SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 1 week ago:
Most welcome :)
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 1 week ago:
In some ways yes. Older designs on older nodes use older equipment- less precise, easier to build. There’s actually a lot of PC builders who are building machines on DDR4 mainboards because the memory is more affordable. A couple of DDR4 mainboards have been ‘un-discontinued’ as a result.
For a desktop or laptop PC, the difference of DDR4 to DDR5 often doesn’t make a huge difference. So you get a last-gen chipset and RAM and you get a decent machine without paying $thousands extra.
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 1 week ago:
Most welcome :)
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 1 week ago:
No they can’t. Building a fab costs $10-20 billion and takes 2-4 years. And that’s assuming you have the people, the expertise, and the IP to be able to produce memory in your new fab.
Now Valve is privately held, 50+% owned by GabeN, so real numbers aren’t public. But it’s estimated to be worth around $20-40 billion. That’s why he can afford to spend his time driving around on yachts and submarines. That means if Valve wanted to, they might be able to get into the business.
But from a business POV, it’d be a HUGE risk. You’re betting basically half the company that you can go in with ZERO experience in semiconductor manufacturing and start making top tier memory, AND that by the time you can bring it to market there’ll still be any demand for it. That’s a BIG risk. And given that they’re making money hand over first selling hardware built by others, it’s not a risk they have any need to take.
- Comment on Valve says there's no end in sight to the memory crisis, and prices are only going to increase: 'Honestly, it's still getting worse' 1 week ago:
The problem is it’s not quite so easy.
If this was making things like cars or toilet paper, where the design and manufacturing methods are well understood, that’s exactly what would happen.
Making computer chips was well understood. You take a slice of single-crystal silicon, dope its surface with something, use a photo mask and a light to etch off the doping where you don’t want it. Repeat that process a few dozen or a few hundred times to etch transistors into the silicon, then slice it up into chips and package them.
Machines that do this are readily available.
The problem is, we made those transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller. And smaller.
Then we ran into problems like how to etch features on the silicon that are smaller than the wavelength of light. And we found solutions to that. And so we made the transistors smaller. And smaller. And smaller.
So now to create a current-gen computer chip, you need a process called EUV- Extreme Ultra Violet. Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, so when you want smaller wavelength to etch smaller features into the chip you eventually go from red to blue to ultraviolet and eventually to extreme ultraviolet. Problem THERE is there’s no EUV bulbs available, and if there were they’d be useless because atmospheric air absorbs EUV, and even if you do it in a vacuum glass absorbs EUV too. So you can only manipulate this light with mirrors, which have to be ground to an insane level of precision.
The resulting machine is quite impressive. You have a giant cavity kept in perfect vacuum. In one side you have an EUV source- that’s a little machine that dispenses a tiny droplet of tin, which as it falls is hit by a laser to blast it into a weird shape, then another much bigger laser that vaporizes it. In the process of vaporizing it releases EUV light. This light is reflected by shaped mirrors carved into the surfaces of the vacuum chamber that reflect and focus the EUV into a linear beam. Below that (also in vacuum) you have the mask and the wafer, and by moving them back and forth while the beam is active you etch features ‘smaller than light’ into the chip.
The result is a chip with current pathways less than 100 silicon atoms wide. And if you want to make current-gen computer memory, that’s the only way we’ve got to build it.
EUV machines are pretty much only made by one company, ASML. They cost a fortune and they’re in insanely high demand. Like I’ve heard of a guy getting hired by a company for over million a year simply because he’s friends with a purchasing manager at ASML and might be able to get the company that hired him a build slot.
And it’s not just buy the machine and hit ‘start’, there’s a ton of other stuff involved.
Bottom line- for a company that already has experience in current-gen chipmaking, setting up a fab like this costs $15-20 billion. And it isn’t just ‘sign a check and come back tomorrow’, the process of building a fab from the project being approved to the first wafer coming off the line is 2-3 years minimum.
Now here’s the bigger problem- semiconductors are always a cyclical market, or at least always have been. Demand (and thus prices) goes up, demand/prices come down. So if you invest $20 billion when prices are high, then in 2-3 years when the cycle is at its low nobody’s gonna be buying your output. And of course, adding more chips to the market will affect market prices (supply and demand). So companies that are building fabs have to look 5-10 years ahead to determine if they’ll get ROI on a fab before they build.
