So what do we do next? I mean, in terms of things that might actually help?

Become a society with strong critical thinking skills who values people based on reasoned takes based on experience and science over people who value rapid, loud appeals to emotion.

One piece of that is recognizing that doing things like putting flat earthers up in high altitude planes or near space is a waste of resources that could’ve been spent doing something better.

EDIT: that last paragraph was an incomplete thought. Individual flat earthers have done the whole scientific method thing, and proved themselves incorrect and stepped away from it. How do you handle the people that refuse to be convinced? If there’s no level evidence that a person will accept and they’re out in the forest commons chopping down trees to build a tower to whatever is on top of earth, how do you tolerate it at a societal level? It’s still an incomplete thought.

They don’t price their based on cost + profit. They price their product based on what analysts think the market will bear.

And for your original question: “How can they be losing money when prices are higher than ever”

They didn’t lose money. In Q3 of 2026 they beat earnings estimates by 27%, and missed revenue by 0.25%. The stonk dropped because its price was based on analysts’ guesses on what it would do in the future, and they’ve revised that estimate down based on Intel’s earnings report and what they think the AI market is going to look like. And so the stonk price collapsed all the way back to where it was in…April of this year.

There are recent parallels in both the firearms and 3D printing industries. California 3D printers now get to have restrictions on them because of recent legislation. When technology bridges the “moat” to some Unreachable Fortress it’s inevitable for lobbying to appear since you can’t move the Fortress. Chinese open source models and weights are that bridge, and here we are.

I’m sure there’s market research, focus groups, and unfilmed talks where people air the ideas out to gauge if they can get national traction, but it’s hard to tell with techbros if we’re seeing the vetted idea put to film or if he really thinks the idea that there’s just one computer on earth (that he owns) that everybody can buy time on. I trend towards the latter given the market for software you actually own instead of license, and unlocked hardware.

There are already rumblings about RISC-V.

No. They have already told off a 27 year old to ensure that the backdoor(s) they put there on purpose are still there when he gets done. It’s been worse than you thought for years.

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-accounts-software,37480.html

Someone with no understanding of what quality software looks like who also doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of every Cisco switch and router on the planet either being old and unsupported, or new and absolutely full of security holes.

They can buy it on the used market and destroy it.

<proper noun> absolutely hates the idea of [other] people <gerund> their own <noun> at home, argues they shouldn’t <verb> <noun>.

I happen to like verbing my own noun.

It’s the perfect place. Sometimes I even see comments I might’ve written myself before.

It doesn’t work until reddit gets to that specific person’s make/break feature and breaks it.

Reddit? The Lemmy alternative?

I won’t go there, but someone go into that thread and try saying something good about Lemmy and see if it sticks.

We could put a lot of nicer groceries up front and hope nobody looks deeper!

But then what happens if someone notices we’re selling a lot of fridges? They could buy insurance on the price of our fridges (options), and that wouldn’t be good because we know the price is going down, that’s why we’re selling them (duh). So we’ll have to sneak all these things out the door and hope nobody looks or notices until we’ve got them all sold.

I guess that’s kind of a rough metaphor, but that stuff all still goes on. The math that tells you when to sell the fridge is where all the real value is.

Like the article says, their internal risk management models are telling them to get the risk off their books.

Taking on the debt in the first place is like agreeing to store a gallon of milk in a fridge for an undetermined amount of time. The milk is going to go bad, and when it does the jug (or bag) might explode forcing a cleanout of the fridge, throwing out other things in the fridge, and maybe replacing the fridge altogether if the milk leaked down into a lot of crevices. Everyone knows the milk will go bad, but the big banks will know how old the fridge is, what coolant it uses, how old the compressor is, how many times a day the fridge has been opened, the average time it stays open, the dairy the cow who produced the milk, and the name of the cow if they can get it. The milk is going bad quicker than expected, and they’re finding out they don’t want to be the ones to guess when the jug will explode, and they’re also finding out that nobody else wants to buy the jug.

Oracle pulling a “god did it” was probably a part of this, but nobody involved is going to give a real answer.

I stand corrected.

I wasn’t aware of any for consumer level chips. All I really want is a basic motherboard+processor with ECC RAM and solid electronics with good capacitors and power filters like the manufacturers seem to be doing for the high end gaming rigs, but without a lot of bells and whistles that need to be turned off as part of the “new computer” process.

they had the technology the whole time to make upgraded modular chips and sell them for pre-existing computer architecture

I’ve heard that it’s also possible to make consumer motherboards with ECC RAM and no built-in wifi as well, but surely someone would’ve tried that by now if is was technologically possible.

Maybe the RISC-V RVA23 push will be able to figure it out.

An investment that would pay off if the tech industry went to hell would be Put options on QQQ (an ETF that tracks the NASDAQ-100). You have to get both the timing and the drop correct, and better funded groups with much faster computers AND the ability to make trades to prop up the market while they unload their shit will be competing against you (every options trade has an opposite side and most of them expire worthless). Watch the movies Margin Call and The Big Short for research as much as playing the lottery can be researched (they’re good movies so it’s time well spent anyway). Make a movie night out of it and watch The Other Guys which was directed by the same guy who directed The Big Short. Watch through the end credits.

I didn’t read the article because gizmodo, but as other people here have said, Dr. Burry (he’s played by Christian Bale in The Big Short) often thinks things are going to go south, and there’s usually reason to think so, but in general as Warren Buffett could easily have said, “stonks only go up.” NVDA, AAPL, and MSFT make around 15% or so of the entire world stock market and around 20% of the US market. Nobody’s going to let them collapse and even without the AI craze they still have all the other stuff to fall back on. Thumbs will go on the scale to an extent even greater than the 2008 collapse.

All of them at once.

Get very, very good at virtual machines, containers, and networks and set up your computer so that it looks like an OSCP test lab environment. Have your daily driver computer have its own user space networks decoupled from each other.

We’re kind of at a point where a lot of concepts have been done and done well. If you get used to having NFS (securely!) set up, you can run it on your host computer which runs something relatively boring and have a bunch of VMs that do whatever you want. Tried something weird with the latest Gentoo and it didn’t work? Flip the off switch on that VM, mount the image as a drive and copy off what you want, then start over.

Some info to help:

• https://www.nasa.gov/spot-the-station/
• https://www.n2yo.com/ or https://orbitalradar.com/amateur-radio-satellite-passes or others

A lot of ISS trackers focus on visible passes, but VHF/UHF like this event just need line of sight and a radio to hear the signal. Add a computer with audio out from the radio to record the signal and software to decode it and get the picture.

So Space Cowboys 2, except

• Everybody passes the physicals just fine, but all decide to quit instead of going through the onboarding process
• The young punk bad guys in the movie are secretly trying to get an LLM to redesign it, but can’t because the Blackbird was a skunkworks program and some key principal princple either never got written down or DOGE cut the funding to restore the microfiche with the details so all the details got destroyed

EDIT: Spelling.

Ah. That’s a misunderstanding on my part, and a good news story. Still don’t want to wake up tomorrow and see a published AES break, though.