These are the same people who don’t know what woods porn is.

International Cangaroo Court amirite

I noticed today the Tom’s Hardware has been keeping track of Chinese GPU developments.

• 2022-12: The Rise of China GPU Makers: AI and Tech Sovereignty Drive New GPU Entrants
• 2023-03: China's First Domestic GPU Announced With 1080p League of Legends Demo
• 2023-08: Huawei's GPU Reportedly Matches Nvidia's A100
• 2024-04: China gives local companies funding to buy homegrown GPUs — aiming for self-sufficiency by 2027
• 2024-05: Chinese-made GPU beats performance of 10-year-old integrated AMD graphics — Lingjiu GP201 hits mass production

They don’t have a tag for tracking Chinese GPUs in particular, but they have one for GPU news in general.

China also seems to have some interesting embargo work-arounds:

• 2024-05: Cracked GPUs pop up in Frankensteined Chinese discrete graphics cards built from RTX 4080M and RTX 4090M mobile chips
• 2024-05: China firms' AI breakthrough can meld GPUs from different brands into one training cluster — Baidu says new tech fuses thousands of GPUs together to help sidestep shortages

Yup. Quoting myself quoting myself:

tl;dr: Private equity. Quoting myself:

Private Equity colludes with the private banks (which control the Federal Reserve and have largely captured the Treasury) to acquire companies using almost no initial capital. They then strip those companies of as much value as they can and then sell the depleted companies to lower-rung PEs, which squeeze out what little value is left, and so on until the companies default from the highly-leveraged debt PE saddles them with. These are asset stripping schemes.

Part of the scheme in this case was to make Red Lobster sell off its stores and rent them back at high rates. LA Times:

If one is looking for the original sin in Red Lobster’s decline, however, a good candidate would be the deal that brought it under Golden Gate Capital’s ownership. The private equity firm bought the chain from Darden for $2.1 billion, financing the sale in part by selling the real estate underlying 500 restaurants to the real estate firm American Realty Capital for $1.5 billion.

This was a sale-leaseback transaction, in which Red Lobster was instantly converted from the owner of its property to a tenant on the same property. The leases were typically long-term — as long as 25 years — with annual rent increases of 2% baked in. They were also triple-net leases, meaning that the restaurants were responsible for paying operating costs, property taxes and insurance.

Red Lobster thus lost a great deal of flexibility for closing underperforming restaurants and cutting costs. The bankruptcy filing says that a material portion of the leases charge above-market rates. Of the company’s lease obligations of $190.5 million last year, more than $64 million was for “underperforming stores.”

This exacerbated the company’s financial problems. “Given the Company’s operational headwinds and financial position,” the filing says, “payment of lease obligations associated with non-performing leases has cause significant strains on the Company’s liquidity.” In other words, the sale-leaseback arrangement was draining the company of cash.

I’d never heard of Lukas. He’s apparently been a self-publishing tour de force for over a decade and has been writing for over three. I imagine he created this Kickstarter as a means of promotion and as a method of gauging interest before committing to writing this book.

Running your own server is sisyphean in the face of the email cartel, as Carlos Fenollosa and Jamie Zawinski will tell you.

Hexbear & Lemmygrad & ProleWiki are the only reason I know these guys even exist.

You know who else was vegetarian?

I have to explain to Lemmitors over & over: where do you think your iPhones & other smartphones and laptops come from? What country has more high speed rail than all others combined? Which country has its own space station? The evidence is right in front of their noses.

If you go to the www link and confirm that you’re >=18, you can then replace the www with old and you should be good.

Am I so out of touch?

No, it smell like the children who are wrong.

I think it was, but that’s immaterial as to whether it’s a useful analogy for agitprop.