“Enshittification” better be the word of the year.

If I ever invent a time machine, I’m making a few pit stops on my way back in time to cap Hitler, and Milton Friedman and his friends are on the list. He’s the misanthrope who popularized the idea that the only duty of a company’s leadership is to deliver profit, and any other pursuit is a disservice to the shareholders. This is known as the Friedman Doctrine.

Wishful thinking?

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just interesting to see yet more evidence they were lying as dishonestly as the tobacco industry. I think this article presents a pretty cohesive timeline of those lies: what they knew and when they knew it.

I think it’s a little of both, but one of my friends left my company producing weird semiconductors to go work at Micron making RAM. They’re definitely ramping up a little, but the equipment and techniques to fab those chips is very specialized. Imagine trying to drill zillions of really tiny, deep pits, and then making sure the very bottom of those pits get coated while the sidewalls are completely unaffected… and you have to do it everywhere uniformly on a hundred 350mm wafers per minute.

There’s a pretty big benefit to the solar panels: more efficient and also can be placed in a solar-synchronous orbit that is always illuminated. I can’t imagine that power advantage outweighs the disadvantages of cooling power-hungry hardware with no way to reject that heat to air or water. I’m with you: WTF are they thinking?

I heard Google just launched a test bed. Basically one mini server the size of a refrigerator that can only operate for 15 minutes before it needs to shut off to prevent heat damage. I’m guessing that thing will prove the case against celestial data centers, but we’ll see. The only good thing to come of this is that it might help advance cooling tech for satellites and suchlike.

That’s if they don’t decide the best course of action is to launch them into LEO lol. If they do (they will–they’re that stupid), the infrastructure will burn up in less than five years.

Didn’t you have ads in the 20th century?

Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky… But not in dreams.

I believe Be Quiet! also sells such fans. I’ve been a fan of their stuff for a while, mostly because it’s black (matching my color scheme) and secondly because it’s cheaper.

Quiet fan.

Would they have called that constellation Ursa Major if not for the presence of bears in that direction? Maybe the constellation naming was like, “don’t go too far towards bear country if you don’t want to deal with bears that think of humans as food.” “Bears this way. Bears ahead.”

Google says methane stays in the atmosphere for less than 12 years. Treating this as markedly different from CO2 seems disingenuous.

I found this: https://www.snaq.ai/blog/cooled-rice-blood-sugar-research

My guess is that cooling the rice causes some of the starches to polymerize into longer chains that are harder for your body to digest, which lowers the glycemic index of the food.

I also prefer very short grained rice, which has slightly higher protein to starch ratio and reheats better. This stuff is often sold as “sushi rice.” If you’re on a budget, Calrose medium grain is fine. (If you’re not on a budget, tamanishiki koshihikari is my favorite bougie short grain rice.)

Is this one of those, “if farmers gave their cows kelp tablets once per day to reduce methane farts, it would reduce it by 50%” deals? I find it hard to believe raising cattle produces more GHG emissions than a similar weight pig.

Depending on your definition of “real,” they’re probably correct. It was real cheese, before it was dehydrated, powdered, and mixed with an emulsifier (probably sodium citrate) so it would reconstitute itself into a cheese sauce. I’ve become a little more sympathetic to this sort of thing since I bought of pouch a sodium citrate off the interwebs and started emulsifying things I didn’t think could be emulsified, like an entire wheel of brie.

They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.

Additionally, the jobs AI can adequately replace are often the jobs companies use to train and vet people beginning their careers. Put another way, you don’t get any senior devs if you replace all your junior devs with chatbots.

Most salaried people in the US have hours on paper but are coerced into working more. I’m theoretically supposed to work 40 hours per week, but if the production line is down they beg me to come in. I can say no, but the people who say no don’t get promoted, and when layoff season starts, they’re the first on the chopping block.