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Courts and legal obligations are to a certain extent irrelevant at this point. There are plenty of illegal ways that Trump can fuck over Google and face no consequences.

e.g. he had Colbert fired (and who knows what else) by threatening to block the Paramount/Skydance merger


> Trump cannot instruct Google to

Tim Apple and the other tech CEO constantly groveling at Trump’s feet indicates that he might be able to do that.

Just like threatening TV networks about having their licenses revoked of blocking mergers unless they fire the people making fun of him on TV (of course with slightly mixed success)


It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.

Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.

When an organization reaches a certain size it starts behaving more like an insect colony than individuals at most levels. There is a lot of exploration that occurs, much of it is unfruitful, yet still enough future resources are discovered for it to continue and expand.

But I do. Often based on direct personal experience.

Alternative ways of working

Intelligent individuals tend to make rational decisions very often this doesn’t result in rational behavior on the organizational level.

Large corporations like Microslop, Google, Meta etc. were frequently behave like headless chickens


There is hardly any need to import food from anywhere besides the EU, though. Which would be rather low risk.

Well Switzerland is effectively in the EU (economically if not politically) so same standard mostly apply anyway.

Economically it would make more sense to import food from France, Spain etc. it would reduce the cost of living for the overwhelming majority of people with limited negative economic impact.

There is a distinction between racism and xenophobia, no need to assign the same label to everything. i.e. the thing about Italians was cultural an educated immigrant from Northern Italy would have been considered as white as a French (not that there a significant number of those in the US) at least.

Technically yes, but usually I think there’s a racist undercurrent to xenophobia.

The US stopped accepting refugees recently… except white South Africans. I’d say these people share no more culture or values with the average American than a Central American refugee. Maybe less. I’d much rather party with a bunch of Central or South Americans than a bunch of Apartheid lost causers.

If ethnically white people were pouring across the US border I don’t think many of our immigration hawks would care much, even if some were committing crimes.


There's certainly a racist undercurrent to generalizing Afrikaner emigrants as "Apartheid lost causers."

Certainly there is no reason other than Apartheid concerns to leave South Africa for the USA... none at all...


Maybe its a bit like Brexit, i.e. not rational immigration being one of the major issues when it did nothing to reduce the immigration of (non-white) people from third countries and EU migration was rapidly decreasing anyway.

It has slowed down massively for CPUs at least. e.g. modern CPUs are hardly more than 3-5x faster than those from 10 years ago. There is zero reason to think won’t happen over the next 10 years again.

This isn't an crazy statement (cpu performance metrics have mostly stalled their meteoric rise from prior to the 2000s)

But it also doesn't capture the entire picture.

CPU metrics mostly stalled for two reasons.

1. There wasn't much demand for the extra capacity. Even low end cpus from a decade ago are plenty capable for just browsing the web and typing up documents. It takes a novel use-case to drive demand again (or a desire to do things like play new games).

2. The interest in CPU development shifted in response to mobile. Given point #1 and the state of battery development.... the blocker wasn't "performance". It was "performance per watt". And on that metric you couldn't be more wrong.

Since ~2005, MIPS per watt has improved 15x to 30x.

Also - fun news is that the traditional CPU pipeline really isn't the bottleneck for AI workloads. So we're going to see incredible interest in things like memory bandwidth and other inference related hardware bottlenecks, which haven't already been optimized.


> There wasn't much demand for the extra capacity. Even low end cpus from a decade ago are plenty capable for just browsing the web and typing up documents.

It stalled before the rise of PC-as-Internet-portal.

I bought a high end PC in 2003, and 5 years later the PCs were not much faster - probably not even 2x. Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.

It stalled because scaling got a lot more challenging. Not because of lack of demand.


Yes, but it only stalled along a single dimension - Single core clock speed.

I was building gaming machines in the early 2000s, I absolutely remember the 4ghz wall that cpus hit.

But it wasn't a real wall... because we then got one of the arguably most influential processors ever in the Core 2 duo. Which... blew the limit away by giving you two processors clocked at 2.93 GHz each.

And honestly, even then - it was lack of demand (we could go to 4+ghz, but we didn't want to pay the power bill for the rest of the system - the planned pentium 5 was 7-10ghz on paper, but they canceled the project because keeping it fed and cool was too hard for personal desktop machines).

Of Note - we did reach these speeds on consumer hardware (ex - in 2012, Andre Yang hit 8.794Ghz on an AMD FX-8350)

So it was never "impossible" to keep scaling. It just wasn't worth it compared to going multi-core.

---

And maybe it's because I was in my formative years at this time, but you're off by 5+ years with this:

> Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.

Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004. Wikipedia was released in 2001. Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s. What do you think the damn 2000s dot-com bubble crash was?

at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).


> Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004

Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and so many others predate Gmail by years.

> Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s.

One of them. People still used non-browser apps for all kinds of things: Media consumption (people didn't watch movies on Youtube), Office (Google Docs was very much a niche thing for many years), photo-editing (lots of pirated versions of Photoshop/Lightroom years after the iPhone release), etc.

Most non-mail, non-social media, non-shopping stuff people do on the web these days was a dedicated SW from the vendor in those days. Want to make a photobook? Download this Windows binary and set it up there. It will then communicate with the server for the order (no browser utilized).

> at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).

Spring chicken! My first online experience was on a 340 baud modem :-)


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