Apple’s willingness to offload all of their production there and basically revolutionize their Tech industry

Taiwan’s FoxConn building assembly plants in Shenzhen in 2005 does not explain why Huawei is releasing cutting edge phones in 2025.

Besides, if you want to get historical, Apple cribbed all their technology from Microsoft’s trash bin back in the 90s. And Microsoft plundered IBM and the early tech companies of the 1980s before that.

Chinese firms didn’t cheat by licensing the same technology every American firm was outright stealing through reverse engineering.

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

That’s what Oxycotin was.

If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?

Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.

Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.

So, I don’t see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.

Even if you’re not up to DDR6, there’s money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you’ll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you’re already in the business.

price gouging laws only restrict predatory price increases on essential goods during officially declared states of emergency

I mean, maybe there’s something in the fine print I’m unaware of. But do you think this Instacart model turns off for a neighborhood hit by a hurricane or wildfire or flood?

I don’t see AGs offices zealously enforcing laws at even this scale, so its something of a moot point. If your DOJ is owned and operated by crooks, they won’t be going after their friends and co-conspirators anyway. And Instacart is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley crowd, which have been successfully paying off politicians left, right, and center since the Clinton Administration.

It creates a situation where an AG’s office with limited manpower and prosecutorial capacity needs to selectively enforce the law in order to shock the public into general compliance. Less “everyone is guilty” and more “too many people are potentially suspect but only a few of them have cases that could actually hold up in court”.

USAs generally hate trying cases that get tossed out or lose at trial. So they try to focus on cases they know they can win - either because the defendant can’t afford quality legal council or the case is so air-tight that a jury will easily convict. Incompetent USAs can quickly get themselves into a position where a defendant can get top flight defense and the prosecutor has to juggle a bunch of gaping flaws in the case. OJ Simpson is one classic example of such a case. Luigi Mangione may end up being another.

New customer discounts, student/senior discounts, etc. The problems arise when the nature of the reason they got a discount, or even the very fact that they did get a discount are hidden.

I’d argue even these arbitrary discounts are bad from a public policy perspective. What you’re describing is a hodgepodge of marketing and PR, intended to cultivate a loyal customer base with an eye towards maximizing revenue in the future once your client list is fully captured.

The better questions to be asking are “how much resources does it make to create Product X” and “what material benefit does the client receive from consuming Product X”? A high price is justified when a product is difficult to produce and highly beneficial to consume, on the grounds that the higher price subsidizes capital investment that bring production costs down long term.

But what Instacart is doing isn’t adding value to a product or pricing in cost of production. The website is instead trying to maximize the marginal profit on the purchaser. It’s the AI-equivalent of you asking “How much is that product?” and the vendor replying “It costs as much money as you have in your wallet.”

There’s no incentive to improve efficiency or maximize throughput in this model. It is entirely a zero-sum game of taking the client for as much cash as the vendor can possibly extract per transaction.

It’s not illegal, but it’s incredibly unethical and really should be illegal.

Funny you should say that because Price Gouging laws are absolutely a thing on the books. And overcharging an individual customer relative to the median historical price is a textbook violation. The question isn’t whether these actions are illegal, but whether any state AG will press criminal charges.

Says so right here.

I asked the Supreme Court, and in a 6-3 ruling they agreed that police tying a person to the bumper of a car and dragging them to death is within the constitutional purview of the executive branch. But a mayor-elect giving a neighbor advice on navigating the municipal bureaucracy while awaiting a green card is felony espionage and a clear and present danger to national security.

I requested clarification, at which point Samuel Alito reached under his robe, grunted, and began flinging feces at me while ICE agents swarmed in firing tear gas and demanding the press pool disperse.

The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.

Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you’ve got 1.4B people you’re going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India’s Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil’s semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for… decades. Russia’s so sanctioned that they’ve got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.

I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there’s an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that’ll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.

I just wouldn’t hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You’re not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.

4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.

The latest semiconductor manufacturer specializing in RAM is ChangXin Memory Technologies

As of 2019, CXMT had over 3,000 employees, and runs a fab with a 65,000 square meters clean room space. Over 70% of its employees are engineers working on various research and development related projects. CXMT uses its 10G1 process technology (aka 19 nm) to make 4 Gb (gigabit) and 8 Gb DDR4 memory chips. It has licensed intellectual property originally created by Qimonda.

So… whatever that costs. Although, I think this wiki is a bit behind the times, as they’ve got DDR5-8000 memory in flight according to TechInsights.

I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.

I wonder if we’ll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.

Sure, in theory. But then you get a glut of responses and have to pick which ones you’d actually care to prosecute.

That’s a bunch of annoying manual work that nobody in Trump’s FBI / DOJ is willing (much less competent) to perform.

Have a friend working as an AUSA in Texas and he can confirm this letter went out a week ago.

It’s very vaguely and broadly written. Doesn’t do a great deal to identify who or what qualifies. Idk if officials are expected to hit some kind of Antifa Witchhunt quota or if raising a flag just brings a bunch of cheap reactionary heat down on the office itself.

My friend’s Africa American, so he’s not touching the request with a 10’ pole if he can avoid it. Most of his caseload is just meth dealers crossing state lines and interstate wire fraud, so there’s not a ton of Antifa to be found anyway.

Mamdani promised to execute the bourgeois class and redistribute housing to the proletariat and he’s already breaking promises

Maduro’s grip on power relies fundamentally on electoral manipulation.

All the “Maduro cheated to win the election” stuff comes from the same people insisting Biden cheated to win in 2020 and Obama cheated in 2008.

Following the contested 2024 election, Maduro launched “Operation Tun Tun” (Operación Tun Tun), a brutal crackdown described by experts as “state terrorism”.

Were these experts affiliated with Elliot Abrams?

Conservatives do love self-owning with the anti-Castro rhetoric

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for a Glorious New War we can all watch on the TV.

Russia is right at our doorsteps

That hasn’t been true in over 40 years. And even when it was true, Europeans suffered far more under the paranoid police states of their own governments than any cross border conflict.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Not like any of us have a material say, but enjoy conscription I guess.

Biggest global rearming since WW1 and people are cheering about it like they don’t understand what happens next.