Don't you have to roll trucks more frequently for copper though?

It looks like the OPEX for FTTH vs Copper broadband is actually quite a bit lower.

This has to do with better basic reliability of FTTH vs Copper, and possibly some energy and field equipment savings.

Anyone in the industry actually know?

So It sounds like if Comcast had invested more in FTTH upgrades (high CAPEX), they'd now be enjoying the lower OPEX that their competitors are theoretically enjoying.

Upgrading infrastructure to FTTH is high CAPEX, but there's usually federal money to help with that in the US, and, there are always very favorable tax and accounting rules for CAPEX spending.

It looks like Comcast's problem is that they are irrationally married to an outdated business model and outdated technology. If they get priced out of the market, "the system worked"

it could also be price anchoring. they could know the price is BS but they are anchoring something unrealistic now to help later.

if we spend the next 2 years thinking the next xbox is going to be $1800, when it launches for $999, some people will be overjoyed at the great deal they are getting.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

but their concerns were ultimately proven correct, over and over.

there were significant LPEs in other OSes that were exploitable because of kernel lock bugs and race conditions.

and since the smp days, entire new classes of bug (eg info disclosure because of observable side effect bugs in cpus w parallel speculative execution) have also been invented as new processor architecture features have become common.

concurrency is still hard, 30 years later.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

Take absolutely any business.

Add "instant, real support by competent Americans"

Loudly proclaim that your customer service is based on this. Make it a credible promise.

Charge x% more than your competitors.

Congratulations: you have a small, lucrative share of the market cornered. You also have a Moat that is AI resistant.

I only ever contact "customer support" when the company has fucked up and I can accurately explain how and I cannot fix their problem my self.

But Increasingly companies have simply removed any mechanism by which you can contact a human with agency. You are subjected to chatbot humiliation loops until you give up. If they give you phone number, you are on hold, or hung up on, or transferred until you give up.

Latest example: For the last 24 hours, an Azure portal blade that my team uses has been completely non-functional, with a knockout-js error in the Azure portal code.

Their own AI-troubleshooting thing says there is no problem with Azure. [they shipped the org chart, again].

Because we don't have a paid support contract to go with our paid cloud shit, there is no way for me to tell Microsoft there is a problem with the service we buy from them. The AI says there's no problem. Without a paid support contract, there's no "plan B".

(Technically, I can also write a forum post, if I agree to getting data mined and spammed forever. During the signup process, I tried changing my country to Germany, and the automatic opt-in changed to manual opt-in, but the continue button was blocked until I "opted in")

The enshittification is preposterous, and there are a class of people out there who will pay more - sometimes MUCH more - to not be humiliated by incompetence.

Those customers are out there, but where are the companies who want them?

The gutter is filled with thousands of crowns.... waiting for the next king to simply pick one up.

>hurting brown people

This _probalby_ wont get through your confirmation bias filter, but if you look at who trump is giving _pardons_ to, i think the leading groups are:

> jews
> blacks

I don't think white Boomers (never mind white 2A supporters) even register.... with the possible exception of releasing some J6 prisoners.

A lot of the people you dislike, because of who they dislike, and who supported Trump, are pretty upset about all of the "pandering" Trump does to criminal blacks.

So if he's supposed to be a white supremacist president, the majority of white supremacists don't seem to agree.

Most people cannot actually see things from outside of their bias filters.

(ironically enough, Stephen Miller, the main mouthpeice of Trump's "racist" immigration policies, is Jewish... again, much to the consternation of many pro-white Trump supporters)

Obviously, the majority of ammosexual 2a supporters view what ANTIFA, BLM, and anti-ICE protesters are doing as much worse than what the Trump admin is doing.

It turns out that almost nobody is against authoritarian violence per-se. Everyone just wants it done to their enemies instead of themselves.

If they can be simpler, why not scale them to the size of a current reactor and reap all the benefits? What's in them that necessarily only works at the small scale?

The number of people within FedGov who have heard of DeepSeek is small. The number who could tell you why it might be better than some other model at some specific task is much smaller.

The number who could want to use deepseek for a valid reason is vanishingly small.

One thing that should be abundantly clear is that the Trump admin doesn't control everything in the executive branch. There is still significant employee resistance to Trump and anything construed as a trump edict or trump agenda.

There's no evidence the administration is afraid of smart people.

There is substantial evidence that people within the executive branch have attempted to undermine or simply ignore Trump's directives.

Banning use of Chinese AI in fedgov makes sense to me; similar to banning use of certain chinese cellphones for fedgov use. Doesn't matter if they are better. What matters is the high liklihood of foreign systems being used in espionage.

It may be that the "ban" isn't prima-facie about limiting the use of deepseek, but, announcing a policy and then firing-for-cause people who choose to violate it.

They didn't support SMP for a long time either.

OpenBSD tends to lag behind most OSes in "workstation quality of life" features, whereas they tend to be world-leading on unambiguous specs, and code correctness. (And man pages, IMO)

Their excellent security reputation is well deserved, and is downstream of their priorities... which I would describe as "skeptical of shiny new things with ambiguous semantics"

SMRs are not simpler. They are reactors, the same as the large ones. They have all the same features. They are safer only in the sense that if they go bonkers, there is less to actually go defective. They are scalable in the same sense than larger reactors are. Most of the large ones are in plants with several of them, which means they were scaled. And the last one is unproven, as they are neither built nor deployed yet.

On the other hand, they have more surface which can catch stray neutrons for the same amount of power, because they are smaller, and you need more of them. That means more material gets contaminated and has to regularly get replaced because it degrades over time. If they operate at the same pressure, you need the same thickness of the walls, but with smaller diameter, you need more material per volume. They need the same amount of shielding per nuclear source to get the same protection level, but you need more of them, because you have more but smaller nuclear sources.

I've been to something which could be called an SMR. It was a scaled down nuclear reactor built in the 1970ies for studies and reactor experiments. It was 25 meters high, and it had a diameter of 6 meters. And its power output was 2 Watts. No. Not 2 kW or even 2 MW. 2 Watts. Enough to light a single LED lamp. Actually, it was designed to withstand 1000 Watts of power output, because that was the theoretical maximum the uranium-vinyl-pellets to feed the reactor could create when going critical. But even then... a 1 kW engine the size of a large grain silo.

This is the most important part. Right now, X-Energy is pure vaporware. And yes, I know, all reactor designs are essentially vaporware, because their task is to heat water to turn it into vapor. But this is vapor-vapor. The time line calls for 12 small reactors to be ready by 2039, each rated 80 MW. And the previous project, as mentioned, was already set up 2 years ago, and not a single foundation has been poured yet.

This is one of those incubator projects. Amazon is investing and probably betting on a 30% chance that this will ever bear fruit. Or a 10% chance. I don't know Amazon's calculation. But this project does not mean that any of those 16 reactors (4 previously, 12 now) will ever come into existence. But if they would, Amazon had an edge on powering data centers. So they think it's worth the risk.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.