ColdStream

Credit to him, he always had a bold take.

One of the funniest things he used to do was write draft reviews of software simply by looking at the back of the box. He said you could get it like 90% right just doing that, I was a different era.

I also remember Leo Laporte constantly trying to take his phone back of him as John was trying to guess his passcode or unlock pattern based on the screen smudges.

Didn't agree with him at lot but he always brought something to the table.

It has been said many times before, who is going to pay for the massive build out before those who invested want to see their returns?

LLM stuff is pretty cool but that doesn't mean it could scale up economically at the desired time frame.

I believe the idea was called 'The Fuzzy golf ball' where eventually computer chips will look like a fuzzy golf ball for all the interconnects and stacked silicon. And Huawie are on the way! Ok, not really.

The complexity of doing this stuff is impressive and one has to wonder how many folds that can be done and it still being worth while.

The other thing is that this can eventually work on much smaller nodes, it won't be exclusive to Huawie forever.

It was the writers of TV comedy series SCTV (Second City TV) that noted how they had used to write and film the show sometimes up to 6 months in advance of it being screened. This forced them to avoid any recent events or specific political jokes. As such a lot of it aged much better than their contemporaries where the jokes applied to the current news cycle.

The one time I find funny was on the show 'The Golden Girls' where they had Bob Hope do about 2 minutes of his stand up and it was all jokes about Ronald Reagan and the administration of the time. It aged terribly.

Movies and the technology they use needs to have the eye of an artist not just an eye of how to use it. I mean the visual effects can be technically low level but when used in the right context still work exceptionally well. The Abyss being the best example of this, CGI is only used on a creature that is completely alien and doesn't conform to anything real world and that is why it works. But I could render it faster on my watch than the systems they built it on.

I have said it for a while now, Google is the one to watch out for in this space because of all those reasons. They have the biggest search data base, the hardware skills and one of the longest runways in the industry in terms of cash, they are the most likely to ride this out to a profitable situation.

A large part of MAGA is that sense of being contrarian to cultural norms. In an odd way, being an outsider proves that you are above the normal influences of culture and thus are more in control and thus have a higher social status.

In the same way that you have people that need to be in the top 1%-10% of fitness, it is a social signal that you have over come the social norms and influences of food culture and that you have capabilities above 'the average'.

The Tate's are just another example of this. They have that sort of teenage angst edgy anti-everything 'normie' and that gets them an audience of being outsiders. If you want a sector of people to become attracted to something, make it a taboo. The thrill of it being the naughty thing really engages some folks, in the same way Weed culture was a taboo so it had a specific range of people that gravitated to it.

But once the taboo is gone, a lot of supporters just drift to he next thing, but there is a real risk of the true believers continuing on afterwards.

Not just that memory shrinks slower, it has practically completely stalled. On chip cache seems stuck at 7nm and DRAM is stuck at 10nm. As transistors shrink, they hold less charge, creating weaker signals that are harder to read and prone to interference. Smaller nodes aren't a huge issue on CPU/GPU work load because they don't have to hold a static state.

I'm not saying we are at peak memory but future gains are going to come increasingly slower.

Pretty much. Nvidia has always been pretty decent at giving away software that is deeply dependent on their hardware.

Could do alright in Australia and the UK for about 6 months of the year as well. ;)

Unfortunately, the camera is the one place they always cut very hard. It gets to the point that it would probably best to have nothing at all.

I don't want to justify the space too much, but things like the Uber app are kind of amazing.

While the base functionality is fairly simple in terms of find location > send car + all the courier and different varieties of what they do. It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application.

That is pretty neat.

Yes, it is still very bloated but it does a lot more than what it initially looks like.

But yes, I am endless impressed when you come across a binary that is tiny. Like a text editor that is 14KB, sure it is simply but it doesn't need to be anything more for most people.

It has been argued that Sam Simons was the one that really honed in the characters of The Simpsons. Groening would throw out all kinds of weird ideas, like Marge was secretly a rabbit (thus the high hair), but Simons kept grounding the characters back into a form of reality.

... you know what, lets just call it a draw and play nice.

