That presumes you can find someone to agree to those terms (which you won't), and if they do, that it isn't a prohibitively expensive fee (which it would be).
The license should be to use the likeness for a given purpose. Either make it perpetual or per copy, not per time. Product breaking licenses should not be allowed in most situations.
I just wonder why movies get away with licenses for both music and depicting cars etc. for eternity. Seems like they just added weird unnecessary rules for video games. I also imagine a situation where Stephen King has to renew with Plymouth every few years. Seems ridiculous for any other art form why is it so easily accepted for this one?
There are only 1,038 delisted games out of 100,000+ games on Steam, so there are willing licensors. Some may offer perpetual licenses, but want a royalty. It might be easier to delist a game than to manage the ongoing paperwork.
Most games don't have that sort of licensed content to start with, so comparing to the total population of games isn't meaningful.
Offering a perpetual license would limit the licensor's options (e.g. they could never offer someone else an exclusive license, nor could they adjust the rates if the brand becomes more popular, nor could they terminate if the developer/publisher becomes toxic), so I guess while it's theoretically possible I just don't see why they'd want to offer such a license.
It is meaningful if the claim that perpetual licenses don't exist. They do. The terminology is often mocked, but comes in handy in case like this: "in perpetuity, throughout the universe".
My wife worked in a facility that didn't allow phone cameras. You had to check it in anytime you went into one of the secure areas or prove you had one of their phones that had the camera disabled if you were important enough to require being contactable. While I'm sure one or more of the thousands of employees managed to leak some valuable info through conversations, pictures would have been worth 1000x as much if not more.
The article barely mentions boomers, and in the one place it does, it cites a stat, and then immediately abdicates them of any responsibility for that stat.
The rest of the article is about a different generation of folks and the current conditions/perceptions of those conditions.
Why make this about boomers? The article is not about them, nor is a brief factual mention of them unfair. Nor is the follow up sentence absolving them of responsibility for the one thing time are mentioned.
Wondering what the people who created the government think of the current government is massively different than wondering what either of two French philosophers who never participated in statecraft born 150 years later thinks.
It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a system thinks of the current system, and entirely separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated Frenchman think of that system. Even if they are just “some ancient dead old dudes”.
These guys made a constitution that says all men are free, except for slaves and women because they’re obviously not men. This led to a civil war just a couple decades later. I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t really know what they were doing. In fact, that’s why they gave you the tools to change the laws of the country.
Ships then, and now, don’t really need numbers for identification. There are various unique numbers that they can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship’s name and home port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship for legal purposes. You don’t need a registration number on a ship, and certainly wouldn’t have needed one then.
The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list of all persons onboard.
Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and home port combinations. The US does not, but that really doesn’t matter much in the real world. There just aren’t that many conflicts.
More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.
The ability to track and search ships without warrants has been an important capability of the federal government from day one.
Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always has been. I don’t know how they would have felt about private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference is that shipping and ships are not private like your other “papers and effects” are.
Thanks for this level of detail. History is complex, which is why I tend to be skeptical of bare “what would the founders have thought about this” complaints.
The point is, why not let people to have freedom of not having to encrypt? And why such freedom is considered as poor? This is like forcing everyone to have a smart phone, car, passport, zillions of IDs, internet profiles and calling their shackled life as rich.
The other day someone was shocked to see that I don't have FB and instagram accounts. When did people lose their freedom not have social media accounts?
Because if the default is unencrypted, you'll accidentally send secrets in plaintext one day. And if the default is encrypted and works well - why would you ever take time to explicitly disable that? What's the situation where you want to say "just in case someone intercepts this message, I want them to be able to read it"?
Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been. Adjusted for inflation the same can be said about “home use” Macs. The list price of an entry level MacBook Air has been pretty much the same for more than a decade. Adjust for inflation, and you get a MacBook air for less than half the real cost of the launch model that is massively better in every way.
A blip in high end RAM prices has no bearing on affordable home computing. Look at the last year or two and the proliferation of cheap, moderately to highly speced mini desktops.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house
before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.
Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.
People that can reliably predict the future, especially when it comes to rising markets, are almost always billionaires. It is a skill so rare that it can literally make you the richest man on earth. Why should I trust your prediction of future markets that this pricing is the new standard, and will never go down? Line doesn’t always go up, even if it feels like it is right now, and all the tech media darlings are saying so.
If everything remains the same, RAM pricing will also. I have never once found a period in known history where everything stays the same, and I would be willing to bet 5 figures that at some point in the future I will be able to buy DDR5 or better ram for cheaper than today. I can point out that in the long run, prices for computing equipment have always fallen. I would trust that trend a lot more than a shortage a few months old changing the very nature of commodity markets. Mind you, I’m not the richest man on earth either, so my pattern matched opinion should be judged the same.
