fugacity

I just checked. Yup, you’re right. Funny though that Pat of all people claims it’s not dead lol

Moore’s law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain’t cheap. It’s not a coincidence we’re up to PLC flash… why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?

You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?

Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)

Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I’m afraid we aren’t even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won’t be holding my breath for it.

Maybe it’s a cartel but I don’t have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.

In my view (and maybe I’m wrong) there’s just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I’m not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol

Moore’s law hasn’t died, if you mean number of transistors per area. Linear scaling to transistor counts has.

Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don’t think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn’t cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.

We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren’t willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they’re not gonna price things for cheaper because they can’t survive that way.

Hence my apology for the imprecise language. I meant what you said by social democracy, not a social economic system. Anyways, if we’re being pedants, there are no true socialists or capitalists in today’s markets. They’re all mixed-market economies.

When I say socialist (and what is more accurately social democracy), I first think of healthcare, then I think of transit, then of education, and then of utilities. These are things that the US certainly could do better.

I think the reason is important. If you stick to something because you think it is the right thing to do, that is conviction. If you stick to something because you think you must continue as you have already invested effort into, that is sunk cost. The point that I’m trying to make, that perhaps I have not worded well, is that you must act with conviction, because if you do not do what you think is right, you either not do anything, or do what you think is wrong. Sure, you may be wrong at the time, and you should be open to reflection, and not be prey to sunk cost.

But coming up with convenient excuses to avoid doing what you think is inconvenient but right is not how leaders behave.

And in this context (if that is what you mean), it is definitely not evident that supporting Ukraine is a strategy that won’t work.

Forgive my previous imprecise language, but isn’t this merely a matter of semantics? I was under the impression that the major countries in Europe are socialist (or if you prefer, social democracies, hence what I meant but European “socialism”), and they drive policy in the EU. But as the top comment said, they have agency to do things on their own behalfs.

See but that’s the problem. Instead of pointing out specifics and being clear you’ve said a whole lot of nothing and just gone back to your echo chamber. Shame on you, not for disgreeing with me, but acting holier-than-thou, walking away in arrogance with your nose held high.

Call me delusional, but despite electing an agent of Russia the previous election cycle, I think the US still managed to give more aid to Ukraine when they needed it. Don’t tell me that the EU pledged more aid than the US has after the fact. If the US didn’t put its foot forward in the first place I have a real hard time believing the EU would have done anything. And yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be giving Isreal weapons to bomb the living shit out of Palestinian civilians. And Europe is entirely right when they call us out on it. But since when is Europe willing to accept refugees from Palestine? Their words don’t mean much to me. It’s always posturing and NIMBY and hoping someone else does it while acting superior.

For the record, the fact that Trump didn’t overthrow the government means that it’s not a dictatorship - need I remind you that Trump was 3 years ago? And anyways, despite how horrible of a person and leader Trump is, he somehow still had better foreign policy regarding China than Europe did.

If China invades Taiwan, what will Europe do? I have a hard time they’ll do anything but thank the heavens they had TSMC build a fab in Europe while conveniently waiting to see what happens: if Japan and the US are able to help Taiwan hold, they’ll open the floodgates, but otherwise they’ll turn the other way.

Yeah, moving forward might be the wrong way to put it. But I’m not impressed at all with bystanders that point fingers at people going the wrong way when they’re at least trying. And if the world wants to literally put their money where their mouth is, maybe they should be adopting the Euro instead of the US Dollar as their world reserve currency (why, if other countries hate our capitalism so much, are they so willing to eat our shit when we print money on their dime?)

If you move without conviction, then does it matter if you are right or wrong? You will never learn from your mistakes.

As an American, growing up I used to think so highly of Europe and their better socialist policies (I even wanted to move there), but honestly their spinelessness when dealing with dictatorships has really disillusioned me. Say what you will about the US military-industrial complex, or even how capricious our current aid situation is with Ukraine, but even when our international policy is clearly wrong or misguided, I do think we move forward with real conviction unlike Europe…

Well, the devil is in the details. People like you, who has actually figured out how to use an adblocker properly for YouTube, and me, who is willing to actually pay for YouTube premium (you’re welcome for the subsidy), surely form a small proportion of the actual number of YouTube content consumers.

Maybe I’m wrong, but my view is that the majority of users just want to watch videos without having ads and they aren’t willing to devote time (for adblockers) or money (for subscription services) and are completely ignorant that they are the product regardless. And those users act like they are entitled to content and that leaving YouTube is somehow significant to the big picture.

In a sense I agree with that piekay though. If they can’t serve me targeted ads on YouTube they lose that money trying to develop technology to track me in that regard. How much money that is I guess is hard to say, since the tracking on YouTube certainly can carry over to other parts of Alphabet.

Perhaps YouTube gets all their content for free, but it certainly isn’t free to transcode video, host it reliably, and distribute it while moderating it (given how bad Twitter is right now I’m sure they have a decent number of measures in place, even if they aren’t even “good” at it). And if it was remotely easy, believe me, there would be a lot of competition in this space.

Yes, I make Alphabet x dollars richer (or really, I make YouTube operate at a slightly lesser cost) every month by paying a subscription. And actually, I’m okay with it. A tiny cut of it goes to content creators and I get a nice piece of tech. And I support the branch of Alphabet that has technology that I think is incredibly useful and beneficial. If there’s a content creator that I like especially then I’ll support them directly.

The reality of it is that things cannot be free. Or at least it seems that way, because we have not been able to provide a free video hosting service that doesn’t take advantage of its content creators or consumers.

If you read around you’ll find (perhaps surprisingly to you) that YouTube operates at a loss. So in response to your points:

1. You can pay to get the ads removed. They make less money off of you when they can’t serve you ads, and I’m sure they’re trying to operate at less of a loss.

2. Alphabet is a public company, and it must release certain information about YouTube. Anyways, I’m pretty sure they aren’t using the money to directly line the shareholder profits. The reality of it is that it’s probably just another arm that Alphabet uses as part of its monopolistic tech deathgrip, so it’s not gonna be a straightforward computation. Maybe Disney could be used as a metaphor here?

If you don’t wanna pay to support that, I don’t exactly blame you. But practically, I don’t really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return. Either you eat ads, you pay for a subscription, or you become the product (unfortunately this last point might be true irregardless).

They’re definitely still tracking their premium users, I agree. But my counterpoint is, what business, online or not, doesn’t track me? If I go out and buy something at a retail store I’m gonna bet my ass I’m being tracked. If I don’t want to be tracked, then I should be making sure information I consider to be sensitive is not being exposed. If there is no reasonable expectation to privacy in the public, then I think it’s fit that there’s no reasonable expectation to privacy when I’m surfing the internet.

Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don’t get it. If they can’t sell your data and can’t serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There’s so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it’s not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don’t think it’s just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.

People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn’t welcome them. And then they get upset that they don’t want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I’m willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren’t. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don’t expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.

If you aren’t willing to eat ads, and you aren’t willing to be the product, and you aren’t willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you’re entitled to content?

Happy they got the Taiwan part correct at least.