It's actually probably a pretty potent lever from the Trump administration. My guess is that Anthropic might be able to sue and win. But...that will take time. They have an IPO coming up, and the last thing they want is going to be this hanging over it.
It's an argument in favor of having more checks on the Executive, I'd say.
He just licenses his name to these things. He doesn't manufacture all these "Trump" products.
I use Emacs plus LaTeX to author stuff.
If I gotta read Office documents, then LibreOffice.
I mean, the real sin here is from the Bluetooth SIG. If you make a radio protocol that broadcasts a unique identifier, it's going to be abused sooner or later.
Google and Apple already know where Bluetooth devices have traveled if an iOS or Android phone using Location Services has come near them at any point.
Other people, like these ALPR guys, can probably harvest a little more data from users of Bluetooth devices, but they aren't going to be the most meaningful harvester, as they have far fewer collection points.
Magewell Pro Capture card
I've been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.
All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.
But I've seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I've had sitting around, and that's just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.
I doubt that this is political theater. The judge
who is a neutral party here, and introduced the question
is asking a pretty straightforward question, testing the argument that the lawyer is making. "If your argument that Trump can rebuilt the wing of the White House holds, it seems that it'd entail X (where X is something that it seems like we wouldn't want). Is that true?"
If you read court transcripts, this isn't an uncommon thing for a judge to do.
Trump's strongest support in 2024 wasn't actually in the South.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/95f42ca4-771c-4a27-b039-969f7ae8160a.jpeg
West Virginia and Wyoming, the two biggest coal producers, were the strongest supporters. There were states in the South that went for Trump, but there's also the Great Plains.
Contrast with, say, the 1920 presidential election, which was clearly a South-vs-rest-of-US result:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_United_States_presidential_election
There are three major DRAM chip manufacturers: Micron, in the US, and Samsung and SK Hynix, both in South Korea.
Micron has two new fabs coming online in Boise, Idaho. The earliest one is scheduled to start operation in the first half of 2027 (they recently announced that they'd moved that timeline up from the second half of 2027) though it'll take time to ramp up; it will not be doing output at full capacity immediately when it first starts up.
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
They announced late last year that they were going to do a second Boise one as well for more capacity.
They also have New York fabs that they're doing:
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
For the South Korean manufacturers:
Samsung
This year, Samsung is prioritizing the conversion of its lines to memory chips at its Pyeongtaek campus in Gyeonggi and the acceleration of new facility construction at the site.
At the P4 plant, the company is upgrading dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) production to its latest 1c process, which will be used for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced DRAM chips. Samsung aims to secure 1c capacity of more than 200,000 wafers per month by the end of the year through line conversion and additional equipment installation.
Construction of P5, which had previously been delayed during the semiconductor downturn, resumed this year with a timeline accelerated by roughly six months compared to earlier plans. The chipmaker is bringing in tens of thousands of new workers to construct the megafab, capable of producing HBM, DRAM, NAND flash and potentially foundry chips. Construction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, with equipment installation beginning shortly afterward and mass production targeted for the latter part of 2028.
Construction of the last Pyeongtaek facility, P6, is currently expected to start in the third quarter of 2028.
SK Hynix
SK hynix is currently concentrating short-term investment on expanding capacity at its M15X fab in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, while also upgrading older lines.
The company is adding 1b DRAM capacity at M15X, while accelerating 1c node conversions at its M14 and M16 fabs for production of HBM and server DRAM. After hitting a capacity of 10,000 wafers per month last year, it is expected to expand capacity by up to 70,000 wafers per month this year.
For a new greenfield project, SK hynix is advancing construction at the Yongin semiconductor cluster in Gyeonggi, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing projects globally. The cluster will ultimately host six Samsung fabs from Samsung and four SK hynix facilities, and the latter is moving ahead first.
Construction of the first fab, Y1, is expected to be completed in February of next year, earlier than previously planned. Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.
