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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

    In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

    Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

    I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?


  • The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

    People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

    Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!














  • The real thing that matters is if they reach “good enough”. 7nm/5nm/3nm is a useful technical milestone, and a measure of the quality of their tooling, but at the end of the day, the question is if they can make parts that fulfills a real product need without foreign dependencies.

    Size is not everything-- don’t forget when Intel stumbled on 10nm repeatedly, yet they were still printing money with 14nm+++++ because the process was “good enough” to deliver a chip people wanted.

    I also have to wonder if the music is going to slow down for some of the IC industry soon. Yeah, we can feed every transistor that can be fabbed into AI/ML, but flagship smartphones are getting both expensive and ridiculous. Are enough people buying a $1500 phone, whose main feature is that it folds into an origami crane, that it can drive new process nodes? Or will a mature 7nm design provide enough performance and battery life for 90% of customers? What’s the current killer app for more than a $200 phone? Maybe the camera, but image sensors have completely different manufacturing constraints.



  • The less economic and tech dependencies China has on the West, the more free they are to act on their own accord.

    The US is concerned about Taiwan-- they wrote a blank cheque of support because it was a DeMoCrAcY back when China was a far weaker economy and military, and it will now be very difficult and expensive to stop reunification. Using TSMC as a shield is no doubt part of policy-- “invade and we blow the tech world back to 2010” is a viable threat until other countries get 7/5/3nm.

    But their fear is more general; they are losing their economic and geopolitical dominance, and one of their big bulwarks-- advanced tech-- is giving way. They’re trying to hype up the fear and concern. Expect a lot more sabre rattling by the West.



  • The thing you must understand about /r/mk is that it was largely sheperded by a man who was driven from the other major mechanical keyboard forums for being too much of a self-promoter. It’s possible the entire organization still has residual brittle-ego.

    If you want proper keyboard discussion, do check Deskthority; the content is a lot richer than “here’s a photo of my board which is just a Taco Bell permutation of the current popular PCB/case/caps/switches”


  • The instance I use is ran by a bunch of Unix nerds, so I’d expect them to wear their uptime as a badge of honour. I suspect there’s probably a sweet spot for instance size, where it doesn’t hit the biggest scaling problems, but big enough to justify the ongoing effort, rather than obviously being a one-man shop that will vanish when his cheque to Digital Ocean bounces.