> The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again
Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say.
There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them.
We also can't be certain that the DRAM makers aren't capitalizing on this opportunity because they can. Remember: all of them are convicted monopolists. As in actual prison time convicted. And fined. And lost civil lawsuits. Multiple times.
I just can't see AI paying enough of a premium on HBM to justify the DRAM spikes. Frankly I can't see the volume either. Wafer starts on DRAM are dramatically bigger than you are probably imagining. DRAM is in practically everything these days. AI servers is but a drop in the bucket. 10% of the market? Yeah right, if its 4% I'd be shocked. And you are telling me a shift of 4% of wafers to HBM is driving these prices and shortages?
I humbly suggest if you look at the numbers something smells funny.
Disclaimer: none of us has access to the actual data, a lot of it is inferred by industry players. Some are well connected and usually accurate but that is not evidence. Therefore it is possible this is a genuine market action and nothing nefarious is going on.
HBM is not normal memory. It uses a lot more area per bit and has lower yield too. So a Gb of baseline DRAM and a Gb of HBM are very different measurements, the latter equates to so much more in terms of volume.
> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.
You can for the destination. That's the whole reason you need the "&": to tell the shell the destination is not a named file (which itself could be a pipe or socket). And by default you don't need to specify the source fd at all. The intent is that stdout is piped along but stderr goes directly to your tty. That's one reason they are separate.
And for those saying "<" would have been better: that is used to read from the RHS and feed it as input to the LHS so it was taken.
My question is: who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
> who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
For this deal, it is:
- ~$57b Debt financing: Bank of America, Citigroup, Apollo
- ~$46b Equity backing: Ellison's dad, RedBird Capital Partners
- Sovereign wealth funds on the equity side: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi
They keep financing these deals so they must be making money on them but there is so much value destruction in so many of these cases. Someone has to be left holding the bag of hot garbage in the end so who is taking the loss?
We know private equity offloads the debt onto the walking corpse and usually pays themselves huge fees and bonuses for their "assistance". So it is clear how they make money. I just don't get how the banks make out.
US style plugs and derivatives (and Australian, Japanese, Brazilian, etc) - all invented by Hubbell - are "good enough".
Are they objectively good? No. Do they regularly fail, cause fires, or shock people? No.
Even my kids when young understood how to grip the plug without touching the metal contacts and to this day still have not been shocked. In theory can something fall and hit the pins just right to cause a short? Sure. You could also get struck by lightning. In practice it just doesn't happen very often.
For the US/North American NEMA style there are some improvements and some clever things about them. Modern receptacles have shutter doors that stop you from putting anything into the holes unless the ground pin or neutral pin unlocks it first. Many plugs also cover the rear part of the hot/neutral with plastic so if the plug is not fully inserted there is no exposed metal.
The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Similarly the 240v version of this plug (6-15/6-20) has the same property: 15amp and 20amp versions. The 15 amp is two horizontal blades. The 20 amp is one horizontal + 1 vertical but swapped places compared to the 120v version. I do wish more builders installed the 240v receptacles in kitchens in the US. There is no technical reason we can't have higher power kettles and whatnot. If code required these in garages and kitchens more appliances would be available for them.
(I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v. Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.)
The huge advantage of these plugs is compatibility. We already have them. The cost to change designs is massive. The benefit extremely small. It just isn't worth doing.
Note: The 240v NEMA plugs I am referencing are not "dryer plugs" which are physically much* larger and designed for much higher amp loads in the 30-60 range. The 6-15/6-20 are literally identical to the standard 120v plugs but with different blade orientations. They were designed to support 240v appliances in everyday use since all of North America is dual voltage. In practice 240v is only ever used for large appliances like ovens so the 6 series doesn't get much use which is a bit of a shame.
> The plugs also prevent mixing voltage and amperage. The typical two vertical blades (5-15) are for 15 amp circuits. 20 amp circuits (5-20) have one horizontal + one vertical blade. The receptacle has a T shaped slot to match - that way you can plug a low-amp device into a high-amp circuit but not the reverse.
Alternatively you can just run everything at 230V and then you don't need a million different plugs as any wall socket can provide up to 3.5 kW, enough for any home appliance except for the most power hungry ovens and IH stoves.
