I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.

I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.

Yup.

LTE can support something like 300-400 connections per band and there are 16 primary bands licensed in the US. 5G and mm wave open things up some more, including beam forming techniques that may allow an antenna array to communicate with two devices on the same frequency at the same time.

But at the same time, each carrier only gets some of those bands, and they want to separate bands by physical space so that neighboring cells are using different bands, and in 3 dimensional space there can be a lot of neighbors. And 300 passive connections simply keeping the connection alive are different from 300 active users trying to actively transmit and receive significant data. Plus real world interference will always make devices come up short from the theoretical max performance.

Temporary/mobile towers go a long way, though, for temporary surges in demand, like sporting events. Things have gotten a lot better on game days in certain places (especially small college towns whose populations basically double on game day, with everyone jammed into a single stadium for about 4 hours).

Yeah, one of the two was a pure safety play, not even ethics.

If I sell the military an ATV for shuffling things around on base, I might engineer a speed limiter to prevent the ATV from going faster than what its safety features are rated at. But a demand that I remove the governor so that the vehicle can go all lawful speeds totally misses the point. Whether it is illegal or unethical to do so, it’s still bad engineering to use dangerous technology beyond the scope of what it (and its safety features) has been designed for.

I’m just not connecting the dots. The amount of money they’re spending on this is astronomical, and they are burning through the cash they have at a rate they can’t sustain, while they’re fighting for their future against Google, Anthropic, plus xAI and Perplexity and others, and maybe foreign competition like Deepseek that the government can’t fully shield them from. While also competing with major data center companies themselves, who may want to build data centers for other non-AI purposes, too. And those competitors have deep, deep pockets.

If they don’t have a revenue model that actually keeps them afloat, then all their capital expenditures will end up going to benefit someone else.

In other words, the central thesis that they want to choke out competition from on-device models kinda ignores that they’re facing a much more immediate, much more pressing threat from their data center competition. It’s like trying to corner the market on snow shovels when a hurricane is bearing down.

Plus one important thing worth noting is that OpenAI purchased the option to buy that much memory, enough to persuade the memory manufacturers to change their own investment decisions for the next 5 years. They’re not necessarily going to actually buy that much. And in theory could sell that option to others. 40% of the market is enough to really move prices, but not enough to actually corner it and exclude others from buying memory. They’ll just have to make it more expensive for themselves at the same time that they make it more expensive, but not impossible, for their true competitors also outfitting data centers.

This operating system contains code known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.

Like what?

Wasn’t LFP commercialized at EV scale like a decade ago? It went from like 0% market share to majority market share in about a decade.

Yeah but firewood is like 5 kwh/kg, or 4 times the energy density of TNT. We drive around with wood in our cars all the time.

It’s funny. I see the phrase “AI doomsday scenario” and I immediately picture devastating cascading consequences caused by someone mistakenly putting too much trust in some kind of agentic AI that does things poorly and breaks a lot of big important things.

I’m just not seeing a scenario where AI causes devastating disruption based on its own ultra competence. I’m much more scared of AI incompetence.

There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.

LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.

Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).

If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.

The judge controls when the jury is in the room. So the jury enters last, only after the judge orders them in. And the judge can order them out at any time to have discussions outside their presence, too.

I never needed more because I just had a dock. My monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Ethernet cable stayed in the same place, so I’d just bring my laptop home and plug in a thunderbolt dock, and I’d have every peripheral I needed. And I’m someone who tries to use wired stuff over wireless whenever convenient.

Same with RAM.

Unfortunately, the RAM shortage is caused by a RAM component being diverted to specialized packages that can’t easily be converted into normal RAM. So even a bubble bursting won’t bring RAM onto the market.

definitely not for sensitive work.

I would argue that desktop software capable of doing this (storing and using past pixel values to calculate some sort of output) violates the principle of least privilege, so that an OS that supports this kind of screensaver being possible shouldn’t be used for sensitive data, even if that particular screensaver is disabled.

Better to harden the OS so that programs (including screensavers) can’t access and store the continuous screen output.

That’s one of the problems we have with Windows Recall. We don’t even want the OS to have the capability, because we don’t want that data being copied and processed somewhere on the machine.

If the screensaver is saving the information of what a pixel has been on average, there’s all sorts of potential for leakage of sensitive information onto a part of the computer that shouldn’t have that information.

Well if you want to read about the many battery chemistries currently in use in EVs, there’s this article:

https://insideevs.com/news/782685/all-ev-battery-chemistries-explained/

As the article explains, there are several chemistries that have already come and gone, and the current models being sold use a few competing chemistries with their tradeoffs. Some of the up and coming chemistries are also already being mass produced.

So whatever it is you mean by “leap,” it sounds like it’s already been happening in the last 15-20 years.

Sure, but very cheap and sometimes free tools help a complete beginner do both, without any real technical knowledge.

Visa/Mastercard requires all cardholders, cardholders’ banks, merchants, and merchants’ processors to follow the comprehensive set of rules for disputed transactions. That way the dispute process tends to be uniform across different banks and across different merchant/payment processors.

The network sets the rules, while the banks implement those rules on behalf of the cardholder and the processor implements those rules on behalf of the merchant.

So replacing the network will require a comprehensive replacement for the network’s dispute resolution rules (assigning who is responsible for paying when certain things happens) and procedures (how a cardholder can initiate a dispute and how that gets resolved).

I would think that accurate color representation would’ve generally required the bright lights and broad spectrum coverage of sunlight, so I imagine people just…painted during the day, by daylight.

Fahrenheit today is literally defined through Celsius

The same as pretty much every unit they use

At this point, that’s basically every unit other than the seven fundamental units. Degrees Celsius is defined from the fundamental unit Kelvin.

Plus the actual definitions of those fundamental units were defined based on historical measurements tied to former definitions. Today the second is defined around the frequency of the cesium-133 atom, but it was traditionally measured as 1/(60 x 60 x 24) of the time of a single rotation of the earth, which stopped serving us when we realized the rotations had too much variation between days. The meter is currently defined around the speed of light and the second, but was previously defined in terms of what they thought the Earth’s circumference was, and then a metal bar they kept in Paris, then based on the wavelength of light emitted from a transition in krypton-86. Same with the kilogram, currently kept at Planck’s constant but previously based on a particular chunk of metal that was mysteriously losing mass over time, and before that defined from the density of 4°C water and the definition of the meter.

Conventions are important. The history of how we got to particular conventions can often be messy.