Spyke

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i used to scrupulously edit my spelling and grammar mistakes online, but now i keep them because they prove I'm human.

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I had written SG1 off as silly for so long until getting hooked on season 2. Definitely a "don't judge a book by its cover".

Also the variety of stories worked so well. That said, nothing will top "How far is Alaris anyway?" /Several billion miles O'Neill/ "That's gotta be a record."

Or the free tickets to the "Virginia Dialogs or something like that"

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Valve Says It Can't Negotiate With RAM Makers At All On Price

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It felt like Apple almost accidentally burst the bubble a few months (or was it a year?) ago when Apple stated their intent to just lease or license one of the leading models. I am not an economist but it definitely looks like they are following the same strategy as Berkshire Hathaway with Apple's board planning to buy on the "dip" everyone outside is seeing as inevitable.

Strategically it would make sense for Apple if they not only extracted steep concessions also gouged out more control over Samsung and Apple's fabs.

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Valve Says The Companies Making RAM Give Them A Price And If They Say No, They ‘Never Talk To Us Again’

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Oh wow, reading the wiki you linked, looks like that one exec really learned their lesson \s

On 5 April 2006, Sun Woo Lee, Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain with the US Government for his involvement in the price fixing conspiracy.[5] Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014

edit/update: Oh, wow so Sun Woo Lee actually really lucked out as Korea focused more on making an example of the Samsung heir apparent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jae-yong

8 months in prison sucks, I totally concede that. Yet literally the deal they made looks like they were asked "Would you take the fall and go to prison for 8 months and then get paid millions per year afterward?"

fuck_ai

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I sat behind someone on a plane who was using ChatGPT to write the materials and remarks for a sustainability and climate conference.

Reddit's LLM powered filter (I am guessing Gemini) is interesting. I jokingly said to constantly bump your car into some else's car just hard enough to leave a mark but not create serious damage. The trigger may have been my use of the phrase "love tap" as I was instantly dinged a 3 day "ban" for advocating physical violence against another human being.

Meanwhile with another service I posted a quote from a 19th century historical figure I hadn't know was a socialist and mysteriously the quote disappeared after I clicked submit. I freely admit my grasp of "good" grammar and English may not be that secure, but I am confident the text was there, and then suddenly it was gone.

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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says

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The modern take of a disturbed idiom is "There is more than one way to microwave a cat!" (disclaimer please don't actually do this).

At or near the bottom of complexity you would think it hard to fuck up "compress this directory and verify they are backed up before deleting the originals" but apparently some of these models have a RNG triggered Uno reverse card so "delete the originals, verify they are backed up, and compress this directory". Also that wasn't a mistake, maybe Claude will infer "they" is a specific set of files, but another model might decide you meant all the dot files at ~/?

Joking aside, the devil is in the details which makes me think even more time will be sunk finding out the RC Cola bottom shelf AI model does things just a bit too differently than Claude.

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Valve Says It Can't Negotiate With RAM Makers At All On Price

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I am willing to bet $10 that Apple is going to be the only one of the FANG gang that survives this mostly unscathed. Apple is at the end of the day a hardware company and when everything goes to shit, they're going to be able extract some brutal concessions from TSMC and Samsung. Yes Apple has thrown more than a few billion in, but they still have their ocean of cash largely untapped.

The way things are going with Nvidia and AMD abandoning their partners and Intel continuing to flop around without any semblance of a plan; Apple is going to be in an amazing position strategically.

Meanwhile Micron, Samsung, TSMC, and the other big fab I keep forgetting the name of are going to have these massive holes in their spreadsheets as "guaranteed" orders evaporate. Very likely going to be more than a few suicides with those unfortunates who didn't tap out before the music stopped.

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Fetterman casts only Democratic ‘no’ vote as Senate passes measure to block US action against Iran

Fetterman ran on a platform that "He's not Dr Oz!" and he's done amazingly well at that!

Unfortunately the root of the problem with Democrat vs Republican is that while the GOP seems to have rock solid blackmail on its representatives, the DNC is a circus.

We've got AOC and Bernie who have nothing in common with Chuckles or the Democrats that voted for more money for ICE's monthly subscription of keep people in cages and randomly terrorize people. Fetterman is indeed an asshole but again it was him or the Dr addicted to being on television so much that he tanked his career Oz (I believe that is his middle name).

The only way out of this chaos is if we the people of the USA can pay attention long enough to get ranked choice voting implemented in enough states. Otherwise even if you can get the circus to all agree on anything, Jill Stein will come out of her crypt and siphon enough votes over to the Green party.

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Valve Says It Can't Negotiate With RAM Makers At All On Price

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My experiments with some of the code assist models is they can be an amazing productivity boost, but only if you are not greedy.

If I ask the bot "Please make me this data structure with this list of parameters" its probably 99% perfect. Moving up, the sweet spot is closer to "Make me this module of code that matches this ABI/API". Alternatively "Hey can you make this entire feature?" I will get a 8000 line of code blob that may or may not work. Even worse if I get really greedy I will get a 8000 file project filled with 8000 lines of code that is most definitely going to start the robot uprising.

Giving the junior and midlevel code monkeys access to AI coding tools is an amazing way to generate a mountain of slop the senior and most expensive code monkey gets trapped trying to decipher while the junior monkeys make even more shit that needs to be dealt with.

Boil it down, if we make centaurs of humans leading AI it will definitely work better than a reverse centaur that will confidently tell a gig driver to drive off a cliff.

memes

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The YouTube Scene Right Now

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Unfortunately a lot of channels have resorted to that because of the changes to algorithm and focus on shorts versus longer format. Youtube's short video audience is huge, the shorts are cheaper due to size, and I guess they don't pay the short video creators comparatively the same?

At this point if I see "It's over!", "I am done" or "Some other dramatic but not relevant text" I often just unsub.

Watching Veritasium's staff swapping titles and thumbnails for the same video trying to find an audience is a bit sad as that company has put a lot of effort into making great videos.

B1M knows their target audience very well and I haven't seen many if not any clickbait titles for their stuff.

One bummer is that I unsubbed from a channel (not naming him, dude's just trying to get by) I had been following for years because they had a very poorly disguised infomercial about a giant UPS for appliances. This was the third time they have done something like this so I called it.