Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world

I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.

AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.

Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.

. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need

Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Sure you can, today, and this is why:

So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .

Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.

Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?

Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.

I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.

“Pagan” is a very broad term, and I could see a form of athesist paganism developing. Nature exists, and you can start with that. Rituals would be purely an expression of appreciation for the natural world around us.

Plus, you have an excuse to run around naked in the woods. Which is the actual goal here.

I’m questioning the morality of the god that cares about high school football games more than starving children.

I don’t like brick houses.

People used to care a lot. The GNU utils absorbed everything all the old Unix vendors did. This made them comparatively heafty back when a high end workstations might have had 64MB of RAM.

Now that Chrome takes up gigabytes per tab, nobody cares except a few old Unix curmudgeons.

Meh. It’s a nice bragging right, but that’s all it is at this point. Linux killed off almost all the old Unix vendors for a reason.

The stock portion is reduced, yes, but there’s almost always some kind of mix of stocks in the portfolio. That’s not necessarily the main issue.

First, you may not get to choose the timing. A lot of older people got trapped in the 2008 downturn. They were planning on retiring a few years out, but they lost their jobs and never got them back. Not only was their portfolio unprepared just based on when they planned to retire, but also the stock crash killed a chunk of what they had. Double wammy of losing their job and destroying their portfolio.

Second, inflation hits hard. If there’s a period of high inflation right when you retire, that can really hurt your savings regardless of how it’s distributed. One of the things those forced 2008 retirees had going for them was that we had a period of relatively low inflation for the next decade. If you took out housing (older people often own their home outright), inflation was sometimes negative.

Capitalism, even when it generally makes line go up, does so in a spiky way. Those spikes cause problems that tend to hit the working class the hardest. Sometimes in ways that cannot be recovered.

There are some liberal economists, particularly of a Modern Monetary Theory bent, who do argue for policies that would flatten growth in return for predictability. Capitalism always goes for the sugar rush of high gains, though. For example, the Fed left rates at rock bottom for far too long, thus letting the market continue extremely high gains (over 20% per year of the sp500, when 7% is a typical long term average). Likewise, you have corps chasing high profits and assuming post pandemic pent up demand would continue indefinitely. Which is now leading to layoffs while major stockholders continue to sweep it in. Both of these lead to the recent high inflation.

I think the efforts to flatten it out are doomed. Capitalism can’t solve its own problems.

What terrible timing. The customers are increasingly suspicious of anything even labeled AI. Investors are pushing this, but even they are starting to get cold feet. It only makes sense if they can sell it, and they increasingly can’t sell it.

What terrible timing. The customers are increasingly suspicious of anything even labeled AI. Investors are pushing this, but even they are starting to get cold feet. It only makes sense if they can sell it, and they increasingly can’t sell it.

Right, and there are tons of other ways that companies run better when workers are empowered to initiate changes. There are a few companies that manage to do this on their own, but most that get there do it because the union forced the issue.

They’re totally boinking.

https://images.news18.com/ibnlive/uploads/2024/09/untitled-design-1-2024-09-3b79e69a08db5ea51eb7638a220cebab.png?impolicy=website&width=640&height=480

Body language like that doesn’t happen in purely professional relationships.

The old plan was that you’d have three things in retirement: Social Security, a corporate pension, and a 401k. Each of these has problems, but if any one of them fails, then the other two are still there to provide enough.

Problem is, pensions have all but disappeared, Social Security gets fucked with, and 401k’s are highly dependent on market conditions at the time you retire.

Inflation is a basket of goods. Yes, you can pick out specific things that are rising faster than overall inflation, but people don’t buy just those.

There have been alternative means of measuring inflation, such as the old Billion Prices Project (stopped in 2016) or the Penn State ACY index:

https://sites.psu.edu/inflation/

In practice, they tend to track CPI fairly close.

Han shot at the same time.

Electronics usually wants to control the temperature range more tightly than a butane soldering iron could do. Fine for plumbing work, though. Electronics soldering irons usually don’t have the thermal mass to handle plumbing work.

My biggest complaint about the ts100, Pinecil, and the iFixit station is that the tips are specialized and rather expensive.

I have a ts100, and the barrel plug is loose enough that it sometimes disconnects in the middle of working and loses its temperature setting. Got a Pinecil to replace it, but haven’t used it much yet.

Firmware was always there in a soldering iron more sophisticated than an old, dumb Radio Shack wall plug iron. That’s how you get good temperature control. Pinecil is just letting you modify it officially.

How precise are you talking? Usually, cheaper soldering stations get that way by not having a lot of thermal mass, which is particularly needed for desoldering. Otherwise, the PID control tends to keep things good enough. Tuning the PID parameters can make a difference, but once you have a heater and a heat sensor, the software is more or less the same for everyone.

You’re probably adding $25-35 to that for a USB-C power supply that can handle it, but yes, it’s cheaper than this. $50-75 if you want it battery powered.

But yeah, I’m not sure what iFixit is bringing to the market that’s better than what exists.