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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • Yup.
    The problem is, how do you guarantee access control that works offline?

    DVD DRM was based on a pretty simple system that was easy to crack.
    HD-DVD (former blu-ray competitor) DRM was more advanced. Someone hacked a software player and extracted its decode key, which this was.
    The DRM was designed to be updateable so any discs manufactured after this leak would use different keys (and anyone using the software app that’d been hacked would need an update). That didn’t stop this key from working on every disc in existence at the time.

    That’s the problem with making software decoding available. It had to work offline, so you could have an authorized player software, and feed it any valid disk, and it’d Just Work. So even if you put a crypto enclave in the drive controller, the player software still needs its own way to authenticate itself to the drive.








  • It is absolutely foul play.

    OpenAI made secret deals with DRAM manufacturers, not for memory chips but for finished wafers straight out of the Fab. Then announced them both on the same day, meaning they had a one fell swoop purchased 50+% of the world’s memory supply for 2026.

    OpenAI does not (as far as anyone knows) have the machinery to process these wafers, to slice them up and package them into memory chips.

    Which means the only purpose of this move was to kill the global DRAM supply and drive up prices for the competition.

    Personally I wish regulators would take a hard look at this deal.


  • Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.

    You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.




  • Is OpenAI likely to fold?

    They bought in one day a significant % of the worlds memory output for 2026. Two huge deals with two huge companies, announced at the same time. Neither company knew of the other deal. But those deals weren’t even for chips- they were for finished wafers. I doubt very much OpenAI has the facilities to slice and package wafers. So it seems to me the only point of the deal was to kill the DRAM supply market and drive up prices for their competition.

    Wouldn’t be surprised if those finished wafers are going straight in the dumpster.


  • “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,”

    I would correct that to say ‘for this to not be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this a. Exist and b. Are significant enough to justify the extreme costs of building these systems’

    Right now I don’t see anything coming out of this that justifies even 1/10 of the $trillions being poured into AI.

    In fact I think you could make an argument that the net result is negative, even for businesses that adopt it, due to the increased prices they will pay for hardware over the next few years. If it makes your employees 5% more efficient great, if it makes your technology 50% more expensive in return, not so great.