Competition?

The headline should read "Microsoft to replace one TSMC chip with different TSMC chip."

Caesar cipher is best cipher!

I assumed that they're dividing the entire cost of creating, testing, packaging and delivering updates by the number of GB distributed. ISP fees would be a tiny fraction of that.

Why would anyone calculate such a silly metric in the first place? It sounds to me like the kind of thing an accountant would think up.

I don't think anybody in government is sitting there thinking about the "purpose of civilization". Sure, they all took political science in school, and to the extent that they realize that governing is compromise, and any government is better than anarchy, I suppose they might have given it a bit of thought in the past. But they mostly just work to get elected next time. All of their actions, and mostly just their words, are always in support of that one goal. "How many votes can I gain by saying this, and how many will I lose by saying it?" If X > Y, then say it. People like their phones, and the companies give lots of political donations, and that means it's a no-brainer to let it be. The only time something like this gets on their radar is if a public health expert or advocacy group rallies enough concerned individuals and shows that this is an important enough issue that they're willing to vote based on it.

... I'll go read that book I've been meaning to read for a while.

If LLM-powered coding is going so well, where are the productivity stats to back it up? Where are the open source projects that are rapidly adding functionality to meet the feature-sets of their closed-source competitors? Answer: they don't exist. It's almost all hype.

That is, of course, incorrect. It stands for the Really Terrible Orchestra, a British amateur orchestra.

Certainly it's better to own assets than cash (due to depreciation), and best to own revenue-generating assets. However, the appropriate value you should pay for a company is the net present value of all future earnings, discounted at a reasonable annual percentage rate. And NVidia and the titans are the ones that are over-valued. Coca-cola or Johnson & Johnson are probably still a reasonable investment that will withstand any significant market crashes.

I can't believe you have to ask.

I remember in the late 90's before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly over-valued by the same metrics that say it's over-valued now, and people literally said to me, "no, this is just the way the new economy works. Technology has greatly increased the rate of real growth and the market prices are just reflecting that." Then it crashed. Technology did end up causing growth, at about the same rates we'd seen historically over the long periods of time. Don't buy the AI hype. At best it's a marginally better search engine.

Look, I'm left of center, and I'm not even American. But you aren't helping. Did you agree with all of Biden or Obama's policies or everything they said? If you did you'd be very rare indeed. The people on the right have various opinions. Many of the ones who swung the election towards Trump did it because they view one single issue, like affordability or immigration, to be the one thing they're mainly concerned about, and it was more about the democrats having not done enough to address those specific issues over the previous 4 years. You can't paint half the country with that wide of a brush. There are lots of people on the right that aren't very happy about what Trump is saying or doing, but they maybe just don't trust the dems to do the right thing either. I've also heard a lot of people more liberal than me say, "It's not that I even disagree with some of the stuff Trump is doing; it's how he's going about it." Opinions vary widely within both "sides".

If you don't want the left to be judged by the craziest screaming radicals on the left, then don't judge all of the right by the crazy wack-a-doodles on the right. It's just a straw-man argument. Both the dems and the republicans are massive coalitions of many different groups and make up millions of people. If you're a reasonable liberal you almost certainly have more opinions in common with a reasonable conservative than either of you do with the radical elements of your own parties. Though with that comment I'd hardly consider you reasonable.

It's not just news organizations. Trust in all institutions has been falling for a while. That includes things like the CDC, police services, and even global organizations like the WHO, etc. In my opinion the organizations partly brought this on themselves. A good example is that during the pandemic there was a very public discussion that was had about what messaging to give to the public. The idea was that the public isn't smart enough to understand that N95 masks are very good, cloth masks perform quite poorly, and surgical masks are somewhere in between. The confounding factor was that we didn't have enough N95 and even surgical masks. News organizations reported on lists of "42 studies" that showed the effectiveness of masks. Yeah, I actually went and looked at those studies and all the evidence was very weak in terms of supporting *cloth* masks. But here's the thing... they had this discussion about what the tell the public in full view of the public, as if we weren't listening. You can't do that and maintain trust. The only discussion you can have in full view of the public is "what should we tell everyone? THE TRUTH!" Manipulating your message to control behavior instead of just to inform is a really bad idea. We can all see the media and other institutions doing it constantly now and we're sick of it.

This is another great example of "women in STEM". She sets a wonderful example. Put her all over the cover of Time and People Magazine.

I can't believe you're defending a person who fabricated documentation to dupe investors into believing there were over 10 times as many users as there really were. You're just trying to twist this into a populist narrative ("the people vs. the elites"). I know that's fashionable these days, and is what Trump is an expert at selling, and the dems *used)* to be good at selling, but the reality is always more nuanced than this simplistic idea.