Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing.
Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
citation needed. taiwan is china, moron, and china has said it will be eventually reunited, peacefully if no one fucks up. anyway, an why should an island aprox 7000 miles away from the us be the us' business? that's the problem right there. not for long, though.
And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.
While true, China's threat has been going on for a long time and they've been running repeated exercises on how to do it, how to take US warships out, etc.
Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
But more generally, when the foundation of your country's morality is "all men are created equal" you really have given up the space to object to others doing what you do.
I don't think Trump is bluffing. However Americans in general are opposed to taking Greenland, and so if Trump does anything I expect Americans/Congress to raise up. Europe should be concerned because this will take months to play out.
They're exactly as rational as any other group of humans.
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
There is a lot of nuance missing in public discourse about the US threats of leaving NATO, stopping direct arms support of Ukraine (except for intelligence), and generally scaring NATO members and Europe into funding their own defense.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
> A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place.
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.
https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778956
I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.
The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
But more generally, when the foundation of your country's morality is "all men are created equal" you really have given up the space to object to others doing what you do.
If honour is a thing.
There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault.
Perhaps, but in the last year China did build these:
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/03/stairway-to-tai...
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.