DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

The difference being the Soviet-captured Nazis were forced at gunpoint to contribute to their R&D projects, being treated as prisoners before either being imprisoned or executed. NATO made its first supreme commander an SS member, put so many Nazis in the West German government that there were actually a higher percentage of them there than in the actual Third Reich, and let von Braun live a long and comfortable life as a free man.

“It wasn’t real capitalism!”

“The United States, too, has a single party system. But in typical American extravagance they have two of them.”

While there is something understandable about partially wishing for it, I don’t think anyone is going to lead a genocidal strategic bombing campaign against the United States to level every manmade structure taller than knee height before promptly having 95% of the planet embargo them for 75 years, so I doubt the US can emulate the DPRK’s economic situation too well.

My country, which has killed more people than any other geopolitical entity in human history and is ruled by a literal monarchy, is clearly free and egalitarian, unlike that horrific autocratic nightmare of…

checks notes

…a tiny Central American nation that’s been routinely bombed and exploited for its entire existence.

I’m begging liberals to remember the one cool thing they ever did, which was chopping off their monarchs’ heads, and commit to that. Just that. Come on now, this is an argument that’s been solved for like 200 years now: monarchs and aristocrats are dogshit and deserve to be forcibly removed from their positions of wealth and authority.

and packaging this into a system that meets the scale and reliability requirements to make it commercially viable hasn’t been reproduced to date

Your overall point about EUV being difficult isn’t wrong, but this line is really where the typical liberal forecasting of China’s capabilities fall apart: they don’t give a shit about it being commercially viable, they give a shit about having the industrial capacity.

The reason why EUV is more or less a cartel monopoly in the West is that it’s a cobbled together collection of scientific principles that work well enough that the first few companies that figured it out could make insane profits off of it, and then proceeded to patent the shit out of it to prevent anyone else from doing so. The engineering behind EUV is… not great from a reliability standpoint, most notably the fact that EUV has an average downtime of something like 10% (meaning your fabs are offline 10% of the year for maintenance), in large part because you’re shooting little droplets of liquid metals with a high intensity laser which tends to splatter and require cleanup. There are potential alternatives to this process for creating the kind of UV light you need for lithography, such as particle accelerators, that are theoretically superior but the R&D into those alternatives costs tens of billions of dollars with no guarantees that any of it will ever become profitable, so Western capital doesn’t bother trying.

China doesn’t have that profit restriction. It needs the ability to produce bleeding edge chips to remove its reliance on an increasingly hostile West, and it has not only the engineering and scientific power to brute force that kind of R&D but the ability to devote a sizeable portion of its national resources to doing so. It doesn’t matter if its profitable, it matters if they’re able to decouple a critical industry from the West and ignore sanctions accordingly, and that has infinitely more value than a shareholder dividend, so they will put the resources into doing so and, inevitably, they will figure it out. And from what we’ve seen over the past 2 years since the trade wars have started, they’re not only succeeding but doing so ahead of expectations, in large part because increasing tensions have made life a living hell for Chinese scientists and engineers abroad working in these industries due to racism and suspicions of spying which push them to emigrate back to China and lend their expertise there instead.

In 20 years, chips made in mainland China will be competitive or even superior to their Western counterparts unless the West undoes 50 years of neoliberal rot overnight and replicates what the CPC is doing for silicon manufacturing or the CPC collapses and China experiences the same shock doctrine that the former Soviet states did in the 90s, and neither of those outcomes look likely right now.

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up of it being any good.

Time doesn’t slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you’ve slowed down, but from where you’re sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we’re using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. “The speed of light” as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn’t change; it’s a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of “I 'unno.” The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we’ve tried so far. They’re still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there’s always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading “Here There Be Dragons”.

Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.

Sounds like a skill issue to me /s

“I’ll have it figured out by lunch, probably.”

You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.

So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.

And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.

Only the most sane and functional economic system.

The answer is that the eagles are theologically angels in LotR and both sapient and very susceptible to the Ring, and having a flying Sauron-replacement is not an improvement.

Parry this you fucking casual

Train gang needs no justification

If there isn’t something in the Geneva conventions about this sentence, there should be.

Unlikely. Microsoft is now first and foremost a cloud provider and has been putting a lot of time and effort into their own Linux offerings, and desktop Windows just isn’t the hypercritical lynchpin for their bottom line that it used to be.

There’s the other half of this problem, which is that the kind of code that LLMs are relatively good at pumping out with some degree of correctness are almost always the bits of code that aren’t difficult to begin with. A sorting algorithm on command is nice, but if you’re working on any kind of novel implementation then the hard bits are the business logic which in all likelihood has never been written before and is either sensitive information or just convoluted enough to make turning into a prompt difficult. You still have to have coders who understand architecture and converting requirements into raw logic to do that even with the LLMs.