I do like the idea of focused intentional hardware. Yes, it doesn't have the convenience of smart phones but it doesn't mean you have to give them up just to have a digital camera. Both have their place.

I also really like the image quality on a lot of dedicated digital cams, I suspect it is because they don't have to have the sensor and lens crushed into a 9mm thick device. That can do a lot more for image quality.

Fantastic news! Always good to see others manage achieve great things.

This was one of my main issues with the Biden administration. They approved approved over 13,000 oil and gas drilling permits in a single term, about 4,000 more than Trump did during his first term.

Liked to say one thing and do another. Get the feeling they would have loved to point that out during the election period but that would have alienated half their potential voters.

I get that a lot of politicians will try to put a positive image forward, but that was a bit rich.

Would still prefer that kind of stability over whatever we have now.

Pretty much. I have been involved with the much more true to heart environmentalist for decades now and they are basically of the opinion that the most viable path is to preemptively prepare for when various systems start to break.

This is why things like the Dark Mountain project came about - https://dark-mountain.net/about/

This idea is to be like serotinous plants. Seeds and cones that can only open up when the fires come through to melt the resin that holds them shut. In a way this is what the Solar punk movement is all about. Depict, advocate and produce futures that will out last the 'line goes up' society.

Just because we wants something doesn't mean we can have it, or at least not at a price we will accept.

Time do get out the old CD of The.Matrix.1999-DVDrip(aXXo).Xvid.

Pretty much. 1080p it very good, 4K is near perfect to me. By the time you can see the pixels you are WAY too close to the screen.

Very likely, look at JPEG. It was released in 1992 and it is still wildly popular on line.

Fascinating! I don't know enough about the field to really weigh in on it but it does seem intuitive that some of this could cause cumulative issues.

Typically you balance out CO2 excess with phosphorus/calcium, so again, seems intuitive.

But a lot of things that are intuitive can be completely wrong because of something one can be ignorant of. Time shall tell.

Not OP but it looks like compassionate 'whataboutism'. The idea that, yes the data centers are bad but there is a much broader issue with the economic system involving the extraction, processing and burning of tarsands.

But it shouldn't be a case of lets do A or B, but A and B.

They aren't wrong but I can see how it can be seen as trying to undermine an argument.

This is a key part of the game theory behind this predicament.

Can we pay our way out of it? If we could it would be to direct our actions towards things like nature restoration rather than anything that could directly increase consumption. In fact it would actively decrease production and reduce consumption by sucking direct resources out of the market economy. Yes, you are being paid to fix some problems but also pulling our of manufacturing thus increasing the prices of almost everything you purchase.

But that is a part of the idea behind planned degrowth. Use the system to actively scale down consumption before ecological and resource constraint blow back forces it. Better to be proactive than reactive.

I do agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't' just sit back and go "Well its done now!". It is better to try than to do nothing at all.

But when it comes to climate action it really seems like scale and latency has really hidden the full scale of the issue.

It is so big that few if any people really comprehend the hyper object and the systemic nature of it. It is so slow to show up direct results that most can ignore it short term.

I have said that the right lives in denial and the left lives in delusion. The right say it isn't at thing or it isn't a big issue. The left tend to seek technical solutions that aren't all that. Near me is a mural of Greta Thunberg that was put up in 2020, it calls for "Net zero by 2025." that was never going to happen on a time scale like that.

As for the Republicans changing the tastes of the world, unfortunately the one thing that Trump has done very well the last decade is burn through any sense of trust of the nation. Regardless of everything else, trust is the one resource you do not want to run out of, it is the foundation on which everything else sits.

Yes, but open source will never work!!!

That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.

I think it is more an attempt at a difficult task. Easy to pickup the basics but having lots of room to grow.

Recently thanks to Modern Vintage Gamer on youtube, there has been a push to see if you could get Doom to run on the NeoGeo. Because of its very unique hardware (no framebuffer) it is a very unqiue and tough task.

And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxhuKTltsk

This is something that doesn't have any real economic value but many are more than happy to see happen.

Itanium is yet another example of how difficult it is to fight software ecosystem momentum.

It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.

Alas, a lot of people have always preferred a comfortable lie than an uncomfortable truth.