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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I wonder if it’s just so far outside the scope of what capitalists know to risk model that it’s not a compelling bet. The “it’s 20-50 years on” timelines are also a hard sell.

    If you win by delivering a reactor, you unlock so many knock-on effects.

    Does your business immediately get subsumed on national security grounds? Does a massive reshape of the energy market cut off your current gravy trains? How do you monetize “too cheap to meter”?

    Researchers don’t care. They’re in it for the cool project.



  • “Destroying a nation” does not inherently mean “genocide”.

    That was the historic norm. If you lost a war, you ended up under the flag of the conquering country and were expected to adopt at least some aspects of their culture. But in general, much of the civilian population survived. A thousand states vanished from Europe in the last millenium, but only a handful of times did it result in their entire populations being slaughtered/displaced.

    I suspect much of the time, it was more valuable to have more subjects than a lot of empty land with nobody to work it. Not like Russia has that problem already…


  • The worry is that it feels like we’re moving past a consumer-directed economy and not in the wholesome Soviet five-year-plan way.

    The almighty market has figured out how to collude and cram stuff that people don’t want down our throats (what consumer wanted everything to turn into an enshittified subscription?)

    Real people may not want AI slop, but if there’s enough of a sense it will make line go up, we’re getting slop.

    On the other hand, this factor might be the salvation: the current AI market is full of 2000-era-dot-com business models based on selling at a loss and making it up on the promise of global domination later. If the VC money dries up, and every “delve” costs whatever the actual amount it costs to drain the oceans and oilfields to pump into an array of Quadros plus sufficiently reimbuse all the ghouls that bankrolled the project, maybe the line doesn’t go up anymore.












  • To be honest, I’m amazed it took til Biden before we saw more pressure on TSMC as a flashpoint.

    Even if we’re on nominal good terms because they’re a capitalist democracy, nobody likes single points of failure (earthquakes and industrial disasters happen even without geopolitical tensions)

    But we’ve handled it miserably-- throw some money at Intel who can’t innovate out of their gilded cage anymore, and try to get a few TSMC facilities stateside-- when we should have been trying to completely diversify the supply chains with new players and new geographies.

    In fact, it’s amazing that we lost the concept of second sourcing. That ensured no one vendor held you hostage. Like 8 different firms made 8088s, on up to the 486, but after that it dried up fast. You saw a few IBM badged Cyrix 6x86s, but who else sells a pin-compatible Ryzen?

    I hope once China gets far enough up on the tech curve, they see distributing fab tech as a BRI programme. No reason your next bag of 74LS04s, or the 30-cent MCU in your thermostat, can’t be made on a 28nm fab in Burkina Faso.