> Alternatively you can just run everything at 230V
Sure and everyone can just stop using Python 2.x tomorrow right?
Backwards compatibility is a big deal. Even moreso when it involves physical infrastructure. who wants to pay billions upon billions of dollars to make the change? How long will it take to roll trucks on all those linemen and electricians to convert/retrofit everything? Does the customer pay? The government?
And at the end of it everything is just the same as it was before. There's no huge benefit to be had for doing it.
That's why I said I wished we had more use of the 240v NEMA plugs. So we could begin supporting higher power appliances over time without some huge switchover expense.
For that matter I wish 3-phase was more available. I have a small machine shop in my garage that would greatly benefit from it.
Rewiring an entire country is a wee bit expensive. Even if the wires are rated to 300V (they usually are), transformers would have to be replaced, and they cost quite a bit. Also different sockets and circuit breakers, and a whole lot of billable hours by licensed electricians.
(But changing the voltage is easy compared to changing the mains frequency. Japan still has to live with 50Hz in one half of the country, and 60Hz in the other.)
The transformers are fine as they are. We already have 240VAC in the typical US home: Two legs of 120v, with one being 180° out of phase. That part exists and it works fine -- the big industrious parts of the infrastructure are already supplying 240v.
US 240v is a bit different than the way the rest of the world usually does it, where they have 1 leg of 240v and 1 neutral, but AFAICT that detail is not a big deal for the stuff that actually uses electricity.
The wire itself, broadly-speaking, is fine.
Suppose we decided that tomorrow at noon to begin the move to 240v.
We just refactor our breaker panels and update to some new objectively-good whiz-bang outlet format (because we would certainly never borrow existing designs from anywhere else on the planet; we in the States have a big problem with Not Invented Here when it comes to policy), and finally get rid of twist-in Edison light bulb sockets, and that part is done.
But then all kinds of stuff doesn't work anymore.
Fridges, garage door openers, microwaves, light bulbs, clock radios, natural gas furnaces, and anything else that doesn't work with 240v: That stuff is dead in the water without converting back down to 120v using an autoformer or something.
Sure, we'll eventually get things updated; when we don't count survivorship bias examples, it's plain to see that stuff just doesn't last all that long anyway (and never actually did).
But for a time: There literal mountains of stuff that just won't work without help. And that's a tough pill to swallow.
---
What we could start doing is embrace our existing dual-voltage home wiring methods, and putting 240v sockets in some places where it's actually beneficial. Places like kitchens (for heating water and food), say. But broadly speaking: Nobody does this because nobody sells safety-approved residential appliances for the US domestic market, so it's a lot of money to spend to get it done for no benefit. It's a catch-22.
> US style plugs and derivatives (and Australian, Japanese, Brazilian, etc)
Brazil no longer uses US style plugs (though you'll still find them in older installations), it nowadays uses a much safer EU-derived style.
> I find it insane that Brazil continues to be dual exclusive voltage; all of North America is dual concurrent voltage. Every home/office has 120v and 240v available. In Brazil it depends on what state/city you live in - some get 120v, some get 240v.
This is wrong; it's very common to have for instance both 127V and 220V in the same building, sometimes even side by side in the same wall faceplate; 127V is phase to neutral, 220V is phase to phase (on the common 3-phase system). Yes, it does depend on the city, some cities use 220V exclusively, and there are a few other variations, but AFAIK the 127V/220V 3-phase combo is the most common.
> Even worse they use the same standard plug design for both so you'd better hope the plug is the right color or has the right sticker. And you can't be sure you can take electrical appliances from one city to the next! At least they should have adopted different plugs for different voltages.
Yeah, at least it's better than the confusing mix of legacy sockets we had before (which already were mixed voltage - and yeah, we already used the "120V 5-15 NEMA plug" aka "computer plug" even for 220V).
> This is wrong; it's very common to have for instance both 127V and 220V in the same building, sometimes even side by side in the same wall faceplate; 127V is phase to neutral, 220V is phase to phase (on the common 3-phase system). Yes, it does depend on the city, some cities use 220V exclusively, and there are a few other variations, but AFAIK the 127V/220V 3-phase combo is the most common.
