs. It's turns out that while some people can absorb their infrastructure cost increasing by a factor of four, most people can't.

More recent guidance we have says that 2028 is going to be worse in terms of pricing than 2026 was. I'm not going to be surprised if, another five years from now, ten-year-old clients (not to mention servers, storage, switches) are the norm in a corporate environment rather than the exception.

I said Darth Cheeto's executive orders were less rooted in law than what's come before and you think I support him? WTF? I said your statement supported the position you were replying to. That's not support, that's telling you you're supporting something almost, though not quite, as bad.

For the rest, I am pro-immigration (even asylum) but anti-unlawful immigration. I don't hold against people that they want better lives and will use any excuse to obtain them, but I do hold against people when they are responsible for upholding the law and not only fail to do so but subvert it (and then claim that they had nothing to do with creating the crisis). Yes, I hold that against both parties equally, and yes, that applies to where we are in terms of the economy, Iran, etc. I am not being partisan here.

"We couldn't get a law through congress so we did something questionably legal via executive order" is reinforcing the point being made by the grandparent (which, FWIW, I don't fully agree with. Many of Trump's executive orders are clearly less rooted in law than what's come before).

By the way, funny that you mention Sen. Kennedy in the context of immigration reform, who rather famously said: "This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forth an amnesty bill like this." Yet here we are.

Washington Irving? Ambrose Bierce? Mark Twain?

Careful, you'll have terrified mathematicians crying about pathological monsters.

Same experience for me. I remember a slow day in the office back in 99 or 2000 (we'd just shipped a release) we got into an argument about typing speeds so set up typing tests for the whole team. My "my fingers never actually sit on the home keys, my hands relocate from time to time, and most of my typing is with three or four fingers and a thumb" ass clocked over 100wpm to the incredulity of the rest of the team.

Natural keyboards feel decidedly unnatural to me, because my hands always want to be somewhere they don't fit.

I have. Generally fall into two buckets: the ones that did everything themselves and learned, or the ones that only have a school education. The former generally know what they're talking about, the latter often have huge gaps in their knowledge. But that's true of the devs I interview, too, so I wouldn't place that stigma on the windows admins.

"Met" as in face to face? No, not really, but I've been on a lot of phone calls with the men who do the needful. Again, this ain't a windows thing.