Y1 will be built in six cleanroom "phases," a unit used in fab construction for the capacity expansion stage. Each phase adds more floor space and related equipment for wafer capacity expansion. The first three phases are expected to begin operation within the same year, providing a capacity of 150,000 wafers per month, with the remaining phases adding another 150,000 wafers per month once fully operational.
The second fab in the cluster, Y2, is expected to begin construction around the third quarter of 2028.
So, two points.
First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.
But, second...I think that some perspective is in order. Set new production aside. Let's imagine a world where that didn't happen. In fact, let's imagine that not a single additional memory chip was going to be produced. Video games were around when I played games on an Atari 2600, to pick an early video game console. I had fun with it. It didn't have the latest, real-time rendered photorealistic graphics. But...the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Bytes.
There are people building microcontrollers right now that have onboard memory, and those aren't impacted by this. It's just the high-density dedicated memory chips that go on DIMMs that are seeing all that demand.
According to Wikipedia, there were 30 million Atari 2600s made. The CPU I currently have in my desktop has a little over 145MB of onboard cache. Twenty-six of those CPUs, looking just at their onboard cache, no external memory from Micron/Samsung/SK Hynix, have more memory than all of the 30 million Atari 2600s ever manufactured, combined.
Like, don't get me wrong. I enjoy using all this memory that we have had available in recent years. But...video games are here to stay and would be even if no dedicated memory chips were around.
As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.
Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You're likely to get more for your money.
If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don't have prices driven by memory price.
They're building out. The first ones are going to be mid-late 2027, but those aren't expected to be at full production until about 2028.
searches
Hmm. Micron says that they're aiming to move up their first fab becoming active to the first half of 2027, now:
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article314253330.html
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says the company is pushing up its timelines for opening its first semiconductor fabrication plant, or fab, into the first half of 2027, instead of the second half. His announcement in a Dec. 17 earnings call came months after the chipmaker unveiled plans to start construction on a second fab in 2026, eyeing a 2028 ribbon-cutting.
They also have a second fab in Boise, Idaho, and some in New York that theylre building.
Both Samsung and SK Hynix have fabs in South Korea that they're building.
Internet Protocol is the protocol underlying all Internet communications, what lets a packet of information get from one computer on the Internet to another.
Since the beginning of the Internet, Internet Protocol has permitted Computer A to send a packet of information to Computer B, regardless of whether Computer B wants that packet or not. Once Computer B receives the packet, it can decide to discard it or not.
The problem is that Computer B also only has so much bandwidth available to it, and if someone can acquire control over sufficient computers that can act as Computer A, then they can overwhelm Computer B's bandwidth by having all of these computers send packets of data to Computer B; this is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Any software running on a computer
a game, pretty much any sort of malware, whatever
normally has enough permission to send information to Computer B. In general, it hasn't been terribly hard for people to acquire enough computers to perform such a DDoS attack.
There have been, in the past, various routes to try to mitigate this. If Computer B was on a home network or on a business's local network, then they could ask their Internet service provider to stop sending traffic from a given address to them. This wasn't ideal in that even some small Internet service providers could be overwhelmed, and trying to filter out good traffic from bad wasn't necessarily a trivial task, especially for an ISP that didn't really specialize in this sort of thing.
As far as I can tell, the current norm in 2026 for dealing with DDoSes is basically "use CloudFlare".
CloudFlare is a large American Content Delivery Network (CDN) company
that is, it has servers in locations around the world that keep identical copies of data, and when a user of a website requests, say, an image for some website using the CDN, instead of the image being returned from a given single fixed server somewhere in the world, they use several tricks to arrange for that content to be provided from a server they control near the user. This sort of thing has generally helped to keep load on international datalinks low (e.g. a user in Australia doesn't need to touch the submarine cables out of Australia if an Australian CloudFlare server already has the image on a website that they want to see) and to keep them more-responsive for users.
