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crumpled 3 days ago

I wish I could look forward and say, "prices will go down again" I don't see when or how. I hope I'm wrong.

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sva_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

RAM prices are crazy now, but they always tended to go up and down in waves over the years.

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PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well the bubble could pop, but...

as much as we are blaming the pandemic, and the crypto and AI bubbles I think Moore's law was really about transistors getting exponentially cheaper not just exponentially smaller. If you can't afford them it doesn't matter how big or small they are!

I think the EUV transition broke the long-term cost decreases and we might be seeing the end of progress in electronics and computing unless there is some fundamental change.

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oliculipolicula 3 days ago | parent [-]

On a wide enough horizon, litho (& MRI) machines are nothing more than a source of entertainment?

Narrower horizon: https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v38y2010i9p5174-5188.ht...

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PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think China came to the conclusion that the French got it right when they standardized on the Hualong One [1] rather than AP-1000. I did break out the champagne the other day when I heard they actually installed a BWRX 300 module at Darlington the other day!

As for electronics manufacturing it's believable we see something entirely different in 20 years (SQUID? true 3-d integration?) but I expect a rough patch for most of the rest of my life. Not like I won't have enough retro games to play for my entertainment.

Just got back giving from Casey Handmer some tough love over (1) it is not commercially interesting to make methane on Earth and (2) it is not feasible to make make methane on Mars unless you can make everything else. Handmer is a tragic figure like Klein, except Klein's tragedy is a tragedy for us all whereas Handmer and I are the only ones crying over his tragedy because I could use a buddy to talk to about the interests we share who is worth talking to.

If Musk was the hard man he pretended to be he'd be interested in my notes on how to attain manufacturing autarky after the future event the Club of Rome warned you about. But he's not so he's not. He gets to date the models from Looker [3] but which witch can resist a pet therianthrope? [2]

[1] ... of which, oddly, there are two different designs!

[2] ... sorry gsf_emergency_\d but a good parody deserves a parody; is @cindy your sister?

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker (I was so dazzled by that LOOKER Gun, my second favorite sci-fi gun of all time, that I had to watch the movie a few times to realize it really is just as bad as everybody else says it is)

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crumpled 2 days ago | parent [-]

Man did I google a lot of things in this comment. Paul, you're an interesting person.

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PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent [-]

And you didn't even ask me what my favorite sci-fun gun is?

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crumpled 2 days ago | parent [-]

I didn't... Is it the one from Existenz? The one from Portal is pretty cool.

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PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent [-]

Nah, it's the gun the psyclos have in Battlefield Earth; it looks like a piece of junk like some power tools mated with a pistol, it seems really painful to get hit with but like the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun it doesn't do tissue damage when set to stun.

https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Battlefield_Earth

https://3dprintedprops.com/shop/looker-light-gun/

	▲	oliculipolicula 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Can't say I have an emo attachment to any gun--- but I'll admit a couple make me pause the way avantgardey prime my third eye to underserved sources of attraction. Eg The Doodad (after Gibson, neither 0% nor 100% lethal, cf Venezuela, "Middle America"). PP gave me retro-pause marvelling at the Chinese supplying precursors to the WestHem factions (existenz). kinda vibe-prophetic. My best take on what you meant by the tragedy Handmer is that he has the mike (and loves to drop it whenever he can)--- but the tragedy of the rest of us here is that we don't quite. ?. And Martian ice caps? Just realized I'd never connected face to name, so I'd bounced off his Dwarkesh clips BC 1st impression was "fake genZ". Oops. Now admiring the ambiguities in "rough patch" and "Cindy". My takeaway from the French essay was that there was nothing stopping others from learning from one's mistakes (ie "without doing") Edit: https://youtu.be/1aQrPK9ulD0 https://lethalindisguise.org/crowd-control-weapons/acoustic-... https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a32892398/... Very ICE, also vibe-prophetic Edit 2 (reel vs real) The RI <-> SV Met <-> Dems (sorry if too heroic but no one else wants to be official with stubbers) Klepts <-> "Trumpians" Stubbers <-> DSA Edit 3: ah so it's an IMI Micro Uzi

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mcmoor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My hope is that whatever makes hardware prices go down over last decades would eventually work again now. I guess CPU is a dead end, but why not RAM and storage?