> B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
I didn't say I could build one from parts. Instead I said buy a mini pc, and then went and looked up the specs and price point to be sure.
The PC that I was talking about is here[https://a.co/d/6c8Udbp]. I live in Canada so translated the prices to USD. Remember that US stores are sometimes forced to hide a massive import tax in those parts prices. The rest of the world isn’t subject to that and pays less.
Don’t forget that many of these manufacturers operate with long-term supply contracts for components like RAM, maintain existing inventory, or are selling systems that were produced some time ago. That helps explain why we are still seeing comparatively low prices at the moment.
If the current RAM supply crisis continues, it is very likely that these kinds of offers will disappear and that systems like this will become more expensive as well, not to mention all the other products that rely on DRAM components.
I also don’t believe RAM prices will drop again anytime soon, especially now that manufacturers have seen how high prices can go while demand still holds. Unlike something like graphics cards, RAM is not optional, it is a fundamental requirement for building any computer (or any device that contains one). People don’t buy it because they want to, but because they have to.
In the end, I suspect that some form of market-regulating mechanism may be required, potentially through government intervention. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see what would bring prices down again, unless Chinese manufacturers manage to produce DRAM at scale, at significantly lower cost, and effectively flood the market.
You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
here’s an equivalent speced pc available in the US for $439 with a prime membership.
So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
> You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
Yes. Absolutely correct if you are talking about the short term. I was talking about the long term, and said that. If you are so certain would you take this bet: any odds, any amount that within 1 month I can buy 32gb of new retail DDR5 in the US for at least 10% less than the $384 you cited. (think very hard on why I might offer you infinite upside so confidently. It's not because I know where the price of RAM is going in the short term)
> So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
At this point I can't tell if you are arguing in bad faith, or just unfamiliar with how prime works. Just in case: You have cited the cost of prime for a full year. You can buy just a month of prime for a maximum price of $14.99 (that's how I got $455) if you have already used your free trial, and don't qualify for any discounts. Prime also allows cancellation within 14 days of signing up for a paid option, which is more than enough time to order a computer, and have it delivered, and cancel for a full refund.
So really, if you use a trial or ask for a refund for your prime fees the price is $439. So we have actually gotten the price a full 10% lower than I originally cited.
Edit: to eliminate any arguments about Prime in the price of the PC, here's an indentically speced mini PC for the same price from Newegg https://www.newegg.com/p/2SW-00BM-00002
At this point I can't tell if you are arguing in bad faith, or just unfamiliar with how prime works. Just in case: You have cited the cost of prime for a full year.
Oh for the love of fuck. I don't subscribe to Prime or pay any attention to how it's priced. I've gotten offers for free trials of Prime before, should I just ignore that for most people Prime is something they have to pay for?
Back at the start of our discourse, you tried to prove that a sub $500 computer can't exist by citing that B+H is selling sticks of 32gb of DDR5 for $384 while ignoring, or failing to find that they had 2 x 16 kits of Crucial branded RAM for $270 in stock when you made the claim. That deal is gone now at BH, but Best Buy has the exact same kit for $260 in stock right now (https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-32gb-2x16gb-ddr5...). Rather critically, the original post did NOT make any claims about the price of a 32GB RAM stick, it made a claim about the existence of a < $500 computer with 32GB of DDR5 and a Ryzen 7. I have definitively proven that multiple merchants in multiple countries can make good on that computer configuration at that price. That you CAN pay that much for RAM has nothing to do with my since proven claim about computer pricing.
You have said elsewhere that "a single entity bought more than 70% of the wafer production for the next year. That's across all types of memory modules." Based on reported industry rumors and press releases, OpenAI have made a non-binding agreement with two foundries that control 70% of the DRAM market for up to little more than half their output of raw DRAM wafers. That is a massive difference from buying 70% of the entire RAM market. Its a letter of intent for both foundries, and is very nebulous about that "up to" phrasing. Both of those deals was called a "Letter of Intent" by the foundry very specifically. If you aren't familiar, that specific phrase is typically used for a non-formalized agreement that has no legally enforceable provisions. No actual deal has been inked. I can understand how a misread happened, but not how you have such strong feelings on a story that you haven't understood the most basic details for. To summarize: not a deal in the legal/enforceable sense, not 70% of the global RAM or DRAM market, not all types of RAM, not even a firm commitment on the 40% of DRAM market from either party.
You say "I don't subscribe to Prime or pay any attention to how it's priced", but you somehow arrive on the only pricing option of the ~4 available options that undercuts what I am saying. I had to scroll to below the fold on google for "prime price" to get a single link that did not mention the lower monthly price in the search result. Even the google AI got it right. Yet, I am to give you the benefit of doubt that you have such specific, yet also profoundly limited, knowledge of the Prime program that you can cite the exact price of the yearly version of the product to prove a point, yet have no idea that a monthly subscription exists. A curiously specific ignorance.
