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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.




  • P(failure second try)=(2/3)^2 since you can eliminate one choice but 2 others are still wrong.

    To total:
    P(failure)=(3/4)2*(2/3)2=1/4
    1-1/4=0.75

    So the probability of passing is 0.75

    Edit:
    Remark: this problem is elegant if you attempt to calculate the passing as the complement of failure rather than enumerate all successes. Shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes with a clear head if you know the correct approach. If this was an college level intro probability exam question, it should be done the fast way since it’s meant to eat up your time otherwise.



  • 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.




  • 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?)



  • 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…



  • “Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving.” I don’t disagree with this, but the problem is that in the US there often aren’t any alternatives to cars to get around. And to be frank, I’m not gonna be walking around on the streets of LA (where I live, insert your crime-ridden US metropolitan here) unless I have good reason to. Getting hit by a car due to RTOR is the least of my worries as a pedestrian. I think a lot of change is necessary (such as locations of stores, etc) beyond safe streets to reduce the need for cars. For instance, if costs of living in the city were better, people wouldn’t need to use cars to commute. Maybe it’s a starting point to fixing our transportation issue but honestly I don’t see it.

    “A minute or two delay… actually doesn’t amount to very much, and that’s what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle.” You say this, and it might be the case the vast majority of the time, especially if the stoplights are separated by a large distance and there aren’t many cars, but traffic is a distributed problem and without seeing some sort of study that indicates this I don’t buy into it. During heavy traffic, if the cars from one intersection back up into a previous intersection due to reduced throughput I can’t imagine how an additional cycle is the only cost. Maybe this is just dependent on the traffic situation, because I have a natural bias to think towards traffic situations in LA (which don’t necessarily represent the rest of the US).

    “The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts.” Can you tell me who the authors of this paper are or maybe offer me a link? I would like to read it, thank you.

    “Studies on roundabouts being safer are… even more conclusive and abundant. I really can’t cite just one because damn, there’s so damn many.”
    Yeah so I’m pretty sure roundabouts are better in every way except for space. But if only getting more space would be easier, because surely we could just replace a lot of our roads with trains at that point right? I think roundabouts are a red herring because they literally don’t fit in most of these intersections (they don’t even have space for a left turn lane in many of the intersections I drive in). Heck, if we’re talking about space-throughput tradeoffs we could just theoretically make every single intersection a graded interchange and that would provide a huge amount of throughput (but this too is a red herring).


  • " All-way stops and, of course, roundabouts are both provably FAR safer often with no impact or a positive impact to overall congestion." This is a pretty big statement to make, and I was wondering if you could provide me the sources for this.

    “The city values keeping more cars moving faster over both safety and financial responsibility.”
    But isn’t keeping cars moving faster financially beneficial? From an energy perspective, needing to stop for every stop sign is way worse on fuel economy than going through a string of green lights and stopping every now and then. Don’t get me wrong, I think using cars as a main mode of transport is incredibly stupid, but I think there must be some tradeoff between time/money/resources wasted due to traffic and time/money/resources lost due to premature deaths or poor living quality due to (non)fatal accidents.