You get a time advantage for doing this strategy, but your talent will be pouched and your competitors will be able to catch up fairly quickly.

I used to think this but it only seems to be true for a shallow tech advantage, which isn’t this scenario. A sufficiently deep stack of compounded tech is robust against even aggressive talent poaching. The knowledge is embedded in the network, not the random individual.

We see this in jet engines, silicon fab, et al.

I mean, even north korea has figured out the nuclear bomb, the original greatest secret deep stack of compounded tech. Seems like anyone can figure out anything if they are hell bent on it on this earth. Engineers seem to be more fungible than people anticipate I guess, and no one really comes up with unprecedented unique ideas. The whole research process incentivizes incremental work on known concepts to justify receiving funding at all, since it is in high demand and short supply.

Korea had the advantage of like seventy years of technological advancement from the first nuclear bomb.

With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.

There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.

Chinese firms won’t have the exact same problems as anyone else. Some problems will be the same but not all.

* Chinese firms finance through different banks and investors than current ram producers

* A company with a mission statement of consumer ram won’t have their supply outbid by data centers

* Chinese manufacturing has more expertise in scaling then any other manufacturing culture

My primary concern is for next generation hardware.

Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?

Why would that concern you unless you are working on the cutting edge and the very limits of that hardware?

The current generation is insanely fast. I am planning to get a gaming PC for my wife and a mix of gaming + workstation PC for me (or maybe just base it off of the Ryzen 9950x3D and call it a day). We plan to hold on to them for 10 years.

I don't care if anything 6x faster comes out. For what I need the current generation is even an overkill.

I'd even go as far as to say that it would be quite OK if that's the very last generation and no further hardware development ever happens.

I am on the edge of current available hardware and do feel the desire to upgrade. As stated before, I am unhappy with the current maximum when combing frame generation, resolution, and graphics quality.

My dream spec is UE5 at 120hz on an 8k oled. I think that sounds like a super sick experience I would buy tens of thousands of dollars of hardware for.

If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.

Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.

Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.

> Many users will not want to risk

How "Many users" though?

I would argue that the segment of the market whose purchases incentivize personal responsibility on their PCs is outweighed by the segment of the market blowing their disposable income on tablets and smartphones who just want things to work and want whatever they see other people using on social media.

We both know which segment of the market the large companies want to win that battle. They want to sell rented compute resources through nothing but impossible-to-locally-administrate devices where every sensor spies on you and it's impossible to store any data or documents locally, let alone privately.

Even One Drive is pushing hard to literally erase your hard drive and only host your documents on their servers.

That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.

Compilers do, and AI models are making software more accessible than ever.

I think this is naive, is it just kicks the can. How do you trust that the signer is human?

True, I can only know that the owner of the private key signed but not how the document was created. But I suppose there is some trust involved that a person I know who signs doesn't sign some AI generated stuff. To establish the initial link, I suppose we need something more mainstream/scalable than the old key signing parties I remember from CCC etc.

But at least for friends and family it should be possible to create some flow where every member has a key-combo and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote etc. and have local mini-keysign parties.

>and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote

You have far too much faith in humanity. The majority of my extended family members are not smart enough to resist continuous attacks and would eventually not only sign, but give away the key in question.

Simply put I think we are stretching humanity farther than intellectual ability allows in a lot of people.

Do we need new key signing for friends/family? I can trust that all messages coming from a friend/family’s account originated from them, or else their account was compromised. I don’t see how a ‘non-ai’ key adds enough more trust to be worth it.

In general barriers to trust/trade are bad for tbr economy.

Three 9s is a perfectly reasonable bar to expect for services you depend on. Without GitHub my company cannot deploy code. There is no alternative method to patch prod. In addition many development activities are halted, wasting labor costs.

We wouldn’t couple so much if we knew reliability would be this low. It will influence future decisions.

Flash was founded in 1993, and while desktops were much more popular laptops were indeed a product sold to consumers

I’d rather give up the empire, then be the type of empire that’s “full focus on hard power.”