And the reason the market is so small is because of players who did as you propose, the DRAM market crashed on them (not due to them but due to broader market dynamics), and they went out of business.

So there is, quite perversely, strong incentive to collude if possible and if not to abide by an unstated agreement to be extremely slow to expand DRAM capacity.

That said...

SK Hynix has two fabs under construction, one set to open later this year. One for 80k wpm, another 360k wpm. A third was recently approved to start construction.

Micro has an overhaul of Fab 6 in Virgina near done and slated to produce first wafers this year. It also has a large expansion in Boise nearly completion for 300k wpm. They're also building a "megafab" site in New York (my guess is >1m wpm) and expanding at their Japanese plants (40k wpm).

Samsung has two under construction, P4 for 100k wpm.

Nanya - historically a secondary player focused only on producing non-leading-edge DRAM is making a play for the leading-edge market with a new fab dedicated to DDR5 and HBM.

It appears they've all decided that the demand is sufficiently sustained that building new fabs is worth doing... but it takes time. If my guess is right Micron is making the largest play with their New York site at 1-1.5m wafers per month. That would give them a large chunk of the market.

(wpm = wafers per month)

The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.

Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?

I'm also thankful that we have at least some seismic standards and have continued to increase them.

Look at how a country like Chile fares where they don't just have standards they enforce them. You can't bribe your way out of proper seismic engineering for the most part. Then look at Columbia which technically has NSR-10 but enforcement is... not exactly stringent.

The results are obvious. Where standards are lax or just as importantly enforcement is lax structures collapse and people die. Where the standards are good and taken seriously damage is much less severe.

Even here in San Francisco things are not all perfect. Sometimes things slip through the cracks like the Millennium Tower. Others are known: the city has a special seismic hardened firefighting pipe network with big metal rods that clamp the pipes together to prevent joints from coming apart. With special seawater pumps and even ship-based seawater hookups so if all else fails they can pump vast volumes of seawater into that network... yet that network has absolutely massive gaps that have been known about for decades and still exist but there are no plans to expand it whatsoever. You'd think the city would continuously invest in this system to slowly expand it over time even if just a bit. But nope.

You can fight the system all you like. You might make a difference but you won't be rewarded for it.

Or you can accept the game and play it. If you don't like the current game switch companies and play a different one.

Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.

However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.

For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.

Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.

Even compared to contemporary vacuum tubes they were slower. Contemporary bleeding edge vacuum tube computers could reach Mhz frequencies. Parametrons were 10-15kHz.

The supposed power benefits depended on state. At idle they were significantly more efficient but the more work they did and the faster you tried to run them the exponentially more electricity they required (and heat they generated).

Lastly because the early ones were lower frequency they required physically larger inductors. Contemporary vacuum tube computers took up similar amounts of space due to cooling constraints but parametrons were bulky in ways you couldn't fix.

Parametrons were a dead-end technology almost from the get-go due to physical scaling limits. Even the earliest use of discrete transistors blew them out of the water beyond any hope that some magical physical scaling would rescue them.

Abandoned technologies are usually abandoned for very good reasons not just because they happened to lose the race or get backed by the wrong companies. No amount of investment was ever going to help parametrons catch up with transistors - just as no amount of investment was going to help vacuum tubes catch up either.

Even a simple change to one file results in re-parsing the whole library because definitions come from anywhere and we have to obey the 1970s single file compilation model. The result is a driver spawns 8 threads and each one wastes time re-parsing every file in the library looking for definitions. AFAIK Rust doesn't really track dependencies at the file or function level either so it doesn't really know what changed.

To me compilers should be content-addressed databases. Each declaration and its associated content generate hashes that roll up to its containing type or namespace, then to the file, then to the library as a whole, along with hashes of the dependencies. Changing the type signature of a single function should result in the compiler being able to cheaply determine whether that has any visibility and if so to what other files in the same library or if it affects the public interface.

A file that hasn't changed and whos inputs hasn't changed should re-use the IR from the prior compilation. Even for an individual type that should be the case so changing the internals of a function in a struct only regnerates that one function and nothing else. The compiler knows deterministically that change can't have affected anything else.

That has major benefits for code completion and editing as prior compilations can feed into generating errors or suggested corrections.

Then you can take things a step further and JIT a changed function, injecting the new machine code on the fly so long as the shapes of the types don't change. Very useful for debugging.

Compilers are mostly held back because the people who write compilers are stuck on certain ideas about how compilers should be written.

I believe the leading theory is that red light is given off by a variety of fruits when ripe so arboreal ancestors with that mutation could much more easily locate food. To most mammals red ripe apples and green unripe ones are all just shades of yellow so the mutation would have been like a superpower: the equivalent of eagle-eyed vision.

Every Amish congregation makes their own rules. The local deacons vote on changes. Each "Fellowship" of congregations has tenets and rules they require to be "in fellowship" but otherwise don't have control over the individual groups. Splits are often driven by disagreement over the fellowship rules.

There are Amish that own cars but the group might specify that each family may only own one car and it must be model X and of color Y with a specific set of features. Most people are aware of the groups that prohibit cars - requiring use of horse and buggy.

Some Amish allow electricity, but only connected to the barn or only when provided by solar power. Or they might only allow it to the extent required to comply with regulation - for example refrigeration for milk on a dairy farm. Some allow cell phones, but not in the home (you leave it in the barn or a lockbox). Some prohibit them entirely. Some Amish groups allow machinery but apply restrictions that don't allow use of the machinery to end up with one farmer greatly out-producing others. So when a farmer gets old they may allow them to buy a tractor for fieldwork but require it be pulled by horses.

