GamingChairModel

Yeah, it wouldn't be copyright. It might be trade secrets, though. And trade secrets can be made out of public data, but arranged in a way that gives competitive advantage (for example, customer lists themselves might be trade secrets, even if each entry is a publicly available set of name/contact information/job title/company).

The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:

1. Etch a stencil that has the pattern you want.
2. Place the stencil over a piece of silicon.
3. Bombard the silicon and stencil with radiation so that the chemical properties of the silicon change exactly under that stencil.
4. Repeat the process with multiple other stencils, so that the resulting silicon has basically shapes of wires and logic gates that can perform different functions with the electricity running through those shapes.

In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.

Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.

The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it's working correctly.

Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.

I like to use these shortcuts as the perfect example to show that it is perfectly fine for sites to offer different, alternative, functionality based on what the platform and input method can offer:

• Got touch? Great, you can now swipe and pinch-zoom on things.

• Got a keyboard? Great, you can focus elements by tabbing into them.
• Got a pointer device? Great, things can now happen on hover.
• Using a keyboard? Great, you can use handy shortcuts.

A practical example here is a modal dialog that is getting shown: depending on which platform and input mechanism combo you are using, you can close it by flinging it away, hitting the ESC key, doing a back swipe, tapping the backdrop, or by activating the close button.

This is an interesting point about input methods and devices, but I'm still not entirely convinced that this shows much more than the idea that users should have multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. I'm less comfortable with the idea that some users with some devices simply cannot reach the same functions as some users with some other devices, even if using what they'd consider to be a full featured, up to date browser.

The blog post raises real issues and discussion, and it's fair to see this as an individual's belief (formed and shaped through experiences that predate this person working at Google, and probably predating the launch of Google Chrome to begin with).

Hibernating twice a day with 32 GB of RAM? That seems insane to me.

I pretty much never hibernate, because I'm usually gonna have the laptop plugged in again sometime later than day. Doing it twice a day means that they know they'll be using the computer in a few hours.

ARM and x86 are instruction sets, not architectures. Intel chips and AMD chips can be different from each other, too, just as different ARM processors can be different from each other.

But all modern processors improve performance by engaging in speculative execution, where they run code or calculations before they're necessary, to have the results on hand in case it's needed, or rolled back if it turns out it's not needed after all. The specific methods differ from vendor to vendor and chip to chip (and even core to core on the same chip, as the article discusses).

Exploring these things is important because sometimes speculative execution leaks data beyond the process that's entitled to view it, and there have been computer vulnerabilities exploiting this (see Spectre, Meltdown, etc.).

Oauth should become federated, just as email.

Aren't you just describing OpenID at that point? Implementation and adoption has been uneven, but the standard complements OAuth.

crypto is untraceable (mostly)

It is very traceable. It's just that the government doesn't have a special position with tracing transactions, so there's been a bunch of kludges built on top of the very transparent Bitcoin network to try to mask things.

The Arch Wiki describes the AUR in plain terms: it's a user-submitted community repository of software, not warranted to be safe or even vetted by Arch maintainers, packaged to be friendly with pacman.

If you're doing things the "Arch way" the differences between the AUR and officially supported packages should be obvious, and you should at the very least skim the PKGBUILD files to understand where things are coming from and how they work.

At 15: I better get an email address that reflects my interests and personality!

At 25: Ok ok my name is the only permanent thing about me so it should be based on my name.

At 35: why am I revealing this much personal information in my email address? I should just have a random jumble of letters.

Sure, but the method of rooting that I'm familiar with (and one I suspect is the most popular) is to unlock the bootloader and modify a boot image that you can freely download from Google's website in accordance with their license, and then load and run that boot image onto your device.

Because a cutting edge semiconductor fab takes about $10 billion and 3-5 years to build. So when they made the plans in 2020 based on anticipated demand in 2023-2025, they started the process for manufacturing memory that would be useful for DDR5 specs. Then big orders came in later, during the AI boom of 2023 onward, to claim the cutting edge fabs' 2025 production, to manufacture that very fast memory to be connected directly to logic chips rather than standalone memory packages/DIMMs.

In other industries, production would just pick up to meet the new demand, faster, to claim all that money sloshing around. But when the bottleneck is with something that takes 5-10 years to finance and plan, sudden increases in demand usually result in crazy price volatility.

See also the whiskey market of 2015-2025, where the production of whiskeys that required 12+ years of aging hit a bottleneck, because 2005 producers couldn't have predicted just how much 12-year-old whiskey people would want in 2017.