And that brings us to the next issue- with AI, we’re in uncharted territory. The computing market has been pretty well understood since the early 90s. There’s demand for PCs and laptops and servers and gadgets, and it goes up and down and new products come out that changes the mix of what’s ordered, but the cycle more or less continues. Up and down.
Then AI happens. And suddenly we have near-instant, unheard-of levels of demand. And it’s all for current-gen top-shelf stuff- HBM (high bandwidth memory) and GPUs and specialty silicon like NPUs.
Now there are more fabs being built. But it’s also starting to be better understood that AI is a bubble, which almost certainly will pop. So if you’re a DRAM maker and you spend $40 billion building a fleet of new fabs and then the bubble pops, you’re gonna be fucked. That’s why you don’t see everybody+dog diving into the DRAM market face first. - Comment on This Apple Lie at the grocery store 3 weeks ago:
Yeah it’s awful.
I actually found the best peanut butter at a local store. They have a machine that looks like a drink dispenser but it’s full of different kinds of peanuts- you grab a jar and push the button and it grinds the peanuts into peanut butter right there in front of you. Resulting machine looks something like this.
There’s a few different options like plain, honey, spicy, etc. I just get the plain one and stir in some salt when I get home.If you let it sit for a while it separates (the oil comes to the top and solids sink) but you just stir it up and it’s fine.
Funny thing is- flavor is actually a good bit better than most of what you get in the jar. And there’s zero bullshit, just peanuts and salt to taste which are all you need for great peanut butter.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
More like
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sell company to Sony for hugely inflated price promising to be the linchpin of their live service strategy
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have one game that does okay, another game that everybody hates
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leadership bleeds money through a fire hose
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everyone is surprised when this doesn’t work
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- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I wanna know what’s happening with all those finished wafers they bought.
If they aren’t being made into memory modules I think someone should go to jail.
- Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?" 5 weeks ago:
And that is exactly my point.
You think The Expanse would be better if Avasarala was a strong woman leader fighting to make her mark in a male-dominated world? I think not. The whole thing that makes her so great is that she can be herself, by not needing to prove herself worthy she proves herself worthy. Or Bobbie Draper- if she was the GI Jane, struggling to be taken seriously in a male-dominated MMC? No, then the story stops being about a badass woman being badass, and starts being about the men who don’t recognize that badassery. And that’s a MUCH less interesting story. Or Drummer- I’ve not yet read the books but I understand TV-Drummer was a combination of two characters-- after the mutiny on Tycho she’s wounded, someone tries to help her up but she pushes them away, grabs the guys sidearm, blasts the two mutineers, and hobbles off to the infirmary on her own… would that scene be better if someone was saying ‘I guess women can have balls after all’?
No, the way you fight patriarchy, or racism, or homophobia, isn’t to fight patriarchy or racism or homophobia. It’s to show people what happens after patriarchy, racism, and homophobia are defeated, and let people decide that’s the world they want.
The Expanse took great strides to fight a number of prejudices. But never once was it ‘woke’.
- Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?" 5 weeks ago:
due to the complex storytelling of earlier series, there’s a large contingent of the fanbase that didn’t realise their progressive nature, and are objecting to how it’s woke now.
Hard disagree.
People are criticizing 'woke’ness- you’re assuming that’s idiots who don’t want to see progressive storylines but somehow didn’t notice that Uhura was a black officer when it was assumed black people couldn’t do much more than cook and clean.
I think the reality is that people are happy to take progressive storylines, but people strongly resent the specific combination of progressive storylines delivered ham-fisted which one might call ‘wokeness’.
I’m saying that for myself too. I am STRONGLY in favor of inclusion. I have NO problem seeing any race, gender, sexual orientation, etc of character on screen, and I want to see all groups represented fairly.
A great example of that was The Expanse. It’s part of the overall series plot that since humans went to space, former national borders no longer applied much so cultures mixed together. So you get this major disconnection between name ethnicity and physical appearance ethnicity (IE, Japanese guy with a French name, Black character with a Japanese name, etc) and nobody bats an eye. One of the first plots revolves around a man and his husband who are going to retire together and nobody gives a shit they’re gay. Like it’s not even brought up, it’s just ‘me and my husband are going to retire on Mars’ and this is treated as a perfectly normal thing that a man of advanced years would say.
Like myself, I bet you’d find a lot of the same people unhappy at ‘wokeness’ in Trek have NO problem with The Expanse- because it’s not woke, it’s inclusive.