That's good news. I'm glad my info is out of date!
> Similarly the 240v version of this plug (6-15/6-20) has the same property: 15amp and 20amp versions. The 15 amp is two horizontal blades. The 20 amp is one horizontal + 1 vertical but swapped places compared to the 120v version. I do wish more builders installed the 240v receptacles in kitchens in the US. There is no technical reason we can't have higher power kettles and whatnot. If code required these in garages and kitchens more appliances would be available for them.
If we had more 240v circuits in garages and on the outside of the house you could use electric motors for more yard tasks. Batteries and gasoline is used often in the US because our branch circuits provide about half the power of a 240v branch circuit. You can buy electric mulchers that are powerful enough to grind tree limbs but they can’t run on a 120v circuits.
We get 3 phases to each home, phase to neutral is 127v, and that's the standard voltage, so loads are divided over the 3 phases.
230v we get through phase to phase connections. We also balance those for the 220v loads, but it's kinda risky due to the nature of our grid, being an island.
Whenever there's a fault they disconnect the zone affected but sometimes in the process we get VERY short but massive overvoltage events.
Since everybody generally uses 127v, as the system trips the 127v line voltage increases for a bit, often within spec but because we take 230v from between the phases it spikes to heights beyond spec and burns the devices.
We use a center-tap neutral except for commercial/industrial that receives three phase.
Most small-to-medium homes/businesses have two hot legs coming off each side of the transformer coil. The neutral is connected to the center of the coil and bonded to earth/ground so it becomes a 0v reference. Each hot leg to neutral is 120v. Between hot legs gives 240v. That neatly supports both voltages in a backwards-compatible way. Typically clothes dryers, hot water heaters, ovens/stoves, etc are 240v appliances. Lamps, USB chargers, and other small day-to-day stuff is 120v.
There are two failure modes that can happen but they are rare and usually only affect the customers attached to the affected transformer or a single customer.
1. Floating neutral. If the neutral becomes disconnected that causes floating voltages as the electricity backs up across the neutral and returns via the opposing hot leg. This presents as randomly fluctuating high/low voltages to 120v appliances but most 240v appliances don't use then neutral and don't care.
2. Damaged hot leg. One hot leg partially arcs to ground or is otherwise damaged. This causes half the 120v appliances to flicker/brown out. 240v appliances will see random low voltages.
Three phase is often delivered as wild leg/high leg delta so a neutral can be derived. It is usually setup so one phase (eg A/C) is center-tapped to make the neutral and two hot legs. This gives three phase power per normal and the same setup as a normal home would have: A/C forms two 120v legs wrt the center tap neutral. However you get 208v between the other phases and neutral so for high density housing you also need to balance the phases resulting in some apartments having 208v power rather than 240v. Thus most 240v appliances also support 208v here but unless you've lived in an apartment or worked on commercial/restaurant systems you'd never see that voltage.
Our breaker panels have 3-phase variants. You'd usually install both: a 240/120 panel for "normal" loads and a 3-phase panel for 3-phase and 240v split phase loads. Breaker design is the same: 3-pole takes up three slots and the bus bars alternate by 3 so every third point is on a different phase.
Who buys on Amazon anymore anyway? You can't find anything.
Want a desk fan? There are four types of desk fan in the entire world (per Amazon). Page after page after page of listings of the exact same four designs. Often listed with the same re-used marketing artwork.
Put aside brands, quality, et al. Put aside the fact that Amazon removed almost all product specs from their search facility (and is increasingly deleting specs entirely from product pages). Put aside the fake reviews, no-name Chinese drop-shippers.
Every category is stuffed full of the same few copycat products over and over. It is extremely difficult to merely find actual choices! Wrenches? Small compartment storage boxes? Paper towel holders? If you can find even 20-30 unique products in a category now you're living like a king. It reminds me of AliExpress in that sense. Lack of specs, lack of manuals, lack of details about any product. The same listings from different no-name stores repeated over and over.
I used to think maybe AliExpress & co were actually good if you spoke Chinese but a Chinese coworker kindly informed me that nope, it is just as horrible for everyone living in China using Chinese.
