Heat Rays - >Tanning Lotion -> automatic rifle frying

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

I am going to make a dangerous assumption and assume that does not mean "we think we should use the written word to train our LLM" as that isn't actually anything that requires consensus. So presumably, the "team" discussion was about how to acquire said books. That the "consensus" answer was "through shadow libraries" sounds an awful lot like "conspiracy to commit commercial copyright infringement" and appears to be a rather shortsighted argument to be making.

Wait, "some other company" can replace Falcon in "a few years" but everyone is "20 years behind" a design that has only been under active development since late 2018? Your math ain't mathing, dude.

Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

Does this mean the State takes over?

Which is pretty funny, since the only major difference between the two these days is "Is Google spying on you, or is Microsoft?"

[exploding cement truck guy explains that yes, you can polish a turd but why would you?]

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.