Now full disclosure- I’ve not actually seen any of the new Trek- didn’t have Paramount+ until my partner wanted to watch Landman and nothing I heard about any of the new stuff made it sound like a must-watch. So I’m speaking conceptually on wokeness.
But in my experience, wokeness is pretty much the same no matter who’s writing it or in what venue. It’s NOT the same as inclusion.
BTW- if you haven’t watched The Expanse I highly encourage you to do so…
- Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?" 5 weeks ago:
But that’s just it. Pushing progressive ideas through ham-fisted storytelling is the wokeness people complain about.
It is also when these things are blatant. Original Star Trek was progressive not because it showed a black person’s struggle for equality, it was progressive because it showed black people as equal.
A perfect example is DS9’s lesbian kiss. The short version, Trill are a joined species consisting of a humanoid host with a standard lifespan, combined with a very long-lived symbiote that can live for many host lifetimes. The resulting personality is thus a blend of the host and the symbiote.
In this specific episode, there is a rule in Trill society that if two Trill are romantically involved, that relationship has to end when either of the symbiotes move to a new host. The explanation is otherwise two symbiotes would just stay together forever through multiple hosts and never grow or learn. Anyway, one of the show’s main characters is a Trill female and in this episode encounters another female carrying the symbiote her symbiote was once married to. So this is a forbidden romance they are both tempted to. It’s explained that the previous relationship one of them was in a male host and the other one a female host. Now they are both in female hosts, and this is not brought up even once. The fact that they are both women is not even mentioned. It is completely and totally ignored.THAT is a non-woke progressive presentation of the idea.
It’s not trying to get the audience to empathize with the black person who can’t sit in front of the bus, it’s just showing the black person sitting in front of the bus and making it not a big deal.
- Comment on Supermarkets destroy food if it doesn't sell. We can always feed the world. We just don't. 5 weeks ago:
and having surplus food production capability necessarily leads to food waste.
Nobody is complaining about that.
The complaint is that there is surplus production, and simultaneously 1. the production is actively wasted and destroyed, while 2. people are going hungry.
That’s like saying ‘your kid has a horrible disease, and in this syringe I have the cure for it, but I’m just gonna squirt it down the sink instead because why not’.
- Comment on Meow meow meow 1 month ago:
That says more about the training of the human than the training of the cat.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 month ago:
American here. As we all know, America is the only important country in the world so there is little need for African content…
Hi Joe, although with a somewhat heavy heart as I think there are some Americans who would say that seriously. I would also love more South African content. It’s a beautiful country with an interesting if checkered story and I would love to visit it someday.
That said, there are two things you should keep in mind. First off, whatever instance you’re on has a large effect on what you will see on Lemmy, so if you want more African content you might see if there is an instance running in Africa or at least subscribe to communities on that instance. You don’t have to join that instance in order to see them, but you do have to go looking for them.
Second, Lemmy has been largely adopted by a westernized population mostly of American and Western Europe origin, mainly because it provides a fediverse system with an experience similar to Reddit. Thus, much of Lemmy’s traffic is current or ex-redditors, which are mostly from the aforementioned demographics.
- Comment on American workers are tired of waiting. 2 months ago:
Both of your points go back to the same underlying issue- Americans don’t do their homework. Expecting the American population to do their own independent research into candidates and select the candidate that objectively best serves their interest is not a winning proposition. I really wish this was different, but that is just not a thing that happens.
But that means that a candidate wins or loses on marketing. This marketing is a combination of having the reach, and hitting those people with the right message.
That’s a big reason why I say DNC handed the nomination to Hillary. The DNC was supposed to remain neutral until the primary was finished, however they helped the Hillary campaign by sharing their mailing lists. So you say Bernie was unpopular, thank you if you limited that to voters who were familiar with his platform as well as Hillary’s I think you would have a different result.
But look at Trump. He won the PR game. He said lots of crazy shit that got him constantly in the news, then when he got the spotlight he used it to say things that directly addressed the American people’s pain points. His message was that he sees the country not working for the average person, but instead working for companies that outsource American jobs. So to stop that he will throw some tariffs and bring jobs back! If you’re in American Blue collar worker or especially factory worker, that is the first time back in quite a while that a politician has said ‘I hear you, you matter and I’m going to stand up to big business and fix your problem’.
