LetMeEatCake

@LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lina Khan: The most feared person in Silicon Valley is a 34-year-old in DC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

  AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
  From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
  After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

  I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No More Windows! Indian Defence Services are Switching to Linux: Indian Govt offices to use Linux distribution, replacing Microsoft Windows⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

  I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s smart, I don’t know how people will feel about it but it’s smart.

  The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It’s goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t read the article but I think they’re making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.

  BEVs were nigh impossible to purchase a year ago. Tesla’s MSRPs were ~$10k higher than they are today, not even accounting for the tax credit. Other manufacturers were seeing dealer markups of $10k+ on a new BEV. Demand for BEVs went through the roof as (1) supply chain effects meant the price difference between ICE and BEV went down, and (2) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices way up.

  Both of those factors have faded. EVs are still selling well, but manufacturers are going to need to find more ways to lower prices in order to stay competitive and to keep demand up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC delays US chip fab opening, says US talent is insufficient⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d be surprised at how many fabs there are in the US.

  • TI has something like a half dozen to a dozen, predominantly in Texas
  • Intel has more fabs than you can shake a stick at, mostly in Oregon but also Arizona
  • Samsung has a fab in Texas
  • GlobalFoundries exists in New York and Vermont
  • Micron is in Idaho
  • Wolfspeed has power electronics fabs in North Carolina and New York

  And so on. The US has a lot of fabs. For best countries in the world to build a new fab, the US would rank somewhere between first and third place — and I think there’s a strong argument for the answer being “first place.” Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, US fab jobs and experience are not almost entirely dominated by one or two companies. The US isn’t located in one of the most geopolitically risky parts of the developed world. The US has a huge population and plenty of money to put into fab expansion.

  The only issues here are (a) the US has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction projects, and (b) TSMC wants to pay workers like shit and treat them even worse, which doesn’t fly for technically skilled US workers. You can treat US technical workers workers poorly, but not as poorly as in much of Asia, and you definitely cannot do it without paying them very well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Renewables surprisingly "on track" to meet net zero by 2050⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  On the timescale of 27 years, grid-scale storage is going to be a complete non-issue. There’s already a decent amount of work being done at that level right now and battery tech has been improving at a consistent pace. Renewables can work quite well as-is with a good mix of location and source. Offshore wind is more consistent wind speeds, solar locations can mitigate light cloud coverage, solar output peaks during the times of greatest human use, and land based wind is typically dispersed over large areas.

  I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power, but as things stand it isn’t going to be necessary on these time tables. The value in nuclear is that it’s another thing we can build now without needing to wait ten years for battery prices to continue to decline or for manufacturing capabilities to ramp up. Building 10 GW of nameplate capacity wind+solar is great. Building 10 GW of nameplate wind+solar and 5 GW of nameplate nuclear is better! That’s the advantage of nuclear today, and we should fucking make use of it. That doesn’t make it mandatory in the long-term.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨3nm Zen 5 by 2024?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d expect Zen 5 in 2024. AMD has been on a decently consistent release schedule for Zen CPUs.

  Zen 1: Mar 2017
  Zen+: April 2018 (+13 months)
  Zen 2: July 2019 (+15 months)
  Zen 3: November 2020 (+16 months)
  Zen 4: September 2022 (+22 months)

  Lots of clustering around ~15 months, with Zen 4 as the major exception. Zen 4 had to run through the whole pandemic supply chain gauntlet to get released, which explains most of that delay to me. Especially since the supply chain issues hit semiconductors hardest. In theory that’d put Zen 5 in early 2024, but I’d guess somewhere from late spring through early fall.

  I want to know when the 3D cache variants of Zen 5 are coming out. I built a good Zen 3 system about a year before those were available. Don’t feel like I can justify the expense of going to a 5800X3D, but I’d love to have the 3D cache. Once the Zen 5 versions are out I hope to make a new system around that.