As far as I can tell nobody really has any consistent idea what "kill switch" is supposed to mean. Eg. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican...

OpenAI and Anthropic already have kill switches, from the power cord through to account bans. If they don't want anyone using their model they can do that. Likewise, if the US government is sufficiently motivated to order a service provider to stop providing that service, they can absolutely do that. I get the feeling the actual companies are hoping they can implement something that has lots of buzzwords and does sort of what their "guard rails" do, and everyone will stop bugging them about it.

Naturally the FSF imagines some hypothetical technology that allows the government to reach into your home to shut off the matrix multiplies running on your own computer.

Excellent pedantism sir!

Not everyone shares your personal passtimes.

Technology isn't really the problem. We've got most or all the technology to do what the GP suggested. What we lack are engineering experience, infrastructure and good economic reasons to do it.

Europe had all the technology required to build a casino in the Nevada desert in the 16th century, but it took four hundred years to get around to building the first one in Las Vegas.

There's lots of desert where nobody really cares what you do, and even more ocean. We don't like building in those places because they're far away from where we want to use the services, difficult and expensive to access, and have issues with cooling, power supply, etc.

But all those problems are worse in space, and you generally need to rebuild your entire infrastructure, from power plant to GPU, every five years or so.

There's also nothing about "AI agent" that says "fully autonomous" but that shouldn't get in the way of wild speculation and some good pedantism.

Yeah, "very". They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after.

No, wait, that isn't how it works, is it?

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though.

Yeah, because Linux totally doesn't have any files or folders that you have to give special permission for programs to alter.

Teams crashes reliably whenever I start video on my laptop. I haven't noticed this very valuable feature in any other similar program so they're clearly inferior to Teams.

I will point out that celebrities typically buy coastal houses on bluffs overlooking the ocean

Bluffs aren't a great place. They collapse.

Using celebrity behaviour as a gauge is also not a great idea. They do all sorts of stupid shit. When a celebrity buys a multi-million dollar house on a beach or a bluff they're thinking "this is cool, let's party" not "is this a secure asset I'll be able to pass down to my children."

That's how it normally works. The subprime mortgage thing happened because banks discovered they could make those risky loans and then sell them to other people for a good price by disguising how risky they were by packaging them up and selling them as securities.

Which is kind of ironic considering the OP's comment about banks still providing mortgages for coastal properties. Apparently they're selling them more and more to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation which... packages them up and sells them as mortgage backed securities.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F0...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insurancebusinessm...

What DRAM fab do you think has unsold capacity?

There isn't really any such thing as a DRAM fab. You can make DRAM at pretty much any of them, including the one in that guy's shed. There are some that specialize in DRAM. They all have unsold capacity, DRAM-specialist or not. The typical lead time is apparently about 18 months. The DRAM manufacturers (including in this story) keep saying they're "virtually" booked up for the next year. So you can call them up and schedule a run in a year, or 18 months, or maybe next week depending on what "virtually" means.

The OP is claiming that memory fabrication is "worse than OPEC" because nobody else can make memory. This is obviously not true. Intel is contemplating it. Many memory manufacturers have started up in the past. Most have gone bankrupt or been acquired. The limitation is that nobody wants to go completely nuts building new fabs that are very likely to be under utilized two, three or five years from now. So they're "only" increasing capacity at 20% per year. For context, world oil production capacity increases by a couple of percent a year and refining capacity, which is capital intensive like chip fabrication, by more like 0.5-1%.

DRAM is a commodity in both the actual sense (the stuff from different sources is pretty much interchangeable) and the sense you've described. You, literally you, can ring up someone who runs a contract fab and ask them to make you some DRAM. It's pretty straightfoward stuff. Here's a YouTuber making some in his garage: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F....

There are a bunch of boutique DRAM producers. They're small scale and do specialty stuff (the actual high end DRAM). The commodity stuff you want to buy is dominated by a few companies that are vertically integrated, super efficient and make their money on massive volume. They also switch around a fair bit because during booms like this one making memory seems like a great idea, but then there's a bust and half of them go broke. SK Hynix alone started out as Hyundai, merged with LG's memory unit, got booted out of Hyundai during a bust, got bought by a conglomerate, bought out Intel's memory unit, and is currently a major producer.

But hey, it's boom time so Intel's talking about making memory again, CXMT is firing up and the majors are all building new fabs as quickly as they can borrow the money to pay for them.

A general named Randy George would normally be a good influence in Hegseth's army but the guy wanted to know why Apache helicopters were buzzing Kid Rock's swimming pool, and you just can't tolerate that kind of killjoy.