strangegecko (u/strangegecko)

strangegecko commented on America has a tungsten problem noleary.com/blog/posts/1... · Posted by u/noleary

tehjoker · 4 days ago

> Now that China has become more adversarial

Just a nitpick, but it is the reverse, the United States has become more adversarial. China isn't kidnapping heads of state.

strangegecko · 3 days ago

They've both become more adversarial. China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals for a long time (e.g. wrt Japan and Taiwan and SEA). They also continue to expand military based in the SCS that don't belong there, hold exercises to simulate blockades outside of China. Etc.

strangegecko commented on Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage culpium.com/p/exclusiveap... · Posted by u/speckx

tim-tday · a month ago

Sneak preview of the TSMC shortage that will sweep the world in 2027 when China takes Taiwan and the TSMC scuttles their chip fabs on the island.

I don’t know the hedge to position against this but I’m pretty sure China will make good on its promise.

strangegecko · a month ago

There is no "promise".

The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready", which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand, it is very risky for Xi.

strangegecko commented on What happened to WebAssembly emnudge.dev/blog/what-hap... · Posted by u/enz

palata · a month ago

> ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

I wonder how much the developers writing that are being paid to be complete assholes.

strangegecko · a month ago

I can't speak for FB. But I know a local (non-US) real estate company which does crap like this (they also love to disable right click and detect when browser tools are open and programmatically close the tab/page when that happens), and they're not paying much. I'm guessing it's double of minimum wage, which isn't high here.

strangegecko commented on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes reuters.com/world/us/us-w... · Posted by u/kpw94

kelnos · a month ago

That doesn't really make sense. The problem we're trying to solve is that housing is too expensive. If we do things that end up lowering the cost of housing, then the saleable value of "average Joe's" house will also go down. You can't say that newly-built housing will be (for example) 20% less expensive, but existing housing will keep its value; that's just not how the housing market works.

I'm not sure if "obliterated" is the right word to use, but if making housing affordable means a 20% drop in home prices (which is perhaps not even enough in some places), average Joe existing homeowner is going to run into financial trouble once that happens.

> We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.

If that's the case, then all that new housing will also cost more or less exactly the same as the existing housing stock costs, and the problem will not have been solved yet.

strangegecko · a month ago

How do home owners get into trouble from falling prices if they're just living in their home?

Sure, if they need to move and sell, the price difference might be less favorable to them, but having to weigh cost vs benefit of moving is a fact of life one way or another.

It's a strange expectation to have that home values should act as an investment that can only ever go up.

Letting that expectation influence policy on making space for living available is one of the root causes of this crisis.

strangegecko commented on Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/saubeidl

ExoticPearTree · 2 months ago

> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.

Using this logic, every country should develop its own critical equipment from scratch, in terms of both hardware and software.

My belief is that there is no problem with the Chinese equipment, just scare-mongering from the US because it has no manufacturer of 5G equipment. And Europe jumped on the bandwagon just because.

strangegecko · 2 months ago

China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian. They're also preparing for military activities to expand their territory.

It's not that each country needs to develop their own, but it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.

strangegecko commented on Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

eru · 2 months ago

Humans often answer with fluff like "That's a good question, thanks for asking that, [fluff, fluff, fluff]" to give themselves more breathing room until the first 'token' of their real answer. I wonder if any LLM are doing stuff like that for latency hiding?

strangegecko · 2 months ago

Do humans really do that often?

Coming up with all that fluff would keep my brain busy, meaning there's actually no additional breathing room for thinking about an answer.

strangegecko commented on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/fleahunter

ileonichwiesz · 2 months ago

At that point you just open up the back of the TV and drive a screwdriver into the WiFi chip.

strangegecko · 2 months ago

Goodbye warranty

strangegecko commented on WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

cogman10 · 3 months ago

I think it was a stats class where I learned this, but as it turns out bad weather is less common than good weather. To be a fairly accurate weather person, you merely need to say "there will be no precipitation" and you'll be right like 90% of the time anywhere on earth.

What makes that funny is that historically, weather forecasters have been less than 90% accurate.

Now, I will say that today's weather models are pretty dang amazing. The 10 day forecast rarely wrong for me.

strangegecko · 3 months ago

I regularly encounter days when today's forecast is wrong and even in conflict with the current situation.

E.g. the weather app tells me there's a drizzle all day and currently and yet it's entirely dry. The opposite happens too.

Days of rain often shift in increments of days one or two days before as well.

I'd say it's location specific how accurate predictions are.

strangegecko commented on Azure hit by 15 Tbps DDoS attack using 500k IP addresses bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/speckx

mkoubaa · 3 months ago

It is absolutely not in China's interest to see the West fail. This is propaganda

strangegecko · 3 months ago

China (or at least the CCP, I find the equivocation of the CCP with the country disagreeable) has had the desire or even need to get revenge for their "century of humiliation" for a long time.

They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.

They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.

strangegecko commented on The App Store was always authoritarian infrequently.org/2025/10/... · Posted by u/bertman

9dev · 4 months ago

Right? These comments are so bewildering. I like the design and UX, and the promise to at least a bit more privacy, but if I had to use android or windows or Ubuntu tomorrow, it’d be another device that I use. How you could even expend so much of your time to think about computers more than necessary to use them, much less worship a brand, is beyond me.

strangegecko · 4 months ago

I think both of you entirely misread the top level comment.

He's saying that owning and using an Apple product requires you to engage in behaviors akin to worship, I imagine e.g. accepting Apple's way of doing X as correct by default (~worship) rather than wanting to customize something based on your thoughts and preferences (questioning).