Ruby was the most approachable language I found and sheparded me from my limits of bash scripting and Windows batch file scripting into the next level.

The author derides Ruby’s easy readability and syntax because it has issues scaling to large enterprise applications. I don’t disagree there is a performance ceiling, but how many hundreds of thousands of Ruby projects never rose to that level of need? The author is also forgetting that Ruby had Rubygems for easy modular functional additions years before Python eventually got pip.

I don’t write in Ruby anymore, and Python has evolved to be much more approachable than it was when Ruby was in its prime, however if someone came to me today saying they wanted the easier programming language to learn that could build full applications on Linux, OSX, Windows, and the web, I’d still point them to Ruby with the caveat that it would have limits and they would be better served by Python in the long run.

In a few centuries (really in the next century or so) clean fresh water will likely be the most valuable resource on the planet. So parts of the USA will likely be in in good shape ripe for a renaissance considering 20% of the worlds fresh water are in the Great Lakes.

but I think the realistic reading is it was simply a kickback to fortune 500 companies that got these politicians elected.

If there were no legitimate geopolitical reasons, then the “simply a kickback” would be much more plausible. Also, if it was a single source company, then “simply a kickback” would look true. Additionally, if was perhaps just domestic companies “simply a kickback” would certainly be even more likely. Lastly, the Chips act wasn’t just about production domestically. It also blocked sales/exports of completed high end chips and chip making equipment to China. If the Chips act was “simple a kickback” you wouldn’t do all that other stuff, and you certainly wouldn’t allow foreign winners (like Taiwan’s TSMC).

Was their rewards because of industry lobbying? Certainly. However, unless you’re in a purely communist system of government where all the companies are owned by the state, you’re always going to have private companies benefiting from government spending, tax breaks, and subsidies. As to this just applying to fortune 500 companies, there isn’t really a “mom and pop” semiconductor industry making handfuls of chips at a time except outside of engineering sample that are used in R&D for fortune 500 companies.

The worst of it hasn’t happened yet. The point where consumers can no longer afford to consume is coming.

Its mostly already arrived.

“As of June 30, the top 20% of earners accounted for more than 63% of all spending”

source

This means that the other 80% of Americans represent only 37% of the spending done today. If a company is looking to maximize profits the typical path is to do so by marketing to the group where they could earn the most money. That is less and less the bottom 80% of Americans.

The creator in that video seems to think the Chips Act subsidies were to benefit consumers by having affordable memory produced domestically. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to derive drive GDP by having another source of domestic production, and drive job growth/tax revenue from workers working at the domestic facility. Lastly, it was to have strategic domestic production decoupled from other nations so we, as a nation, could not be held hostage by another nation (like we do to so many other nations) for crucial (pun very much intended) resources we need.

Nothing about that is about making RAM cheaper for retail consumers.

The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.

Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.

To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.

I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that

I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.

At one time, it was a government promise to exchange for a certain amount of gold. After that became a limit on growth of a nation it becomes “fiat currency” which is simply a conceptual agreement of value to make the exchange of goods and services easier. This is your AMEX money.

At the 1 hour mark:

The lemmy instance you choose (for example, you chose .ml) to join will have its own tone, flavor, rules, politics. You will find instances that are left, right, and center. Additionally you will find some that are VERY far-left or VERY far-right. If you are finding the tone for the lemmy community (equivalent of reddit subreddit) different that your position, it may be because its hosted and moderated on an instance with that particular bend.

You may also experience some judgment from others because of the instance you are coming from as it can communicate some of your positional bias. Some users have chosen to relocate to other lemmy instances once they get an understanding of what ideas live where.

All of that said, while lemmy and the fediverse has a much smaller userbase than Reddit, it is so much nicer here. My last post to reddit was over 2 years ago, and every post I hear about how bad it is getting over there confirms this is the better place here.

Huh, is this why I’ve been accused of being a bot before? I’ve been using the noun-verb username format since the late 1990s.

Sign up for a Pilates membership. Go regularly. Seek to make friends. Work on improving yourself in that class. The group will likely be mostly women. Now, your goal is NOT to find a mate in that class. Don’t be a creep. Embrace your inner warmth and genuinely and build friendships. Don’t fake this. Those women know other women that are looking for a mate, and would recommend you if you can be a genuine human being.

I’ve been in the Raspberry Pi world for awhile and had a taste of both the more limited selection of ARM based binaries, but also exposed to a bit of cross compiling. I’m sure I’ll run into things that are x86 specific, but that will also give me a chance to be exposed to the benefits and limits of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon.

This brings me to cloud compute. For x86 binaries with no chance of substitution/cross compiling, I am planning on spinning up an x86 cloud instance that will likely accommodate a few more of my needs. I’m fully aware that there will be some applications that will simply have no accommodation, mitigation, or substitution on ARM and I’ll have to “go without”. I do have x86 a Linux desktop in regular use.

Lastly, I also take advantage of ARM based cloud compute, as it is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than x86 cloud compute. Having a native workstation architecture matching the cloud compute architecture, I think, can possibly make live easier instead of harder.

Worst comes to worst, I can press an old x86 laptop back into service running Linux.

While I run Linux on a desktop, I’ve always owned a Windows laptop. I decided last week that instead of ever running Windows 11, I’m going to buy a Macbook and dual boot it with Linux. Yes I know I can run Linux on any number of PC hardware laptops, there are occasionally windows only utilities needed to run firmware or some other proprieatry application. If I can know I can always fall back to OSX for system updates and running proprietary commercial software, I’ll know I never need to touch Windows 11.

May when Microsoft realizes Windows 11 is Vista 2.0, Windows 12 may be great. With Linux and OSX, I don’t see myself coming back to Windows even then though.

You gotta find a better way to present this other than making it sound like Torvalds is a baby taking a shit. “The one who makes” I’m dead.

Its capitalized “Makes” which I took to mean a proper name instead of the verb. So this is referring to the GNU compiler Make. Since this is posted in /c/linuxmemes, I think its a safe post for the audience to know the difference.

I read the article, and the title is a pretty decent summary. AI is being used to find a never-ending supply of bugs (a number of which are trivial at best). The issue that not only are the bugs being found by unlimited resourced AI, those same processes are revealing them to the public after a time. This is placing undue burden on unpaid volunteers. So “FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs”.

I have a small portfolio of space company stocks and keep them as a reminder to avoid active investing.

My boring old Total Market (essentially S&P500) index funds have done much better in the same time as my space stocks.

Wait till gold drops by into it.

Every time the market spikes for gold (as it is now), I run the projections to see if I would have been better off in gold than buying equities instead. Gold has never once shown to be the better investment as vehicle for appreciation.

For gaming I wonder if it could be underclocked and undervolted to get the power consumption down. Since its essentially RAM starved for alot of other games, it may not be able to take full advantage of the CPU/GPU and a slowed-down, but lower power consumption unit, might still play games of certain era’s just fine.

The available RAM is pretty anemic, but that sounds pretty cheap for a fully functional PC with a GPU. It mentions an RDNA2 GPU, which that family apparently has had successfully TensorFlow-DirectML running on it.

Electricity consumption would be an issue, but I wonder if these would make good machine learning training compute nodes.

Yep, thanks for the fact check. Peter Theil is certainly a trump advisor helping shape policy but he doesn’t hold an government office. I’ve corrected my post.