frezik

joined 2 years ago
[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A 150-200mm drone frame wouldn't have that kind of range in its battery, anyway. There are useful drones in the war that are even smaller than that.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 30 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Initial reports indicate that the site, previously protected by one of Russia’s densest air defense networks, suffered catastrophic damage.

Good chance Ukraine could hit the Kremlin if they wanted to. They have drones with the 500 mile range to pull it off, and Russian air defense has become a joke. The only thing that's been stopping them was US worries about actions like that causing escalation. Ukraine has had less and less reason to care what the US thinks of late.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago

Like the sinking of the Moskva, they choose a story that makes them look incompetent rather than giving the enemy a win. If you have to make this choice, you might be losing.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Large corporations are allergic to capital expenditures. That is, they don't like investing in new things to make the business run. They want their previous investment to run as long as possible. On occasion, the workers will arrange big projects to be covered as "maintenance" rather than capital expenditures.

Oil companies have invested in oil pumps and refineries. They could invest in all sorts of other things, but that's less money in the hands of shareholders. That's all there is to it. Money spent on new investments isn't making them richer right now.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

New pope gets elected, and then the believers will say it was misinterpreted the whole time. This is the standard way.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 75 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Some brain cells cobbled together from stem cells that have his DNA. None of the life experiences that made his music. You could likely get similar results with the same technique using the DNA of any random person on the street.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

There's some servers using SSDs as a direct extension of RAM. It doesn't currently have the write endurance or the latency to fully replace RAM. This solves one of those.

Imagine, though, if we could unify RAM and mass storage. That's a major assumption in the memory heirarchy that goes away.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you don't have an especially long commute, good chance you're between 12k to 15k per year. That's a typical yearly amount, and leases are usually set around there.

13k in six months is about twice the average.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

On the contrary, this is pretty close to what we have right now. Companies don't like to spend much on R&D once they're out of the startup phase. A good chunk of that startup phase R&D was actually taking place at a university with public funds. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals. So the answer to the question of "when does it get handed off to private industry?" is to just look at what's happening already.

The exception is big monopolies. AT&T's Bell Labs is a legendary R&D department. IBM, Microsoft, and Google all likewise have significant pure R&D going on, and even engineers who don't like those companies salivate at the opportunity to work in that capacity for them.

But then you've got big monopolies on your hands, and that's a whole other problem.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 12 points 1 week ago

In the manufacturing space, people are questioning if patents help them at all. There is no stopping China from copying your design and selling it on Aliexpress. In fact, since you're almost certainly getting your product manufactured in China in the first place, there is no stopping the very manufacturing plant you're using from producing extras and undercutting you.

Consider this old EEVblog vid about bringing a product to market, and the #1 tip is "don't bother with a patent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BL1O0xCcY

Patents have evolved to be useful to patent trolls. That's it.

That's not what Dorsey and Musk are after, though. They want to kill copyright law because it's inconvenient for AI training data.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 71 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

We have the wife of the world's most famous pro wrestling promoter, who someone gave the title of Secretary of Education. You may ask why the the wife of the world's most famous pro wrestling promoter is Secretary of Education. As in, that is a question that may be asked.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 11 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Pretty much. Nobody believes the tariffs will outlive Trump, and he's very old. Why drop a huge capital expense to solve a problem that will go away?

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