There's more, but I'll move on.
I'm happy to accept your plea of ignorance, but it severely undercuts your arguments when you have to plea ignorance on the facts at the root of your arguments continually. It severely undercuts your plea of ignorance when every single number and fact you misquote happens to be an error in favor of your argument. People making mistakes in good faith tend not to make every single error in their own favor.
The worst part is, the position that RAM pricing will not drop has merit and is very arguable (although I don't agree given what I have seen so far). It is NOT a good thing for DRAM prices that OpenAI might have first dibs on a sizable minority of next years DRAM production. It is also not at all a given that that will be true. Continually using deceptively cherry picked, or outright wrong, numbers and info means that this conversation won't continue. I must insist on basing arguments in fact.
Thanks for the back and forth, for what it's worth. In any case, its always enlightening to get a good peak into how different people interpret numbers and facts, and arrive at their understanding of the world.
What is your estimate for when memory prices will decrease?
I agree that we've seen similar fluctuations in the past and the price of compute trends down in the long-term. This could be a bubble, which it likely is, in which case prices should return to baseline eventually. The political climate is extremely challenging at this time though so things could take longer to stabilize. Do you think we're in this ride for months or years?
I can’t be more clear: specificity around predicting the future is close to impossible. There are 9 figure bets on both sides of the RAM issue, and strategic national concerns. I say that prices will go down at some point in the future for reasons highlighted already, but I have no clue when. Keep in mind what I myself have said about human ability to predict the future. You would be a fool to believe anyone’s specific estimates.
Maybe the AI money train stops after Christmas. The entire economy is fucked, but RAM is cheap.
Maybe we unlock AGI and the price sky rockets further before factories can get built.
There are just too many variables.
The real test is if someone had seen this coming, they would have made massive absurd investment returns just by buying up stock and storing it for a few months. Anyone who didn’t take advantage of that opportunity has proved that they had no real confidence in their ability to predict the future price of RAM. RAM inventory might have been one of the highest return investments possible this year. Where are all the RAM whales in Lambos who saw this coming?
As a corollary: we can say that unless you have some skin in the game and have invested a significant amount of your wealth in RAM chips, then you don’t know which way the price is going or when.
Extending that even further: people complaining about RAM prices being so high, and moaning that they bought less RAM because of it are actually signaling through action that they think that prices will go down or have leveled off. Anyone who believes that sticks of DDR5 RAM will continue the trend should be cleaning out Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg since the price will never be lower than today.
The distinct lack of serious people saying “I told ya so” with receipts, combined with the lack of people hoarding RAM to sell later is a good indirect signal that no one knows what is happening in the near term.
I can’t be more clear: specificity around predicting the future is close to impossible.
And I can't be more clear: a single entity bought more than 70% of the wafer production for the next year. That's across all types of memory modules. That will increase prices.
people complaining about RAM prices being so high, and moaning that they bought less RAM
because of it are actually signaling through action that they think that prices will go
down or have leveled off
No, no they're not. They're saying nothing about what they think future prices will be.
> I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax
That's an amazing price, but I'd like to see where you're getting it. 32GB of RAM alone costs €450 here (€250 if you're willing to trust Amazon's February 2026 delivery dates).
Getting a PC isn't that expensive, but after the blockchain hype and then the AI hype, prices have yet to come down. All estimations I've seen will have RAM prices increase further until the summer of next year, and the first dents in pricing coming the year after at the very earliest.
Amazon[0] link below. Equivalent systems also available at Newegg for the same price since someone nitpicked that you need a $15 prime membership to get that Amazon deal.
Shipping might screw you but here’s in stock 32gb kits of name brand RAM from a well known retailer in the US for $280[1].
Edit: same crucial RAM kit is 220GBP in stock at amazon[2]
“A computer in every home” (from the original post I was replying to) does not mean “A computer with the highest priced version of the highest priced optional accessory for computers in every home”
I’m talking about the hundreds of affordable models that are perfectly suitable for everything up to and including AAA gaming.
The existence of expensive, and very much optional, high end computer parts does not mean that affordable computers are not more incredible than ever.
Just because cutting edge high end parts are out of reach to you, does not mean that perfectly usable computers are too, as I demonstrated with actual specs and prices in my post.
The original base MacBook Air sold for $1799 in 2008. The inflation adjusted price is $2715.
The current base model is $999, and literally better in every way except thickness on one edge.
If we constrain ourselves to just 15 years. The $999 MBA was released 15 years ago ($1488 in real dollars). The list price has remained the same for the base model, with the exception of when they sold the discontinued 11” MBAs for $899.
It’s actually kind of wild how much better and cheaper computers have gotten.
I feel bad for their competitors. We need good competition in the long run but over the last few years it's made less and less sense to get something other than an Apple laptop for most use cases.
