This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

I tried one in the store. It’s an amazing experience, the augmented reality is done very well.
The problem is I don’t think there’s any content for it. If it could play 3D movies or games or something, that might be a reason to buy it. But for right now as far as I can tell the main reason to have one is to view 3D photos from an iPhone in actual 3D. And I’m sorry but that’s just not worth $3,500.

The other issue is the competition. Quest 3 is very close in terms of technology, not quite as good but close, and it’s 7x cheaper with a hell of a lot more content available.

Make it $1500 and release enough content that there’s a reason to buy it, and it’ll sell.

I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?

This is all well and good but I don’t see any changes happening and I don’t see any lessons being learned.

We voted for Biden, not Garland. Advisors can push him whatever way they want but at the end of the day it’s his call. And voters have been sharing every frustration for the last decade or two at getting presidents that don’t actually push the real reforms people want.

IMHO, in Biden’s place, The smart thing to do would have been go full Bulworth mode the second he dropped out. If he cut the bullshit and started calling everybody out he could endorse a damp paper bag as his successor and they’d get votes.

People voted for Trump because he is a reform candidate. He may not be a reform President (he wasn’t the first time) but he talks a lot of reform on the stump.

Hillary was not a reform candidate. Kamala was not a reform candidate. Both lost.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it’s that DNC needs to jettison a lot of the old guard that have been the face of the party for the last 50 years. Get some young people with energy and new ideas and put them in charge.

After the United CEO shooting, it would have been a great time for Democrats to put the public option back on the table. That should never have been dropped from Obamacare. But there is enough sentiment in favor of it that they could probably get it through, or at the very least make Republicans pay in the court of public opinion for stopping it. Yet another wasted opportunity.

I said get rid of the procedural filibuster. That’s where a Senator can say ‘I’m filibustering that bill’ and it can’t advance further until 60 Senators vote to end debate on the bill. The chamber then moves on to other business. That allows any Senator to mostly block any bill without consequence. That IMHO is bad.

The real filibuster- where a Senator will stand up for hours and read the phone book, that is essential to stop the worst bills. It should be used sparingly and it should be disruptive.

All those things would be worthy of a stand-up filibuster.

And, much like most Republicans over the last decade or two or maybe three, you are thinking about what’s good for your agenda in the short-term and not what’s good for the nation in the long-term.
The procedural filibuster is bad for the country. It’s bad for the country when Republicans have a majority, it’s bad for the country when Democrats have a majority. And if the GOP tries to pass something awful, maybe one of our Democrats could grow a backbone and actually filibuster the damn thing.

Disagree. The only reason 60 votes are needed is because somebody will filibuster it. So grow a fucking backbone, and call out whichever asshole senator is refusing to fund the troops because he cares more about sticking it to transgender people. Don’t just vote for the thing, don’t focus on getting it passef no matter what, put your fucking foot down and name and shame. Point out that one person is holding up a spending bill worth hundreds of billions of dollars over an objection to a line item that probably costs $100k.

Or better, reform the filibuster. The filibuster is a good thing in concept. The procedural filibuster however means that it now takes 60 votes to pass something instead of 50 and there’s essentially no consequence for that. That was not the intent of the Framers.

If you want to filibuster something, you should have to get up there and read the phone book for hours. It should grind the government to a halt. It should be disruptive to everything, a measure used for only the worst bills.

Rules are rules of course. But when the car was approved for sale, approved as being rule following, and then retroactively after the fact, after it’s been out for years with literally millions of units on the road, suddenly it’s no good…, that doesn’t seem like fair enforcement to me.

Frequent software updates are part of having a Tesla. If the vehicle is unable to do a software update, then it is broken and would require service regardless of the recall.

Which IMHO just shows that the recall in the first place was just NHTSA unnecessarily flexing on them

Sorry we don’t think like that anymore. Nuance and multiple truths are a waste of time. Elon supports a Republican that means he is bad and everything he does is bad and everything he has ever done is bad and he has no vision or leadership of his own he is just a rich asshole using Daddy’s money to buy cars and rockets and Twitter. Thus he is unworthy of praise for anything at all that he has done since he was born into a life of luxury and anything he touches is automatically shit worthy of being canceled or outlawed.

