No, it would not be possible, the etching process would destroy extant features on any silicon. There are multiple steps to it and some will destroy the work of the steps that come after, so putting a finished chip through would remove the existing features.

Generally fabrication is done on a circular 300mm wafer, printing a grid of identical chips on it that are then cut out. It would be highly inefficient to do each chip one at a time, doing one small chip or 50 chips at once on one wafer takes the same amount of time and effort.

And the bare silicon left after the first few steps isn’t really worth much. You can go buy a blank high end 300mm wafer for like 81 bucks online. The material value of the silicon is nothing compared to the value of the machine time.

He’s reporting on it and trying to help the victim get restitution.

maybe people should vote more strategically in primaries so half the party’s base don’t feel like they’re voting for the lesser of two evils in the general.

A lot of that cloud compute revenue growth comes from open AI and anthropic paying Microsoft to use their GPU compute to run their models, which is to say, that if you think “anthropic bankrupting people overnight with token costs” is unsustainable, then a lot of Microsoft’s cloud compute growth isn’t sustainable ether. Especially given that a significant amount of the associated “revenue” growth is just them counting redeemed credits as revenue. Credits that they traded to OpenAI in exchange for access to the IP and models that they built copilot on. So if openAI can’t run a sustainable business renting out Microsoft’s GPU compute to run openAI’s models, what makes Bill think Microsoft will be able to do so by running those same models them selves with that same GPU compute?

If we ignore that shell game of “revenue growth” then the rest of their increase in profits comes from incredibly short term and short sighted strategies, such as huge layoffs across multiple divisions and jacking up prices for 365 subscriptions. In fact they’re probably over valued right now given that their current valuation is based on the assumption that they will continue to grow at the rates they have in the past. Price(of their shares) to earnings(earnings per share) across the whole market are at record highs. A price to earnings of 21 to 1 would be exceptionally high 30 years ago. The fact that the average P/E of the companies on the S&P500 is 31 to 1 doesn’t mean Microsoft is undervalued, it means that most companies are massively over valued. Like, you need to be expecting insane growth over the next 10 years to justify P/E’s like that.

People still voting for republicans at this point will not hold their representatives to account over favoring billionaires, it’s a nothing burger as far as they’re concerned, not an issue for the realm of politics.

Democratic voters, as the poll shows, do care and can be convinced to hold their representatives to account, if the representatives ignore it, they are liable to get primaried.

Where is the effort and attention best placed? What is most likely to produce results?

Ezra Klein being on the list is so fucking funny. Like, you telling me the “abundance” guy associates with the “techno monarchy” guy? Shocked I tell you, that the guy who’s proposed ideological concept basically just boiled down to “what if we deregulated stuff further to make economy good?” Is deeply tied to tech oligarchs.

Red hat isn’t a publicly traded company, but they are owned by a publicly traded company (IBM)

Going public just means that the shares will be traded on a public market (stock market) rather than being held privately. So anyone who wants to buy shares can. There are some legal requirements to be publicly traded, largely regarding public disclosure of finances and assets.

The major difference would be that suddenly anyone who wants to have a say in how they are run can buy shares, and if they buy enough shares, they can pressure leadership in to making decisions they would not have otherwise made. also, people buying the shares probably will want to see their shares increase in value, and thus leadership will be pressured to please the stock market hive mind. Potentially it opens them up to a hostile takeover where some outside group buys up enough shares to replaces the leadership with people they want in charge.

Same exact computer, they just don’t charge you for the windows license. So it’s a bit cheaper.

It is very private, by nature of it recording so little and leaving so little trace. Which is what was being asked about, not strictly speaking security.

Most distros don’t collect any data by default.

Basically any distro not built and maintained by a company will be a thousand times more private than Mac or windows. Arch and Debian are both good in that regard, most distros are derived from those. There is also Fedora which is a community project, but it’s very heavily involved with Red Hat inc who is owned by IBM. I’ve never heard about any privacy issues there, but, it’s worth keeping in mind.

If you want something super secure and locked down in regards to privacy, there is Tails which has a lot of neat tricks and tor built in. Not sure I’d recommend it as a daily driver but it’s got it’s use cases.

Can’t wait for Schleswig-Holstein and France to fight distro proxy wars.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.