Now you can objectively point out problems in his budget proposals and his stated agendas as of campaign season, you can point to the gop’s track record of abandoning lower classes, but that all just becomes more words on a very crowded page, more talking heads. None of that overcame the power of Trump’s message.
Obama did the same thing by the way, the whole hope, change, yes we can campaign was brilliant and it did the same thing of speaking directly to the American people’s pain points. And it was also simple enough to resonate in someone’s mind. Unfortunately Obama had the right idea and he was a good president but he didn’t have the balls needed to railroad his desired reforms through.
My point is though, if the DNC had two brain cells to rub together they would be learning from this. You need a candidate who’s willing to stand up to big business, who is willing to ruffle feathers among the donors. That wasn’t Hillary. And it wasn’t Kamala either.
- Comment on American workers are tired of waiting. 2 months ago:
I was not evaluating his effectiveness as a leader. Only his effectiveness as a candidate. Simple fact is, both times he pushed a message of radical reform. Both times his opponent did not. Both times he won.
I am not a fan of his presidency for a great many reasons, and I did not vote for him either time.
- Comment on American workers are tired of waiting. 2 months ago:
I’m aware. I also know that the DNC (the centralized organization) has a lot of influence through things like superdelegates. Look at the 2016 primary- openly colluding with Hillary against Bernie, and it worked.
- Comment on American workers are tired of waiting. 2 months ago:
As opposed to nominating candidates that have actual reform plans rather than going for the ‘safe option’ Hillary/Kamala status quo candidates.
Donald Trump was not the safe candidate for the GOP. He pushed radical reform. And it got him elected.
Hillary and Kamala were the safe candidates for the DNC. Status quo, don’t rock the boat, appeal to the base, don’t take risks. They lost.The American people are hurting. The American people want radical reform. And so they vote for a radical reform candidate.
Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, had he gotten the nomination. But the DNC saw him as too radical and unpalatable in the general election. How’d that work out?
- Comment on The Art of Surrender 3 months ago:
Amen to this. There’s a very few couple of good ones, but for the most part the Old guard Democrats really need to go enjoy their long overdue retirement and let some new people with new ideas and new energy carry the torch.
The old playbook isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t resonate with voters. It doesn’t address the major problems with our country. - Comment on Court tells Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton to reinstate fired CEO and let him handle its Early Access release | VGC 4 months ago:
Would absolutely love that. Just split the two. Unknown Worlds cut loose, existing publishing agreements severed, they walk away with a developed game and their IP. Free to contract with Krafton or anyone else to distribute the game, or they could just self-publish pretty easily.
Sadly I doubt that will happen but we can always hope.
- Comment on Where *does* the money come from? 5 months ago:
If they’re only spending hundreds of thousands to stop your union, you need to try harder :P
I was once years ago talking to a guy who ran an industrial shop. In the area there were a lot of other similar shops that had gone union, his wasn’t. And when asked about it, his answer was ‘everyone around here that’s gone union has deserved it. I pay my guys above prevailing wage, I don’t overwork them, and when they need time off I give it without a ton of HR paperwork. That costs a little more but it’s worth every penny because I get the best workers, and when the union comes knocking, it’s the workers who tell them to shove off.’
A number of years later the company was bought out. I only assume that guy left, because a Google search shows that shop is now union and employees gripe online about how management is continually squeezing their pay and working conditions.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
You are confusing the spread of ideology with the spread of a conquistadorial government. Remember, most of the Germans who supported Hitler didn’t realize the Jews were being massacred. And we didn’t go to war to stop Nazi ideology, we went to war to stop Germany from conquering the entire fucking world through military means.
The problem with using force to stop an ideology is that to the people who might follow that ideology, the fact that you care enough to use force against a belief system must mean there is something important in that belief system they should be checking out. Trying to stop an ideology with force only makes that ideology stronger, gives it validation.
If you want to stop an ideology, ridicule it. Make fun of those who believe in it. Talk about how stupid they are. Talk about how they are morons not worth your time. Don’t give that ideology the validation of deserving force.The other problem with violence, is it prevents dialogue. If you are hitting somebody while talking to them, they are not going to hear what you are saying.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
Hitler was defeated by being nice to him
In that sense you’re right- some people only understand and respect force, and the only way to stop them is to use force against them. The analogy of Hitler might be compared to hardened criminals- being nice to a criminal won’t stop them from victimizing you.
