The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.
Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.
Once an egg sac hatched at our communal postbox and it was magical, all these tiny yellow spot sprite things bumbling around and setting off. Put a good narrator on and people would have watched for hours.
I think it’s more the £50 notes. Much like using a USD100 note in the States, it’s a bit big for most daily purchases.
I ended up dumping most of mine on a couple expensive souvenirs in shops expensive enough that they’d deal with it or breaking them in banks.
It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.
The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.
If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?
Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.
Hey, the broken clock’s right!
IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)
This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.
If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.
Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?
Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.
I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.
The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”
Don’t tell him there’s been women on the $1 coin since 1979, and recently themed seasonal quarter reverses that alternate between illegible and just overly busy.
That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?
There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.
A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.
In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.
In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.
To be honest, I’m amazed it took til Biden before we saw more pressure on TSMC as a flashpoint.
Even if we’re on nominal good terms because they’re a capitalist democracy, nobody likes single points of failure (earthquakes and industrial disasters happen even without geopolitical tensions)
But we’ve handled it miserably-- throw some money at Intel who can’t innovate out of their gilded cage anymore, and try to get a few TSMC facilities stateside-- when we should have been trying to completely diversify the supply chains with new players and new geographies.
In fact, it’s amazing that we lost the concept of second sourcing. That ensured no one vendor held you hostage. Like 8 different firms made 8088s, on up to the 486, but after that it dried up fast. You saw a few IBM badged Cyrix 6x86s, but who else sells a pin-compatible Ryzen?
I hope once China gets far enough up on the tech curve, they see distributing fab tech as a BRI programme. No reason your next bag of 74LS04s, or the 30-cent MCU in your thermostat, can’t be made on a 28nm fab in Burkina Faso.