The US is allergic to it, but needs to get over it.

Aluminum wire was tried in the 1970s due to a spike in copper prices. The problem was that they just tried to swap it right in. Aluminum and copper have different rates of expansion. Over time, that would slowly loosen the connectors, and the wires would pop right out and cause a fire.

You can design connectors to handle both, and you’ll see many electrical things today specify that they’re good for aluminum or copper wire. It still has a bad reputation among electricians; they haven’t unlearned the problem yet.

Now, one place it’s more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.

From old electrical connections that weren’t designed for the different rates of expansion of aluminum and copper. Today, most of them are.

There’s a thread of thought that pops up in pro-AI posters from time to time: technology can’t go backwards. The implication being that the current state of AI can only improve, and is here to stay.

This is wrong. Companies are spending multitudes of piles of cash to make AI work, and they could easily take their ball and go home. Extending copyright over the training data would likely trigger that, by the industry’s own admission.

No, self-hosted models are not going to change this. A bunch of people running around with their own little agents aren’t going to sustain a mass market phenomenon. You’re not going to have integration in Windows or VisualStudio or the top of Google search results. You’re not going to have people posting many pics on Facebook of Godzilla doing silly things.

The tech can go backwards, and we’re likely to see it.

To salvage the argument, it’s quite possible this would have been different if they were from GM rather than VW.

Last part that I need is for SSDs to come down in price to where ~80TB isn’t too ridiculous (that’s 40TB usable space with RAID1). Cut the price per TB in half two more times to make it there. Otherwise, spinning platters are the bottleneck with my 10Gb network.

Which probably would have happened in the next few years if not for tariffs.

They’re apparently in talks to sell off their network division. Future there is really up in the air.

A lot of those modules would work fine if the companies didn’t fuck with their drivers.

The Linux ixgbe driver (for Intel 82598 and 82599 chipsets) was submitted with a whitelist for Intel SFP+ adapters. Linux devs added a module option to shut off the whitelist, and tons of stuff is perfectly compatible.

Yes, it did. Most of the basic research came from there. The first section of the book “Hackers” by Steven Levy is a good intro.

The major thing that killed 1960s/70s AI was the Vietnam War. MIT’s CSAIL was funded heavily by DARPA. When public opinion turned against Vietnam and Congress started shutting off funding, DARPA wasn’t putting money into CSAIL anymore. Congress didn’t create an alternative funding path, so the whole thing dried up.

That lab basically created computing as we know it today. It bore fruit, and many companies owe their success to it.

The issue this time around is infrastructure. The current AI Summer depends on massive datacenters with equally massive electrical needs. If companies can’t monetize that enough, they’ll pull the plug and none of this will be available to general public anymore.

This system can go backwards. Yes, the R&D will still be there after the AI Winter cycle hits, but none of the infrastructure.

It has the most important aspect of cheap frozen pizza. Which is the cheese having built up on one side because it was shipped that way in the truck.

Because they make all the cheap ethernet chips that go on motherboards.

Other than that, can’t think of a good reason.

It’s all included, but median tends to be less susceptible to a few outliers skewing the numbers. That’s why it’s preferred over averages.

That was a right-wing talking point in the years following 2008. After Bush had flooded the banks with money, Obama took office and suddenly Republicans decided they were fiscal conservatives again.

The paper that said a debt/gdp ratio over 100% created a death spiral (I believe it was more like 125%) had a problem: nobody else could reproduce their results. Didn’t matter, Republicans had to remind people that Obama was a spend and tax liberal.

Then an econ student asked the authors for their Excel spreadsheet (econ does everything in Excel; everything). He found a coding error in one of the formulas. Once corrected, the whole conclusion evaporated.

Even by this definition of recession, we’re not. Real wages are up since that time.

Wages have not been keeping up with productivity increases. They’re going to billionaires, not the workers.

How many US boomers died in Vietnam? How does that compare to a percentage of the total US boomer population at the time?

Is every 101 college class really just “here’s what all the terms mean in this field”? I suspect the answer is yes.

This is a good analysis, but it’s slightly different from OP’s statement.

Median real wages actually are up since 1979. It became something of a meme post-2008 to say that median wages have been flat since that time. That was true for a few years following the Great Recession, but they caught up and went quite a bit higher. It’s possible the numbers will cycle around to that again, but it’s not where we’re at right now.

What the graphs in the article are arguing is that wages over that time are much lower than they should be given productivity increases.

Let’s say you work for one hour making a widget, and you get $1 for that time. Your boss sells the widget for $5 and pockets the difference. Now there’s an increase in productivity, and you can make two widgets in the same hour. You still get paid $1 for that hour, but your boss is selling those two widgets for $10 total now. You’re not getting a raise just because of that productivity increase.

You might get a raise due to inflation. With 4% inflation, you get to make $1.04/hour, but your boss is now selling those widgets for $5.20 each. This is more or less the story since 1979.

That difference between productivity and real wages is what’s charted out above. It tells you exactly who the real moochers are in society.

This all tracks very neatly with a decline in union membership.

Might not need anything except economies of scale. But getting that is the problem.

Tablet sized eink displays found a niche that couldn’t quite be displaced by smartphones and regular tablets. That let them have a market for getting costs down.

There would need to be a similarly wide use case to get the price down on larger eink displays.

Be glad you don’t have VR. Those porn vids get big.