Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

I think the appeal is that you probably don’t need a huge CPU for a lot of workloads-- just something to run an OS, handle talking to the outside world, and configure the GPU/NPU complexes.

I could imagine a something like a Quadro card that had a small RISC-V core built in as a freestanding device, no motherboard needed. Even if the CPU ran like a Core 2 Duo, that would be sufficient for purpose, but it will be a lot easier to license an appropriate RISC-V core than an x86 one.

So next they’ll use AI-generated infantry?

Why can’t we subsidize American carmakers more?

I liked ASrock when they were in the ECS tier of quirky and weird. Got a Socket 939 board with the ULi M1695 chipset that was really nifty.

Then I had an awful experience with an AM3 board that claimed to run a FX-8350, until they edited their support list.

I grudgingly chose them for AM5 because it was $50 cheaper for the featured I wanted, and it’s been okay, aside from me breaking the x16 slot clip due to hamfistedly removing a shipping-container sized GPU.

It also creates no precedent. You lose, you pay out one angry customer, but the next one who tries, you get a fresh attempt to convince the arbitrators you were right.

In a real court, the first loss woukd be leveraged against you by everyone else in similar straits, even if it wasn’t a class action.

I used it in a necromanced college laptop… 486DX2 at 40MHz, no L2 cache, but admittedly 20Mb of RAM. It was slower to boot than DOS, but reasonably usable. By 3.0 they included half-decent pack-in software, while Windows still had just Write (not even Wordpad)

This isn’t as absurd as it looks.

If we assume the loans will implode either way, the Chinese model at least funnels some of the money back to their own contractors, and ends with some goodwill and infrastructure. It’s an aid programme with extra steps.

I wonder if the western model optimizes for loans doomed to fail to use them as a lever to extract structural and political concessions, or if it’s just a happy accident.

Oh, boy! As an American consumer, I’m even more perplexed what the hell they are.

Like 15 years ago, Rakuten seemed to be a normal ecommerce site. I think they bought buy.com or something to get a foothold in the US market. Then they pivoted to being some sort of cashback referral service.

I’m not really sure why that would lead customers to think “yeah, I want cloud storage from the people who made a weird janky digital simulation of the Piggly Wiggly Value Club Card!”

(AWS made it work because they could say “we have the infrastructure to host one of the busiest sites on earth, it’s good enough for you”, but Rakuten does not have that credibility in the US)

The more I look at modern UIs, which seem to have decided the best way to use the metric crapload of screen space a modern PC has is with gratuitious whitespace, the more I like 1990s UIs.

I wonder if we’ll see a lot of special purpose models-- we start with a vast model and gradually cut it out to fit on smaller hardware but only do one thing well.

Or if we’ll just end up collapsing them into more recognizable code.

TBH, I could see a viable angle in livestream-style QVC… with the proviso that the presenters are usefully interactive.

“Can you turn to the side so I can see how the shirt you’re selling shirt looks from that angle” or “what do those four buttons on the doodad do?” It’s approaching the experience of a store with helpful salespeople, only delivered remotely a la peak pandemic.

But that wouldn’t scale to a huge audience, likely filled with trolls trying to convince the streamer to do something lewd or destructive.