fugacity

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.

Now, if you really are Taiwanese, if China and Taiwan are one, do you really think China would let TSMC do as they please and not immediately takeover the company for SMIC? Or do you not remember what happened to Jack Ma? You think Taiwan can vote how it wants while still being part of China? Taiwan is part of China just as much as Ukraine is part of Russia.

By the way, last I checked in December when I visited my parents, rubber ducks and Winnie the Pooh aren’t banned in Taiwan. I wonder about Hong Kong and its one country two systems ;)

Lmao no that’s not the status quo of Taiwan. Or maybe I should ask you what happened to Hong Kong?

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.

Well, the devil is in the details. People like you, who has actually figured out how to use an adblocker properly for YouTube, and me, who is willing to actually pay for YouTube premium (you’re welcome for the subsidy), surely form a small proportion of the actual number of YouTube content consumers.

Maybe I’m wrong, but my view is that the majority of users just want to watch videos without having ads and they aren’t willing to devote time (for adblockers) or money (for subscription services) and are completely ignorant that they are the product regardless. And those users act like they are entitled to content and that leaving YouTube is somehow significant to the big picture.

In a sense I agree with that piekay though. If they can’t serve me targeted ads on YouTube they lose that money trying to develop technology to track me in that regard. How much money that is I guess is hard to say, since the tracking on YouTube certainly can carry over to other parts of Alphabet.

Perhaps YouTube gets all their content for free, but it certainly isn’t free to transcode video, host it reliably, and distribute it while moderating it (given how bad Twitter is right now I’m sure they have a decent number of measures in place, even if they aren’t even “good” at it). And if it was remotely easy, believe me, there would be a lot of competition in this space.

Yes, I make Alphabet x dollars richer (or really, I make YouTube operate at a slightly lesser cost) every month by paying a subscription. And actually, I’m okay with it. A tiny cut of it goes to content creators and I get a nice piece of tech. And I support the branch of Alphabet that has technology that I think is incredibly useful and beneficial. If there’s a content creator that I like especially then I’ll support them directly.

The reality of it is that things cannot be free. Or at least it seems that way, because we have not been able to provide a free video hosting service that doesn’t take advantage of its content creators or consumers.

If you read around you’ll find (perhaps surprisingly to you) that YouTube operates at a loss. So in response to your points:

1. You can pay to get the ads removed. They make less money off of you when they can’t serve you ads, and I’m sure they’re trying to operate at less of a loss.

2. Alphabet is a public company, and it must release certain information about YouTube. Anyways, I’m pretty sure they aren’t using the money to directly line the shareholder profits. The reality of it is that it’s probably just another arm that Alphabet uses as part of its monopolistic tech deathgrip, so it’s not gonna be a straightforward computation. Maybe Disney could be used as a metaphor here?

If you don’t wanna pay to support that, I don’t exactly blame you. But practically, I don’t really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return. Either you eat ads, you pay for a subscription, or you become the product (unfortunately this last point might be true irregardless).

They’re definitely still tracking their premium users, I agree. But my counterpoint is, what business, online or not, doesn’t track me? If I go out and buy something at a retail store I’m gonna bet my ass I’m being tracked. If I don’t want to be tracked, then I should be making sure information I consider to be sensitive is not being exposed. If there is no reasonable expectation to privacy in the public, then I think it’s fit that there’s no reasonable expectation to privacy when I’m surfing the internet.

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.

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.

Not that this comment is all that relevant to you, but here’s a wall of text for context:

The devil is probably in the details here. My assumption is that your denatured alcohol is referring to ethanol mixed with other toxic alcohols (such as methanol).

This can’t be 100% pure ethanol because it MUST contain denaturants to discourage drinking, otherwise it would not be denatured and would legally require an additional excise tax. In that case, you might find it as Everclear (190 proof or 95% or ethanol by volume at highest concentration). It can be close to 100% alcohol, of course, because methanol is an alcohol.

I HAVE seen (at least in the US) food grade USP purity ethanol for sale (with additional cost due to excise tax inclusion) that’s at least 99.5% pure. I have also seen 99% purity isopropyl alcohol (IPA). My point in the reply to the original content is that it’s not accurate. Distillation of binary mixtures results in azeotropes that prevent purity of more than 91% IPA (by volume) and ~95% ethanol. But there’s ways around it such as adding a third solvent for a ternary mixture, salting out (shown in some chemistry demonstrations), changing the pressure of distillation, or using molecular sieves to remove water content. Alternatively, you could use freeze distillation, or even zone melting if you chose to freeze the mixture instead of boiling it. In fact, once you PASS the azeotrope, you can actually distill at standard pressure albeit what you want and don’t want in the column would switch places.

Getting the last few percent of water out of it definitely costs more, but it’s not something so hard that you can’t find commercially available alcohol solvents at purities above the azeotropic point. I know this is the case since I’ve acquired them for home use and have used them in multiple lab settings before. The annoying part for those who REALLY don’t want much water in the solvents is that at that point your solvents are hygroscopic and unless sealed properly or kept in a desiccated environment they’re gonna tend to absorb water back toward the azeotropic point.

Ethanol is similar to IPA in solvent properties but they won’t be the same. I don’t have enough wet lab experience to give a good answer in this regard though. If you’re able to take things apart, I’ve cleaned PCBs the Louis Rossmann way, which is with Branson EC solution and sonication. Drying is really the most important step there ;)

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…