SlowTao

Demand is up and supply is increasingly getting more costly. Ripe conditions for this kind of behavior.

When it comes to a lot of metals it is kind of amazing how some of the biggest mines of this stuff are some of the oldest. It makes sense as we go for the low hanging fruit first and they are the biggest deposits.

Alas, as an aggregate, the ratio of overburden on mining has been going up for almost a century now and it is starting to catch up in some materials. Copper, nickle being a big two. Iron... not so much. So far we have managed to 'Red queen' ourselves out of the situation by throwing massive amount of resources (mostly energy), but one does wonder what happens if we even hit an energy plateau. Many have speculated, most are wrong, time will tell.

Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.

About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.

What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.

Here in southern Australia we would endlessly see this one guy with his broken down leaf on the side of the road. If I recall it was one of the very first generation models and they did not handle our summers well at all. To be fair to Nissan a lot of their issues did get resolved in come generations but it was funny to see that, yeah, they didn't do too great on those first few rounds.

As to your Tesla *. I do endless tire of folks who are like "But what if you want to circle the planet!?! Check mate EV dorks!". For 99% of the time they are absolutely fine.

A friend of mine had one as a work car and drove the 940km (580 miles)from Melbourne to Sydney with only a single charge up of $20 half way through, got lunch at the same time. I mean yes if you really stretch it, you could do it on a single tank of fuel on a combustion engine but it would be a tight run. Also to the recharge time, that drive takes about 9 hours if you do not stop. I have never done it in less than 12 hours because you end up having a lot of down time on trips like that. There is plenty of time to charge if needed. Like you say, for the most part these are solved issues.

That was my first though. While not legal precedent, it does sort of open the flood gates for others.

They have been playing the long game for decades, the speed up in recent times feels like they realised the windows was closing and they need to lock things down before many wise up.

I am still endlessly fascinated by how modern GPUs can handle stuff like UE5, raytraced lumin (whatever) but still struggle to do 2D rendering. I mean I get it logically, but it just feels so disconnected.

Always neat to see this kind of stuff however. Very cool.

I mean, it is a hard line elimination diet. If you watch what happens with reintroduction, you can provably figure out where the issues are.

When it comes to physical exercise, this is the key fundamental one. Yes, others things help but it is the foundation on which everything else rests.

Alas, it can be taken away without choice, hopefully not.

While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.

Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.

It is 7:29am here and already this is enough internet for the day.

I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.

The last good place is https://neal.fun

Can compile the kernel at record speed! Fan speed support... nope!

Always to option to fork it. Linux Legacy? Linux 32? Linux grey beard!

I think the big thing was Steve did make a lot of great decisions, some of the best the company could at that time in those respective fields but completely missed on everything that Apple did. Portable media players, smart phones and tablets and those are the three huge misses and that is really were it counted.

The old three envelope joke.

You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".

I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had.

Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.

Completely agree. This is a general issue with technology in general, if someone uses a new technology to their advantage and at your disadvantage, you are essentially forced to adopt said technology just to keep up. In that sense a lot of technological change isn't voluntary. This also explains why a lot of open source/proprietary software is always chasing each other to keep up.

Bingo. They may not be as fast or feature complete but they do work.

I think it is more a case of, at least provide the option to have another OS. Chances are that nobody else will be able to make it work but having it closed off before even getting a chance to try feels a little unfair to those that buy the hardware.

That is a fair point, this is a similar issue that Libre-boot went through a few years back. Yes, you try to stick clear of binary blobs as much as possible but at a certain point you just run out of hardware that meets that criteria.

How long until they produce an generative AI version of Burt Newton to do new episodes of 20 to 1 based on some social media slop?

Yep, not a great time line here.

Yep, here in Australia the social media age restriction was pushed through by both sides. Two sides of the same coin.

I think both sides of this are fair. Power is interested in stability of itself, to keeps its back to the wall so that nobody can sneak up on it. But also political power has teamed up with corporate power/determination to create a far more nasty beast.

Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.

Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.

It was David Graeber that said we should be wary of places like The Guardian. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Used a lot of the more liberal momentum of the early 2010s combined with promoting some of the more left leaning writters to gain a fair bit of clout. But underneath, they will conform to the power structures if it comes down to survival. Alas, they nay not be a Sealand edition although that would be neat.

In oz personally and yes, I warned folks of this a few years back, especially in the 12 months or so. Every time I was met with a fair bit of push back.

They would argue back on technical merits, I was talking political, a politics doesn't give a damn about the tech. We have slowly been going down this path for a while now.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” - PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.

That is also happening in Manhattan/greater new York. The land is still rebounding from the ice age and the coasts happen to be at the point where they will slowly sink. Ocean level rise is also an issue but the base geology accelerates the issue in those locations

You are right. I was far to reductionist there.

"No wars have been more ruthless and ravaging than “just” wars, fought in “defense” of religion, honor, or principle. If war must be, give me rather a war to capture an enemy’s wealth and territory, based on honest greed, in which I shall be careful not to destroy what I want to possess. " - Alan Watts

I have said that their benchmark to power a desktop with Google Maps in 3D. Anything beyond that was a bonus.

Reminds me of the desktop/server processor space in the late 90's. At least this time we have a dozen vendors that are all using ARM instead of x86/POWER/DEC Aplha/MIPS/IA-64 & ARM. More chance of surviving together rather than making multiple moats.

Intel dropping the XScale ARM was the beginning of the end. Their iGPU's where fine so long as the peak of usage was google Earth/Maps. But it was wildly under supported and they ended up missing the boat, that could go for a lot of their products.