Aceticon

This is pretty much my situation with my gaming PC.

I did do a small upgrade on the Graphics Card after a few years, in between the mining price peak and the AI price peak so it wasn't too expensive, and also bought second hand for €14 a CPU that fits that CPU slot (which is twice as powerful as the original one I had and which, had I bought it new, would have cost about €200), so that extended that PC's life a bit.

Another thing that helped a lot was replacing Windows with Linux - 16 GB memory is absolutely fine with Linux.

I starting to think about a replacement - which would have to be a full one as that motherboard can't really support any further significant improvements (PCI isn't really fast enough to really fully use better and more recent Graphics Cards, memory is maxed and the for that CPU slot there's just 1 better CPU and it's a tiny performance improvement over what I have) - but then the AI bubble came and that was that.

Mind you, similarly to that cartoon, I totally think "just keep going a little bit more, please, please, please" when I look at this PC.

All that said, my gaming needs are still served just fine with this machine since I don't tend to go for glitzy recent AAA titles since I generally find them too linear and intellectually unchallenging for my taste.

Well, now we're down to "pragmatic responses".

By which point we're not "punishing" anybody for being bad boys, we're doing things for geo-strategical value - basically to change behavior or reduce the possibility of future behaviors which are bad for us.

What the poster that originated this thread wanted - that Europe stops sending any tech to China because in his or her view China "supports" (unclear how much is too much) Russia - is not an appropriate response in pragmatic terms because it is a hostile movement towards a massive and increasingly influential nation - China - to try and change unclear behavior (just how much does China really "support" Russia compared to, say, India?) which supposedly indirectly would change somebody else's (Russia) behavior. Specifically for the EU, said somebody else is bad for it because they basically bark a lot towards it (whilst not actually biting it, though they do bit others) and have committed crimes in the EU at the level of a small organized crime organization.

How exactly is it pragmatic to go down a route of trade aggression towards a giant nation which is friendish towards a different nation to somehow (magic?) try and deter said other nation from further committing in the EU the level of crime of a small criminal organization?!

The retribution from China would cost the EU vastly more than the problem that action by the EU might (but it's not at all guaranteed) ameliorate.

That's not pragmatic in any way form or shape.

If we're going for punishing them, then that's not "pragmatic" anymore, that's at the level of principles, at which point what I wrote about punishing all imperialists, genociders and their supports applies.

If you think denying technology to China because they work with Russia is a proportional response to Russia murdering people in Europe, I have some news for you about CIA activities all over the World including in Europe ...

It's a lot more simple to just follow the logic of Principles and pushing back on those commiting wars of aggression and genocide and those who support them as a rule and without trying to treat some of those one way and others differently for *reasons*, than try and come up with the perfect red-line of actions in Europe which decides between "do nothing at all" and "block anybody in any away associated with them", that puts Russia on the bad side of the line and the likes of America on the good side so that we can keep on treating one set of murderous imperialists better than the other.

Ah, I see, you're driven by "what's in it for me", not by principles.

Well, by that logic, I as an EU citizen shouldn't give a shit, since Russia hasn't attacked the EU (at most they should get a proportional talkie-talkie response when they engage in talkie-talkie "aggression") and meanwhile it's more profitable for the EU to engage with China than it is to cut them of, and as for the rest of Europe (most notably Ukraine), well screw them same as the "screw Palestinians" of your position.

Even better, as a Portuguese and thus as far from Russia as possible whilst still being in Europe, by your "self interest" motivation I shouldn't give a shit about Russia even if they invaded Eastern European EU countries.

Of course, me being a person of principles, I support Palestine against the Israeli Genocide same as I support Ukraine against Russia aggression (no need to feel personally endangered by either aggressor) and what I think the EU should do in the international plane follows from that, but that's not at all your reason to wanting that Europe behaves towards China in a certain way.

That's actually an excellent summary of the whole situation.

As an European, I very much prefer that we apply to those who support Israel the same standards we do for those who support Russia.

So I'm absolutelly fine that we do not give BOTH Israel's and Russia's allies important technology.

Doing otherwise would show our "European values" to in practice be nothing more than sociopathic hypocrisy.

Of course, then ASML wouldn't be able to sell its machines to America and at least half of Europe as well as quite number of other countries.

Saying you “invalidate” content that is “properly researched and legitimately correct” = what?

I read it as meaning the definition of the person producing the content of “properly researched and legitimately correct” rather than one's own.

Content produced by somebody who claims it has been “properly researched and legitimately correct” and that person thinks Claude is a proper research and validation tool, should be treated as invalid until proven otherwise.

It's like when a Junior level professional comes to you with something and says "I made sure this is all correct" - one can't really trust that the thing is indeed "all correct".

I think that at least when it comes to America it's more than widely proven that they have an insanely large digital spying infrastructure (not just the 4-eyes stuff but also all that the NSA does, a lot of which having been revealed by Snowden) and even very openly laws such as the Patriot Act and the Cloud Act that let them force American companies to spy for them.

No "hysteria" necessary to conclude that America will do whatever it takes to spy on everybody (both internally and internationally).

Yeah, well, when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!

Also, who would pay the people with the necessary expertise to decompile all BIOS of all motherboard shipments (if at all possible, in this day and age when a lot of shit is encrypted with the keys inside a TPM module)?

I mean, just go at it another way - notice how thousands of pager sent to Lebanon were altered by the Israelis and nobody were aware of it until the Israelis made them explode.

In this day and age it's pretty straightforward to just alter the software for some shipments and not others or add a weakness (like both Intel and AMD CPUs have) that can be used as a backdoor by software that's installed remotely (for example, pushed as a Windows update, something which certain American 3 letter agencies can most certainly do since the have the power to demand the signing keys from MS).

There are huge numbers of vectors for spyware to end up in certain computers that start with subtly backdooring the hardware itself.

It's about complex products which contain RAM rather than other component.

Anything made in China which has RAM in it will have its price affected by the price of RAM so if Chinese brands of such products have access to cheaper RAM than non-Chinese brands, they can outcompete the latter on price whilst delivering similar quality products.

Personally I tend to assemble my own desktop PCs, but for example in the past when buying a Mini-PC I would pick a Chinese brand one if cheaper since the quality is the same. Now imagine if the Chinese brand is now 1/2 the price of the non-Chinese one because the former uses RAM from China whose price is nowhere as high as the hyper-inflated South Korean RAM - in this kind of device were the quality is the same, the Chinese product will always be the better option if it's half the price because of using way cheaper RAM.

It's not a question of concern, it's a question of what's technically possible.

It's technically possible to ship a motherboard with spyware capabilities in the BIOS.

Different performative elements and mechanisms for determing the subset of people who are priviledged elites, same operating principles.