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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • There might be public displeasure about it, but I think behind the scenes India buying Russia oil is expected and at least to some degree accepted (or possibly even wanted).

    The bigger thing is Russia not generating profits from those sales, which I am speculating is not the case at the prices India is buying at. The upside of Russian oil still being available to the world market is keeping the prices lower, something Europe is very much interested in.






  • I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

    The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

    The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

    The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.


  • This is their best chance to escape their coming economic trap. They control so few actual resources beyond labor.

    Is that actually the case? I am not sure how many resources china has in their own country (I assume there are a few with it being this vast), but I think they are tackling the resource problem more so with their investments in Africa and other poor countries. And because of the war Russia also has fewer countries to sell to besides China.

    I think the true longterm problem is actually with the cheap labour force you mention. As the standard of living rises, so do wages. And more importantly they’ll experience the same demographic shift other developed countries are currently experiencing with an aging population. With the difference that it’ll be worse for them due to the one child polic.




  • That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.

    But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?

    This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.



  • Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

    I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.


    Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

    There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

    Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

    You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

    And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.




  • I think you’ll need to give some more information to receive good advice:

    • What’s your budget

    • What’s your use case? Just web browsing, light office work or something more demanding like gaming or editing?

    • What form factor? Want a larger screen or something lighter and more compact? Touch screen/convertible yes or no?

    I’m nowhere near tech-savvy so it has to be easy to use,

    Easy to use or easy to repair? As far as use goes pretty much every windows laptop will be feel the same to use, same as with apple. I mean it is the same operating system, just depends on what you are used to, but neither are complicated. It’s only Linux where you have a larger variety of variants, some easier to use, others geared more towards advanced users. Bur you haven’t indicated that you specifically want to run Linux.

    I want something that is built to last, as opposed to certain (looking at you, Apple) devices that are desinged to become unusable within a next couple of years.

    Generally laptops aimed at businesses are more durable than consumer lines. Don’t go too cheap unless you are buying used business laptops. And if something is heavilu leaning towards thin and light, then usually it is at the expense of some durability.

    Apple is actually decently durable and I’ve seen quite a few MacBooks running for over a decade while still being ok. Where they fall short is repairability, when something does break and their lowest specs paired with no real way to upgrade later (especially with the newer models that don’t even have SSDs that can be swapped) is bad for future proofing, if demands change. And they make you pay through your nose for reasonable configurations.