You might also be surprised to learn many Amish experiment with new technology. Often the deacons will appoint a "nerdy" (for lack of a better term) person in the community to use some new thing. They'll evaluate its effects and costs. Then hold a vote on whether to allow it and what the rules will be. Sometime their answer to changes is not "no" but "not yet".

The decisions are nominally driven by a desire to be independent and to avoid negatively affecting family life rather than rejecting technology directly. Most don't allow electricity, cell phones, or internet inside the home because it would lead to people not interacting or connecting with each other. When power tools are allowed they're often pneumatic so they don't need to be tied to the grid and thus dependent upon "the English" - though with Solar and batteries that has rapidly changed.

Most don't allow extensive use of farming machinery because it could lead to your neighbor out-producing you, leading to them getting much richer and having more than you leading to discord in the community. If cars are allowed they may require everyone to buy the same car so there is no jealousy or "keeping up with the Joneses".

Amish are just people so they certainly have assholes and jerks but many are friendly people and if you treat them genuinely they'll repay the favor. They will not be offended that you use a cell phone or drive a car.

Surprising how often things boil down to "they're just people and most people, if treated with respect, will repay in kind".

I also dispute that site's claim that everyone starts before 8am. Here on the west coast I'd say most jobs start at 9am unless they are retail. A lot of schools have also switched to later start times.

Not to mention: DST is already in effect for 65% of the year.

Permanent DST has been introduced in congress every year since 2018. A few years ago it passed the Senate but the house didn't take it up. This time the house has passed it but who knows if the Senate will take it up. I'd prefer to be on permanent DST but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

It is easy to imagine a large group of slaves escaping or being freed from Egypt. Maybe they or their ancestors were war captives. But wandering the desert for 40 years? Yeah right. Even if you want to grant miracles the idea that all of Egypt would even know about such events at that time is bananas. Information didn't travel that fast. Probably one group of people in one city. And the antagonist could easily have been a local lord. Over time it became the Pharaoh and the 18 months of wandering turned into 40 years. Only then it was written down.

That also makes them harder on oil as the piston/rings have larger tolerances so they don't expand and bind up during operation. That means greater blow-by at startup and when operating at lower temps which puts a lot more combustion byproducts into the oil. Ultimately you want to run an aircraft engine in the upper part of its range (65% power) continuously and don't let it get too cold.

This is also true because 100LL still contains lead and at lower temps the lead combustion byproducts precipitate out of solution, coating everything in metallic lead, lead oxides, and various other lead compounds all of which are really bad for engines. Converting to unleaded nearly doubled engine life in autos.

Many modern engines have valve rotators and hydraulic lifters. Oil pressure is fed to a lifter that sits between the valves and the cam and automatically takes up for any variation in the system, ensuring valves operate correctly. If you ever wondered why car engines don't need to have their valves adjusted every 20k miles anymore - that's why. In some engines if these leak down after shutdown it can cause trouble starting because the valve timing will be off until oil pressure re-fills the lifter.

Rotators are little spring mechanisms that compress and when uncompressing try to rotate the valve in one direction. This causes the valves to rotate a tiny bit with each cycle. Often there are hot spots and exhaust valves especially often have no good way to shed heat yet are exposed to extremely high temps - so they shed heat when they close and are in contact with the head. If they don't rotate the slightly hotter spots will continuously build up heat eventually destroying the valve. The rotator keeps that from happening. (Some engines use sodium filled valves to help transport heat away from the valve face).

I always found it surprising how tiny variations in wear or even a few degrees of excess heat can end up destroying an engine.

It requires them to bet that:

1. This AI-driven demand cycle is a temporary blip

2. None of their competitors will make massive investments in capacity.

3. No state actors will do so despite evidence to the contrary.

Many in silicon have gone out of business due to the boom-bust cycles so being a bit conservative is appropriate but at some point not expanding production becomes an existential crisis.

Or ya know enough governments with the power get really angry and start forcing price controls, nationalizing, using their state spy agencies to steal your secrets, or use unofficial back channels to make your life extremely difficult.

I sometimes wonder if some design decisions were made on that basis.

Yup, this was also a fun exercise. Use nslookup, find the MX records, then telnet to them and deliver some mail destined for domains that email server handled. At that point you're just a slower version of a mail daemon.

In 2006 when FIOS first rolled out they assigned ARIN IP blocks to anyone who requested a static IP and I hosted my own webserver and email server on the web. So for a long time I had my own netblock and my email server had been around for so very long it was in everyone's legacy trusted list. Even gmail never bounced emails from me, despite not having SPF or DKIM and whatever else. Though I did eventually set those up. Only authed users could send email and that was a limited list so my netblock never actually delivered a spam message.

Funny enough I also setup default routing so all non-registered addresses went into a separate mailbox for me and I used the "companyname@mydomain.net" for everything. For many years I knew about every single data breech before anyone else. Often months or years ahead as spam would arrive out of nowhere to that address.

When I finally moved to the bay area to work in tech for real the entire world had changed. You couldn't just get a netblock assignment anymore. And lord knows even if your ISP wasn't deliberately sabotaging your ability to run a server every other system on the internet would assume you're a scamming spammer. I had to give up self-hosting on-prem.

The realization that (on DOS) "copy con file.txt" as the world's worst text editor or "copy file lpt1:" was treating physical devices as files. Everything on the computer was arbitrary so you could make anything behave like anything else (for some definition of behave like)!

Not a great insight I'll grant but a key one that everyone has to go through to be any good.

Perhaps I am just not well-informed but 30% slowdown in progression translates to sufferers have some mild improvement in cognitive tests and live a few months longer.

Maybe it is simply too early to tell but I would naively expect something much more significant. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that requires much earlier treatment to demonstrate better results.

I'm not saying amyloid beta research should be terminated. Merely that everyone in the field should be willing to entertain other ideas.