I’m pretty sure that whether it can is irrelevant. Unter Trump it won’t because China playing strongman appeals to him more than petty things like allies and an independent semiconductor market. Also, he can very clearly be bought and Xi can just send him a couple yachts with tacky decor or something.

He has pretty much torched all of the USA’s soft power and standing as a trade partner.

GWB had already done some damage to both, which Obama tried to repair (more so on the trade front). Then Trump I happened and made it very clear that the USA were no longer a reliable partner and probably not even politically stable in the medium term. Biden tried to salvage something but then Trump II happened and conclusively buried what little goodwill the States had left.

I don’t think the pax americana is going to survive the decade and neither is the petrodollar. It remains to be seen whether the States will become a local hegemonial power, a failed empire with lasting ambitions á la Russia, or will even fade from relevancy entirely. I don’t expect them to remain a superpower.

Also note that the EU has just signed a free-trade agreement with Mercosur, meaning that the EU and pretty much all of South America are pivoting trade away from the USA towards each other. Conveniently, that should also make both of them less reliant on China.

We just signed an FTA with Mercosur. That’s a major trade bloc. I think we’re doing good on that front and it demonstrates that we have the capacity to just pivot trade home away from the States.

Still, I do agree that counter-tariffs don’t feel too great as a response, even with the new FTaa in place. It might really be time to bring out the anti-coercion instrument.

The letters are too consistent (each “O” looks the same etc). It’s a font.

It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.

Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.

For another ring was made and this one was made of gold and fetched almost 700 bucks at the pawn shop.

It’s about PMMA sheeting (aka plexiglass), right?

I always describe pansexuality as “bisexuality with more politics and an ugly flag”. The basic idea is the same (not being attracted only to one gender) but pansexuality is more explicit about there being more than two genders and liking most or all of them.

And due to social media dominance, the far-right party (AfD) is set to become the strongest power with the next election if things don’t change.

Mind you, that party has been confirmed to be radical by the constitutional protection agency; that assessment has only been temporarily retracted because they got an injunction against it that now needs to be resolved. Court procedure is the only thing keeping them from being recognized as a threat to the democratic order.

The other major parties see no reason to comment on this, especially not the conservatives. Those same conservatives refuse to rule out a cooperation with the AfD, instead wanting to “face them on content”. That means parroting their talking points and then acting surprised when this doesn’t drive voters away from them.

In previous elections I voted for the pan-Europeans who, in a saner world, would be steadily on track towards beating the 5% cutoff. Unfortunately, right now the far-right threat is too big for me not to hold my nose and vote strategically. I’m not happy about that.

But hey, who knows how long that’ll even matter? Like always in such a situation, I expect the AfD to use bullshit delay tactics to stretch that injunction until after the next election, get voted into power, and then kill the investigation. Because rules don’t apply when you have enough backing. And I’m deeply afraid of what they’ll do to the country as the governing party with a conservative lapdog rubber-stamping everything they say.

Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.

My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.

That’s what happens when you get distracted while posting. Thanks for the correction.

To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.

Except if they then have to run it on their machine and the setup instructions start with setting up a venv. I find that a lot of Python software in the ML realm makes no effort to isolate the end user from the complexities of the platform. At best you get a setup script that may or may not create a working venv without manual intervention, usually the latter. It might be more of a Torch issue than a Python one but it still means spending a lot of time messing with the Python environment to get things running.

This may color my perception but the parts of the Python ecosystem I get exposed to as an end user these days feel very hacky. (Not all of it is, though; I remember from my Gentoo days that Portage was rock solid.)

There still plenty of “this version of pytorch doesn’t run reliably with Python 3.12, please use 3.10”, though. It’s not all sunshine and roses.

Other lessons from the sign:

• You may send radio broadcasts to origami birds.
• We encourage you to dip your hands into any glasses of sparkling water.
• Do not swing progress bars around.
• Violence against butterfly skewers is forbidden.

See, I don’t have to worry about such details. I work in corporate software dev, which means that everything is an MSSQL database where most of the tables contain only an ID of a table-specific format and a JSON blob. Why use an ORM when you can badly reimplement NoSQL in a relational database instead?

I do agree with you but have to note that this might be the most sensible use of Copilot I’ve seen so far.

Not really; mine was eventually too expensive and I only got that model because a) I could get it for cheaper through a leasing arrangement and b) I don’t need to pay for a car.

I must admit, though, that having a belt drive is extremely nice and worth the money. 10/10, top tier bike component.

I read that there are two “waves” of rapid biomolecular aging in the mid-40s and early 60s. Still affects everyone differently and of course a worn-out body will feel that much worse.

In general, though, our bodies start wearing out in our mid-teens, about a decade before we’re even fully grown! High-frequency hearing is one of the first things to suffer. Bodily decline is really a constant companion in our lives; it only becomes noticeable when it starts accelerating.