281–290 of 682 posts
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Don't forget the threat of Ebola, hantavirus, Taiwan war
The Taiwan war that the world is sleepwalking into is going to wipe out so much chip capacity that the current inflation will look like a blip.
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While it's a possibility, do you believe it is likely enough in the very near future to the point where you are betting on it? Perhaps shorting TSMC? If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.
The point to short will be when the Chinese army forms up. With Ukraine we saw it. It was incredibly obvious. Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences. Taiwan will be the same. But the satellites will give everyone enough warning.
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In what world would 256GB of RAM be “entry level”?
A world where Apple has invested in their own fabs, so they can sell devices with drastically more RAM than their competition at entry-level prices.
Apple’s not exactly famous for their low pricing on spec upgrades nor competing based on being the price leader…
Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.
Yeah, modern software towers of libraries literally eat memory. MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.
It's haaard to do state machines.
Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also software bundles. I can see decades of possible progress hiding in plain sight behind a browser screen.
So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM. What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development ph…
Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway
It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…
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I don't have concrete metrics/sources to give right now, but my general perception from reading the news is that there's been staffing issues pushing healthcare systems in the US towards increasing workloads in individual providers, leading to less time/attention given to individual patients, lower availability of appointment slots, and offloading of patients onto alternative app-based telehealth platforms, which hav…
Staffing problems are absolutely everywhere, regardless of the particular healthcare system or even political system. Czechia, the UK, China, Japan. It seems to be a global trend, much like falling birthrates.
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It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market. Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow…
They'd more likely split themselves laughing. The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the res…
So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.