fugacity

I just checked. Yup, you’re right. Funny though that Pat of all people claims it’s not dead lol

Moore’s law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain’t cheap. It’s not a coincidence we’re up to PLC flash… why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?

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.

Maybe it’s a cartel but I don’t have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.

In my view (and maybe I’m wrong) there’s just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I’m not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol

Moore’s law hasn’t died, if you mean number of transistors per area. Linear scaling to transistor counts has.

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.

Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don’t get it. If they can’t sell your data and can’t serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There’s so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it’s not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don’t think it’s just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.

People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn’t welcome them. And then they get upset that they don’t want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I’m willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren’t. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don’t expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.

If you aren’t willing to eat ads, and you aren’t willing to be the product, and you aren’t willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you’re entitled to content?

Happy they got the Taiwan part correct at least.

Having personally played Rocket League, (1800 hours), Valorant (500? hours), CSGO (2000 hours), League of Legends (2000? hours) and a variety of coop multiplayer games, I can tell you that the most toxic communities tend to be the competitive ones. Something about competitive games draws out the most hardcore crowd and that crowd tends to be a lot less friendly. Maybe it’s because people who play ranked games care about their ladder MMR, and the ones who are able to keep playing must have some kind of ego - you have to understand that a lot of people get fun out of winning, not from just participating in the game.

Regardless, the mechanism that rewards players is skill. And in these games, being polite, being nice to your teammates, none of it really matters if you aren’t skilled. Inherently there is a pecking order because higher ranked players are better than lower ranked players. Most games don’t reward direct toxicity of higher ranked players towards lower ranked players, but they don’t forbid it. Smurfing, for instance, allows a player to assert their superiority over lower skilled players. A carry on a team can be significantly more toxic towards their teammates since their teammates want the MMR from a win and will be willing to put up with being bullied or harassed. Just like another commenter mentioned, players compete against each other, and you will not really be friendly with your opponents in most ranked settings. But additionally, players also rely on their teammates. I think this is where a lot of the toxicity comes from.

When your friend dies to the enemy and gets t-bagged, your teammates aren’t pitying your friend for getting t-bagged. They’re mentally rolling their eyes that your friend was outplayed by their opponent and that’s why when you post on a forum the result is usually “git gud” and not “we should be more friendly”. I don’t think being toxic is positive to the health of a game. I could go into detail, but this post is already pretty long. But I want to point out, if the setting is a competitive game, merit is usually the driving factor regardless of toxicity or kindness. If you don’t gain that dopamine hit out of outsmarting or beating your opponents but rather simply from playing the game or socializing with other players, you probably should not bother touching these games - you aren’t the core audience for these games and you’ll find more enjoyment in other settings.

For the record, if you get t-bagged in a competitive game, the recourse is to either not look at the kill cam (CS:GO lets you turn it off), or try to improve so you don’t get t-bagged as often. Ragequitting, or going to complain that it should be turned off will get you nowhere. BMing your opponent is a popular thing in most competitive games, and it’s part of the reward for outplaying them. In many eyes, it’s not really all that different from a giant defeat screen when you lose. If you’re sensitive to this kind of stuff, I think you should find more friendly communities. Coop games generally tend to be better, as do more casual games, or FFXIV if you’re looking for an MMO. I would say most players (me included) consider the option to t-bag a feature and not a bug, because really the thing that upsets me the most is not getting t-bagged; it’s getting outplayed by my opponent so they’re able to do it in the first place.

I don’t know if I would see it as a pure money grab. Pretty sure game consoles, just like inkjet printers and the like are sold with zero or near zero profit (or even at a loss). The benefit the console manufacturer gains from the platform lock-in far outweighs whatever greed they might have trying to reap gains from the hardware. 10 year old hardware is roughly 30x slower in FLOPs, so we might be looking at a desire for better games or easier software development - I for sure would not envy the developer needing to target 10 year old hardware, though it’s not exactly unheard of.

That’s mostly correct but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Distillation is useless at the azeotropic point but ternary mixtures are used to break the azeotrope. Once you move past the azeotrope you can continue distillation to high purity. You could also do pressure swing distillation but my guess (even though I’m not exactly a chemical engineer doing unit operations for a living) is that it wouldn’t be economical. Of course, getting “100%” pure anything is really a different story…