This is a different battle though. The small % of racists who want to burn minorities’ houses down, they must be met with force.
Force doesn’t win hearts and minds though. Force is intertwined with fear- ‘if you do xxx, force will be used against you’. So it might stop some church burnings, but it doesn’t stop racism. Force doesn’t win ‘hearts and minds’. Force doesn’t convince a racist that they were wrong. It might make them too afraid to speak up, but it doesn’t win them over, and they will only take their message underground, where it will thrive.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
Can you point to some other times in history where the threat of being beaten up has been effective in eradicating an ideology?
I can point to plenty of instances where driving an ideology underground only fuels its growth…
And look at the simple logic of it- if the guy in the big KKK hood says ‘the establishment doesn’t want you to acknowledge this’ and he then gets beaten up by mainstream majority people, you’ve just proved him right in the eyes of a would-be follower.
It’s like if you found someone who knows nothing about astronomy, and told them ‘today the sun will rise at 7:15am and set at 5:43pm, and the moon is mostly made of bleu cheese’ you’ve predicted two things correctly so that gives you credibility when they consider the 3rd.
If I said that to you, you’d say ‘you looked that up on Google, anyone can do that, and it’s well known the moon is made of rock’. But you are knowledgeable about astronomy (on a basic level at least).This works with the KKK person because chances are the KKK person has had limited or no actual contact and understanding with black people. So he sees news reports of inner city black people doing crimes and it becomes easy to convince him black people are somehow inferior. And ‘THEY don’t want you to know the truth’ is a powerful message for someone already interested in counterculture / dislike of the mainstream.
That’s why Daryl Davis is effective- he sits down with the racist, who has a mental image of what a ‘black person’ is, and he’s not that. It’s like putting you on a rocket and flying you out to the moon and saying ‘okay we’re here, where’s the cheese?’
And that’s why violence ISN’T effective- because the racist is expecting violence, so being violent only reinforces their belief.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
I think we need both of these —punching Nazis and talking with them to change their views.
Can you explain to me how punching Nazis works to reduce Naziism and racism? What is the mechanism of action? Like how specifically does getting punched make someone less racist?
That is a genuine question and I’d love an answer.
I personally believe that punching racists only creates more hatred. The racist will be angry at the one who punched him, and thus less open to anti-racist messaging.
- Comment on Control Resonant - Announcement Trailer | PS5 Games 7 months ago:
I general, I agree 100%.
There’s an exception for Remedy though. They have a strong track record of not releasing underwhelming unfinished crap.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
Why?
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
I think that’s called conflict exhaustion. You’re sick of fighting, sick of holding your nose and respecting things and people you find repugnant, while there’s little/no serious progress in your direction, it seems like there’s more racism and hatred than ever. So part of you is ready to set the world on fire if it gets rid of MAGA and all the thinly veiled (or not so thinly veiled) racism and intolerance.
Just keep in mind that the dark wolf actually serves those nazi punks. Punching them only makes them stronger.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
Exactly 100%
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 7 months ago:
No worries my friend. I know it’s hard, but it’s useful to always assume good faith.
“The monster never sees a monster in the mirror. We all have good reasons and justifications for what we do.” – J. Michael Straczynski
That applies to us too.
I think it especially applied in 2016, first time in my life that all pretense of respectful debate went away, replaced with ‘unfriend me if you like Trump’ as a mainstream accepted even encouraged position to have.
I talk to a lot of people who supported Trump. Most of them talked about tariffs, manufacturing, jobs, there was a dream of bringing back American industry and rolling back outsourcing. Yes there was some assholes, but there were plenty of good American folks who just wanted to keep their jobs.
But if you listened to Democrats, the only valid reason anyone would vote for Trump is because they are a tiki torch wielding racist misogynist sexist xenophobic islamophobic basket of deplorables. The public discourse broke down for good, it was all just insults from both sides.Nobody saw a monster in the mirror. We only saw an opposition supporting a guy who was basically openly racist and creeped on his own daughter.
But they didn’t see a monster in the mirror either. They only saw an ivory tower elite whipping ourselves into a frenzy over which bathroom someone uses while the middle class is dying.That’s why, in my opinion at least, it is always vitally important to generally assume good faith on the part of your opposition. Because if there is good faith, then we repair the cracks that are dividing the country. And if there really isn’t good faith, then we are all totally fucked anyway so it doesn’t make any goddamn difference.