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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • An unfinished civil war in which the Republic of China lives on in a tiny island? Damn, must have been a real stalemate for the KMT and Communist Party.

    For the record, I absolutely believe China would attack Taiwan, when they think they are ready. And you don’t have to take my word for it: what of all those missiles Taiwan posseses? Are they pointed towards or away from the strait?

    As for being left alone, the only reason Taiwan can live in peace and prosperity is because of its strategic semiconductor fabs and the publicity it generates. Yes, the publicity it generates puts us the forefront of global conversations and keeps Taiwan safe.






  • You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?

    Hire top PhD:
    Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
    Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
    Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
    Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
    Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)

    Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I’m afraid we aren’t even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won’t be holding my breath for it.




  • Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don’t think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn’t cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.

    We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren’t willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they’re not gonna price things for cheaper because they can’t survive that way.




  • P(failure second try)=(2/3)^2 since you can eliminate one choice but 2 others are still wrong.

    To total:
    P(failure)=(3/4)2*(2/3)2=1/4
    1-1/4=0.75

    So the probability of passing is 0.75

    Edit:
    Remark: this problem is elegant if you attempt to calculate the passing as the complement of failure rather than enumerate all successes. Shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes with a clear head if you know the correct approach. If this was an college level intro probability exam question, it should be done the fast way since it’s meant to eat up your time otherwise.



  • Hence my apology for the imprecise language. I meant what you said by social democracy, not a social economic system. Anyways, if we’re being pedants, there are no true socialists or capitalists in today’s markets. They’re all mixed-market economies.

    When I say socialist (and what is more accurately social democracy), I first think of healthcare, then I think of transit, then of education, and then of utilities. These are things that the US certainly could do better.


  • I think the reason is important. If you stick to something because you think it is the right thing to do, that is conviction. If you stick to something because you think you must continue as you have already invested effort into, that is sunk cost. The point that I’m trying to make, that perhaps I have not worded well, is that you must act with conviction, because if you do not do what you think is right, you either not do anything, or do what you think is wrong. Sure, you may be wrong at the time, and you should be open to reflection, and not be prey to sunk cost.

    But coming up with convenient excuses to avoid doing what you think is inconvenient but right is not how leaders behave.

    And in this context (if that is what you mean), it is definitely not evident that supporting Ukraine is a strategy that won’t work.




  • Call me delusional, but despite electing an agent of Russia the previous election cycle, I think the US still managed to give more aid to Ukraine when they needed it. Don’t tell me that the EU pledged more aid than the US has after the fact. If the US didn’t put its foot forward in the first place I have a real hard time believing the EU would have done anything. And yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be giving Isreal weapons to bomb the living shit out of Palestinian civilians. And Europe is entirely right when they call us out on it. But since when is Europe willing to accept refugees from Palestine? Their words don’t mean much to me. It’s always posturing and NIMBY and hoping someone else does it while acting superior.

    For the record, the fact that Trump didn’t overthrow the government means that it’s not a dictatorship - need I remind you that Trump was 3 years ago? And anyways, despite how horrible of a person and leader Trump is, he somehow still had better foreign policy regarding China than Europe did.

    If China invades Taiwan, what will Europe do? I have a hard time they’ll do anything but thank the heavens they had TSMC build a fab in Europe while conveniently waiting to see what happens: if Japan and the US are able to help Taiwan hold, they’ll open the floodgates, but otherwise they’ll turn the other way.

    Yeah, moving forward might be the wrong way to put it. But I’m not impressed at all with bystanders that point fingers at people going the wrong way when they’re at least trying. And if the world wants to literally put their money where their mouth is, maybe they should be adopting the Euro instead of the US Dollar as their world reserve currency (why, if other countries hate our capitalism so much, are they so willing to eat our shit when we print money on their dime?)



  • As an American, growing up I used to think so highly of Europe and their better socialist policies (I even wanted to move there), but honestly their spinelessness when dealing with dictatorships has really disillusioned me. Say what you will about the US military-industrial complex, or even how capricious our current aid situation is with Ukraine, but even when our international policy is clearly wrong or misguided, I do think we move forward with real conviction unlike Europe…