I don't. They're being weighed down by Windows and to a lesser extent, x86. If they want to excel in the market, make a change. Use what Valve is doing as an example.
Also, the MBA vs MBP lineup is different now. MBP was the default choice before even for students, so MacBooks sorta started at $1300. Now the MBA is decent, and the MBP is really only for pros who need extra power and features.
What regular home workload are you thinking of that the computer I described is incapable of?
You can call a computer a calculator, but that doesn’t make it a calculator.
Can they run SOTA LLMs? No. Can they run smaller, yet still capable LLMs? Yes.
However, I don’t think that the ability to run SOTA LLMs is a reasonable expectation for “a computer in every home” just a few years into that software category even existing.
It's kind of funny to see "a computer in every home" invoked when we're talking about the equivalent of ~$100 buying a non-trivial percentage of all computational power in existence at the time of the quote. By the standards of that time, we don't just have a computer in every home, we have a supercomputer in every pocket.
You can have access to a supercomputer for pennies, internet access for very little money, and even an m4 Mac mini for $500. You can have a raspberry pi computer for even less. And buy a monitor for a couple hundred dollars.
I feel like you’re twisting the goalposts to make your point that it has to be local compute to have access to AI. Why does it need to be local?
Update: I take it back. You can get access to AI for free.
As a similar minded person in regards to “whatever goes”, the way I square it is drawing the line at persuasion, as well as the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” games they are playing with enticing kids to gamble via sweepstakes loopholes, lax identity verification, etc.
I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.
Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.
The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.
"contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world. I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary outside of... contemporary usage and definition.
It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is about a TV show and not literature.
Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18 year old show that stopped production more than a decade ago contemporary?
You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of the last step.
I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to the kid, or more intermediate steps.
> Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for most. With other things like sports, we know that there is the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated and the benefits far outweigh the risks.
I'd rather have my heroin addicted son do it at home, where I can be there to take him to the hospital, talk to him about it, etc., rather than make him go out into the streets alone. Banning it doesn't seem like a productive approach
We aren't concerned only about existing addicts, but potential future addicts. Especially for something like social media with strong network effects, where decreasing use is non-linear.
The question is always:
A. What do people use instead? (banning pot, for example, increases use of heroin and alcohol, which is good for alcohol companies but bad for public health. If banning social media sent kids to 24/7 news channels, it might not help, but I haven't seen evidence of that.)
B. How much is organized crime funded by the increased black market? (In this case, kids are a limited population that doesn't have a lot of money, so the answer is probably "not much".)
Banning substances naturally decreases use, that's obvious, but prohibition criminalizes use, which will always persist. You cannot stop drug use. Drug legalization so far has resulted in declining use of dangerous substances like tobacco and alcohol. Far more young people today choose smoking pot over smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. Many people choose not to drink because they've observed the widespread dangerous effects of it since it's been legal. If heroin was made legal all over the world today, you'd 100% see increased use. But maybe humanity needs to see the consequences in order to respect them? Just like alcohol and cigarettes?
> I can be there to take him to the hospital, talk to him about it, etc.
Nanny state! Let him take himself to medical facilities, and deal with the consequences himself instead of interfering
HELL Let's ban hospitals, they're just interfering in the natural order of life.
Real talk: I know that those are strawmen and you most definitely think that where you draw the line is right for you and your family (assuming that you have one), but the reality is that the line gets moved a LOT as children grow - your line might be great if you have developed a good relationship with your son, and he's received a good social education from his friends/network and he's over a certain age.
It fails very quickly if he's, say, 5 years old and/or he's had no friends that model good/bad behaviour and/or you and he are human meaning that communication, interpretation, and any hint of resentment lies underneath (keep in mind that teenagers are geared to fight/be angry/dislike their parents, for the specific reason that it motivates them to leave home and begin their own lives)
I like your libertarian approach. You're right the line can move a lot. Of course, my support/interference would (hypothetically speaking) be different on a situation to situation basis, my reasoning is simply love. If I love someone, like my son, I want them to be free to make mistakes and hurt themselves, and certainly if they start hurting others I would seek to stop that. I think it's important, though, to be there for people, nut the line does change like you pointed out. So I'm really not sure- my decisions would be situationally dependent. I'm still inclined to say that prohibition is ineffective and potentially more dangerous for some people
Without wishing to completely sidetrack the discussion...
> I like your libertarian approach.
Their idea is to prohibit government...
What we are seeing in Australia is a community that has decided that the best course of action is to say that children under the age of 16 are generally too young to have the skills to deal with some social media.
You yourself are comfortable with the idea that a 5 year old is far too young for social media (and kids that age /can/ work devices to access social media if they want)
The question really is, at what age should we draw the line.
16 is arbitrary, but the ones most able to manage the interactions are the ones that will have the skills for circumventing the blanket ban, and the ones that aren't that savvy, won't.
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