However, CDNs also have a certain level of privacy implications. Large ones can monitor a lot of Internet traffic, see traffic from a user spanning many websites, as so much traffic is routed through them. The original idea behind the Internet was that it would work by having many small organizations that talked to each other in a distributed fashion, rather than having one large company basically monitor and address traffic issues Internet-wide.
A CDN is also a position to cut off traffic from an abusive user relatively-close to the source. A request is routed to its server (relatively near the flooding machine), and so a CDN can choose to simply not forward it. CloudFlare has decided to specialize in this DDoS resistance service, and has become very popular. My understanding
I have not used CloudFlare myself
is that they also have a very low barrier to start using them, see it as a way to start small websites out and then later be a path-of-least-resistance to later provide commercial services to them.
Now, I have no technical issue with CloudFlare, and as far as I know, they've conducted themselves appropriately. They solve a real problem, which is not a trivial problem to solve, not as the Internet is structured in 2026.
But.
If DDoSes are a problem that pretty much everyone has to be concerned about and the answer simply becomes "use CloudFlare", that's routing an awful lot of Internet traffic through CloudFlare. That's handing CloudFlare an awful lot of information about what's happening on the Internet, and giving it a lot of leverage. Certainly the Internet's creators did not envision the idea of there basically being an "Internet, Incorporated" that was responsible for dealing with these sort of administrative issues.
We could, theoretically, have an Internet that solves the DDoS problem without use of such centralized companies. It could be that a host on the Internet could have control over who sends it traffic to a much greater degree than it does today, have some mechanism to let Computer B say "I don't want to get traffic from this Computer A for some period of time", and have routers block this traffic as far back as possible.
This is not a trivial problem. For one, determining that a DDoS is underway and identifying which machines are problematic is something of a specialized task. Software would have to do that, be capable of doing that.
For another, currently there is little security at the Internet Protocol layer, where this sort of thing would need to happen. A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question. One doesn't want some Computer C to blacklist traffic from Computer A to Computer B.
For another, many routers are relatively limited as computers. They are not equipped to maintain a terribly-large table of Computer A, Computer B pairs to blacklist.
However, if something like this does not happen, then my expectation is that we will continue to gradually drift down the path to having a large company controlling much of the traffic on the Internet, simply because we don't have another great way to deal with a technical limitation inherent to Internet Protocol.
This has become somewhat-more important recently, because various parties who would like to train AIs have been running badly-written Web spiders to aggressively scrape website content for their training corpus, often trying to hide that they are a single party to avoid being blocked. This has acted in many cases as a de facto distributed denial of service attack on many websites, so we've had software like Anubis, whose mascot you may have seen on an increasing number of websites, be deployed, in an attempt to try to identify and block these:
We've had some instances on the Threadiverse get overwhelmed and become almost unusable under load in recent months from such aggressive Web spiders trying to scrape content. A number of Threadiverse instances disabled their previously-public access and require users to get accounts to view content as a way of mitigating this. In many cases, blocking traffic at the instance is sufficient, because even though the AI web spiders are aggressive, they aren't sufficiently so to flood a website's Internet connection if it simply doesn't respond to them; something like CloudFlare or Internet Protocol-level support for mitigating DDoS attacks isn't necessarily required. But it does bring the DDoS issue, something that has always been an issue for the Internet, back to prominent light again in a new way.
It would also solve some other problems. CloudFlare is appropriate for websites, but not all Internet activity is over HTTPS. DoS attacks have happened for a long time
IRC users with disputes (IRC traditionally exposing user IP addresses) would flood each other, for example, and it'd be nice to have a general solution to the problem that isn't limited to HTTPS.
It could also potentially mitigate DoS attacks more-effectively than do CDNs, since it'd permit pushing a blacklist request further up the network than a CDN datacenter, up to an ISP level.
Thoughts?
UnReal World? It's never really grabbed me when I've tried it, personally, but it might be up your alley.
Kenshi has a pretty difficult start, though it gets easier later in the game. I don't think that it's as complex.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is quite complex and has a very steep learning curve, with a lot of hidden stats and the like and limited documentation.