VMWare had/has a strong moat which can be exploited by jacking up prices. Intel doesn't have that.

But they also provoke thankfulness for all I have. For a little while after I read such tragic stories, I try to enjoy the everyday life a bit more, enjoy the presence of the loved ones.

Memento mori.

I assume we will start screening for things like cancer when the test will be as simple / cheap as measuring your blood pressure.

A non-technical reason is that the market of people wanting to run their personal LLMs at home is very small.

Ironically, buying a Tesla is nowadays a very visible political statement.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of EU-China rapprochement as a result.

But this is not what people usually call as ORMs. All the "bad kind of ORM" (JPA impls, Entity Framework, SQLAlchemy, Doctrine, Active Record...) have some concept of an entity session which is tracking the entities being processed. To me, this is a central feature of an ORM, one of its major benefits. It is, incidentally, also serving as a transaction-scoped cache.

I won't of course dispute that you can have caching on other levels as well (which may perform differently, for different use cases).

Example: if you execute "UPDATE orders SET x = 5 WHERE id = 10", the connection pool has no idea what entries to invalidate. ORM knows that since it tracks all managed entities, understands their structure, identity.

For the first try, hack together something working, you'll learn things along the way, validate/disprove your assumptions. Iterating on this will often bring you to a good solution. Sometimes you find out that your current approach is untenable, go back to the whiteboard and figure out something different.