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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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



  • Raising a big eyebrow at the prospect of mega-corporate consolidation of movie theater venues collapsing in the face of mega-corporate consolidation of movie production companies.

    I think it should say something that you can stream a thousand different movies at home for $20/mo, but you can’t license a movie for public viewing at less than $300/day. The real big blockbusters can demand north of $2000/day, then demand 50% of the ticket price on top of the licensing fee. If you’re wondering why you can’t get into a theater for less than $20/ticket or why the old 3-5 screen cinemas all died out a decade ago, this is why.

    It almost makes me wonder at the prospect of fully off-book unlicensed movie houses. How gangster to set up shop in an abandoned mall and host one-night screenings of pirated films on high end portable projectors? Maybe this already exists and I just don’t know about it.




  • 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.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comstethoscope theory
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    14 hours ago

    Stalin is a… polarizing figure for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which being his comic inability to extend revolutionary Marxism into Europe when it was at its most popular and most necessary.

    Like, the liberals kicking and screaming about his successors - largely a bunch of socialist softies who were happy with detente and primarily interested in economic growth - are absolutely reactionary shits more invested in reinventing the 1950s through third world extraction than any kind of global standard for civil rights or ecological preservation. But Stalin’s paranoia, his intractability, and the toxic consequences of the cult of personality that kept him in office long past his expiration date did horrible things to 1930s Soviet Era domestic policy.

    There’s a reason numbskull Russian fascists venerate Stalin far more than Lenin or Khrushchev. Its the same reason Americans put Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comstethoscope theory
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    15 hours ago

    “tankie fucks deserve to get their heads bashed in.”

    It’s so funny to see liberals whine about authoritarian communism and then come out with “my solution is to be even more authoritarian than the evil leftists that live in my head”.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the perfect idea of a liberal candidate is just this guy