I don't know where we went wrong but this is not the future we were promised. Can any of you remember when Amazon was actually good? When their search was useful? Those were some amazing times and how little did we realize they were fleeting.
Indeed, the problem is the same in Texas which is about as opposite California as you can get. Sprawling suburbs over old farm fields. Installing infrastructure is vastly cheaper when you are doing so in an unoccupied empty field.
None of those cities are saving money or even _planning_ for the inevitable repaving, pipe re-lining, etc. Worse: many of them were built up in waves so much of the city's infrastructure will "come due" around the same time.
I never imagined we would see San Francisco (of all places) overhaul its permit process. I can now build a deck in my backyard, add a story to my house, or build an ADU without having to pay DBI to send certified letters to all my neighbors asking if they'd like to object, then being forced in front of the planning commission when they do so. That's a direct result of the pro-housing legislation at the state level, something Wiener has been heavily involved in.
1. Rich cheats for whom complexity is the goal. Reduced enforcement benefits them without the guilt. They can construct nonsensical schemes but if no one ever audits them they get to feel like they are paying what they owe despite being freeloaders.
2. Strangle the baby types: they hate the federal government. They deliberately want to reduce its income to force cuts to government spending (programs and staff). If they can they will cut other parts of the government then use that to justify reducing taxes. Nothing else matters except shrinking the federal government as much as possible via any means possible. These types also enjoy taking any government service that works and people like and making it as terrible as possible to kill popular support thus making it easier to cut the program entirely.
Indeed. Uber Eats now makes you talk to an AI bot among other customer-hostile issues. I've largely abandoned them. The last straw was a driver leaving the food at some random house I could not even identify from the picture. It made me wait 5 minutes before I could do anything at all. Then it made me talk to a bot.
When I eventually got it to issue a refund I realized they kept the service fees and driver tip. For an order I didn't even receive!
If that's the best they can do I'll just go pick it up myself.
Order directly from the restaurant. You'll get better and faster service. And it'll often be cheaper as they have to increase the price on middle men platforms to pay for the fees.
Not really. It only applies to machines whos "sole or primary" ability is to manufacture firearms.
I'm not sure even one such machine exists. Some companies market benchtop or small lathes as "gun lathes" but that is marketing fluff not a technical description. Any lathe can be used to make weapons. They have tons of round parts and parts with drilled holes. So does everything else that gets manufactured.
I am not aware of any machine tool company that manufactures lathes, mills, etc explicitly designed just for manufacturing firearms.
So in that sense the law you reference is typical of performative legislation. You have angry idiots pestering you to Do Something(TM). So you pass a do-nothing bill. You get to say you banned a thing that never existed. Meanwhile it doesn't hurt or bother anyone because it applies to no one. That's the best of both worlds! Do nothing while looking busy! Take action without actually hurting anyone.
Is it silly? Yes. But I'd rather they do stuff like that then actually try to regulate 3d printers.
The law was targeted against Cody Wilson's "Ghostrunner" CNC machine, but c.f., the "Coastrunner" (the same machine painted vivid colours and marketed for general usage so as to get around this law).
"primary function of manufacturing firearms" effectively targets that "marketing fluff". As the other person mentioned it was a reaction to the ghostgunner mill.
Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say.
There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them.
We also can't be certain that the DRAM makers aren't capitalizing on this opportunity because they can. Remember: all of them are convicted monopolists. As in actual prison time convicted. And fined. And lost civil lawsuits. Multiple times.
I just can't see AI paying enough of a premium on HBM to justify the DRAM spikes. Frankly I can't see the volume either. Wafer starts on DRAM are dramatically bigger than you are probably imagining. DRAM is in practically everything these days. AI servers is but a drop in the bucket. 10% of the market? Yeah right, if its 4% I'd be shocked. And you are telling me a shift of 4% of wafers to HBM is driving these prices and shortages?
I humbly suggest if you look at the numbers something smells funny.
Disclaimer: none of us has access to the actual data, a lot of it is inferred by industry players. Some are well connected and usually accurate but that is not evidence. Therefore it is possible this is a genuine market action and nothing nefarious is going on.
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