The warning icons were the exact same size as the car I had before that. No recall on that car, and if anything icons were even easier to see because the contrast was higher and they are closer to your face.

Yes absolutely. The term recall is supposed to be when they literally recall the cars, like bring them back in, in the same context as you recall your dog after he runs around the yard.
No cars are being brought back in. No dealers are involved here. It’s just a bug fix for the next software release.

I also don’t like how the ability to fix bugs is creating a huge number of ‘recalls’. For example, last year Tesla had a ‘recall’ because NHTSA decided the warning icons on the dashboard screen weren’t big enough. Like the icons for parking brake and seat belt. Which is frustrating because the car is operated for years with the original icons and nobody had a complaint.

But if this was an old style car, where those were individual LEDs silkscreened in an instrument cluster, that would never be a recall because it would cost millions to replace every single instrument cluster on every single car. But because it is remotely fixable, it becomes a recall.

This is a very good point. The other issue is security. The little mechanic shop that has no dynamic content, technically should be static pages, so when it’s left alone and not updated for 3 years it doesn’t get hacked by some WordPress vulnerability.

Absolutely. They were so arrogant they never thought it would happen to us. After all, we are in charge of our own networks so why would we expect the enemy to be at the gates? Let’s make those gates out of cardboard so it’s easier to spy on everyone.

Of course then you have things like CALEA mandating a back door, you have cheap telecom companies that will happily buy cheap lowest bidder Chinese hardware and install it "everywhere* without concern for security (after all, it’s not their data being stolen) and now the enemy isn’t just at the gates but inside the walls.

A decade ago, making sure the feds could read everyone’s mail was the national security priority. Suddenly when the Chinese can read everyone’s mail, good security is the national security priority.

It’s too bad there was no way to predict this in advance. Oh wait…

XKCD #538: Security

Joe Biden could theoretically pardon all people in violation of this, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for a blanket universal pardon involving guns

Nope. Biden’s DOJ was happily pushing the ‘weed users can’t have guns’ as one angle of gun control, while the administration was simultaneously pushing the ‘weed shouldn’t be persecuted’ angle. Quite hypocritical really.

China’s too smart to ‘invade’ Taiwan. There will be no tanks and helicopters invading. China / CCP may be assholes but they are also fucking smart.

Look at Hong Kong. There were no tanks or helicopters. Just steadily increasing political control. More or less the entirety of HK protested for weeks/months. It did fuck all.

That will be what happens with Taiwan. It won’t be an invasion. It will be a gradual slide.

Right now, USA officially supports the ‘One China’ policy to appease China even though we want Taiwan to be independent. It’s let us keep huge trade with China (which the Chinese also want/need) while we depend (and NEED) Taiwan for a lot of tech manufacturing especially computer chips.

Thing is, China has no desire to be dependent on us. They want us dependent on them for manufacturing, but don’t want to need that business. That’s why China is doing aggressive R&D on pretty much every high tech area they depend on the West for, trying to ensure that everything China needs can be made in China from Chinese tech. To do that they need to be able to design and manufacture the latest computer chips, which they currently can’t. But they’re pouring billions into figuring it out.

If China takes over Taiwan, either openly or covertly, they get TSMC. And that gives them all the chipmaking tech they need.

Don’t expect tanks. Expect state sponsored industrial espionage at TSMC and their own suppliers. Then expect Chinese chipmakers to flood the market with top-line or near-top-line hardware at low prices, which US won’t embargo and thus we’ll get even more dependent on China.

And to that I ask, why do the Democrats not also use the filibuster? Or when they have control of the Senate, rewrite the rules to disallow a procedural filibuster and make it so if you want to filibuster something you have to actually stand up there and read the phone book into the record for hours on end?
If the filibuster is the problem, why is there not a large public campaign for filibuster reform?

I’m sorry but this is an excuse plain and simple. The procedural filibuster, which I personally think should be abolished, can be used as a weapon by either side. If GOP filibusters the school spending bill, Dems should filibuster the defense spending bill. If GOP filibusters the medical care bill, Dems should filibuster the warrantless wiretapping bill (well, they should do that anyway, but you get the point).