This is all obviously very specific to the locality where you live, but at least where I live, property values were recently reassessed to account for the large post-pandemic increases. Individual homeowners were generally stuck with these reassessments, while commercial properties, especially those managed by large property management groups, were organized and successfully petitioned to reduce those assessments in disproportionate numbers. So the balance of power was not equal to start with.

Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.

That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.

This should not have been a surprise.

[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.

It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.

He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.

There have been over 70 incidents of overt domestic default since 1800. The United States defaulted in 1790, when a portion of the interest it owed was deferred for 10 years, and technically defaulted again in 1933 when it abrogated the gold clause.

I was really happy Thomas Davies added quantization matrices to the spec, because if he hadn't, I would have had to. Fortunately, he did a good job. I am glad someone is finally using them. Don't sleep on per-segment quantizer deltas, either.

Source: I lead Mozilla's technical contributions to AV1.

Unlike a thumbnail, higher-resolution layers can be predicted from the lower-resolution layer, so those bits are not wasted. That is not possible by layering elements.

The exact same logic applies to devices you buy. These companies have shown they do not have any integrity. So why would you want buy something from them that is "smart" and never sleeps?

Whether or not that is true, I have no idea. One would expect there to be enough diversity of trade that on the balance it cannot be that lopsided, but maybe that's wrong. It is certainly possible for one side of a trade war to be hurt both coming and going, without any logical inconsistency.

The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.

No, the Pentium M (Banias / Dothan) also needed multiple cycles for basic SSE2 ops (with a few exceptions like PUNPCKLQDQ or PMOVMSKB), a full four years after Katmai (source: I owned one, and wrote SIMD on it for codec libraries).

I can also find decades' worth of quality books for prices that sometimes drop below $1 (though popular / rare books are frequently sold for more than their original asking price now, but inflation-adjusted, that is still a good deal, and much less than a new book). There is no reason to expect that just because something was just published recently that it is worth many multiples the cost of an older book. I will still buy new books to support authors I particularly like, but as prices keep going up, I find I am becoming more and more selective.

And finally, physical books do not spy on me or show me ads, or otherwise try to coerce me into an abusive relationship, like every other form of entertainment seems to attempt to do these days.

Debt is senior to equity. For private credit to start taking haircuts, the equity has to have already gone to zero. At that point, this will already have been everyone's problem for some time.