There's a smell about this so close to the US election.
It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.
Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.
It's funny to me that people don't realize it's over yet. Not haha funny, but more like when you meet someone who thinks the moon landings were faked.
I knew it was over when we used automatic place and route to synthesize entire CPUs in Cadence in my ECE classes in 1999 before I graduated with my degree. It already achieved 80% of the circuit density and speed as humans. Then read Genetic Programming III by John Koza 5 years later, which explained that each computer 10 years older than the previous generation, running about 100 times faster due to Moore's Law, could be made to write previous gen software automatically.
Unfortunately, GPUs don't help much with the kinds of optimization problems that I was interested in, where we really need many thousands or even millions of independent threads exploring enormous search spaces using multicore CPUs with local memories. Gradient descent is one way to do that, but IMHO it's one of the hardest ways, requiring the most bare hands effort and brute force. That's why neural nets that actually worked took 25 years to manifest.
So imagine knowing how to basically grow computer hardware and software organically with self-training/improvement in the late 90s and early 2000s, only to be stifled by the end of Moore's Law arriving in 2007 when smartphones chased the profit in cost/power reduction of CPUs and devoted most all remaining R&D to faster SIMD GPUs which didn't help MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) workloads.
After working so hard for so many years and decades, only to tread water making rent, some part of me welcomes watching the world burn. Now everyone else will get to enjoy the precarious feeling of having the skills to do real work, only to be forced not to at some BS job that almost pays the bills.
Unless you all prove me wrong and put your potential to real use, and bring time/money/resources to the working poor, outside of the current wealth inequality pyramid scheme we pretend to call capitalism.
Maybe I sound bitter, but I'm feeling oddly inspired and optimistic for the first time in a quarter century.
Since your comment is one of the few that struck upon the natural progression of AI, I'll offer an answer:
Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.
Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..
Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?
We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.
The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.
Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.
Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.
Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.
I was there, and this is why I consider the 2000s a lost decade.
Honestly we only just started to get back into the swing of things from 2012-2016 when Obama's reelection provided enough market confidence for electric cars to reach MVP status in 2013 and solar panels to begin scaling until Trump slapped a 30% tariff on them in 2018. Progress in sustainability is my litmus test for the economic viability of getting real work done in the economy, sort of like grading a steakhouse on how good its least-ordered mushroom appetizer tastes. We could also choose healthcare, education or any other field whose success is determined by the social good it provides.
If it weren't for the arrival of AI, I'd call this a wasted quarter century.
Now let’s hold this mini-catalog up against the mass-market bestsellers list from the very month in 2025 that Dennis Abboud, CEO of ReaderLink — a former managing partner at a private equity firm — announced that the mass-market paperback was to be put out to pasture:
Is nothing sacred? This isn't hacking. More like cracking.
As far as I can tell, private equity firms are a virus exploiting bugs in our economic system to steal its lifeblood. The known bugs are trickle-down economics, the Citizens United decision, lax antitrust law enforcement.. the list goes on. I shudder to think what kinds of backroom deals happen every day to further separate us from our time, money and resources.
If the hackers of the world were to unite under one cause, surely it would be to patch our broken system and get the power back. Whatever happened to unmasking the bad guys and bringing them to justice? Has no one seen Sneakers, Johnny Mnemonic or even Hackers for crying out loud? Those aren't even classics, or books, but they run circles around today's ensh!ttified surrender culture.
I wonder that too, perhaps by encrypting the data with a key generated from a long passphrase meaningful to the user, that nobody could possibly guess. Then just store the data in a permanent cloud like IPFS, pinned with 4EVERLAND, Filebase and/or Pinata:
Maybe someone could write a provably private client-based browser decryption script, hosted on various websites. We might need a new browser spec that sandboxes pages until they're unsandboxed, allowing them no egress/ingress or even local storage or cookies.
Or better yet, take that choice away from browser vendors, and create a runtime in the browser that simply can't be observed, perhaps by using zero-knowledge proofs.
Writing this out, I wonder if the issue is due to longstanding incomplete browser architecture, going back to when the web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it's still just an open problem.
Solve private distributed durable storage, along with a base level of secret computation eventually running about the speed of a 6502, 286 or 68000, and we wouldn't need free services that inevitably get privatized and ensh!ttified.
I have no idea if something like this already exists, I'm just speculating as to what base functionality it might need from first principles.
Also I wonder if similar techniques could be recruited to build an OS around cryptocurrency. That way a meta economy could run alongside the corrupt economy, and shield users from currency devaluation and other wealth inequality drivers used by the ultra-wealthy to increase the value of the means of production that they own relatively, so that they can buy more.
Arguably the process of wealth concentration is so fundamental that it puts a countdown on capitalism, driving it towards the late-stage capitalism that we've had since about 1970 when productivity diverged from wages, and eventually revolution which results in socialism/communism or even permanent authoritarian dystopia like on Star Wars. In a way, it's in the best interests of the ultra-wealthy to build meta economies, which of course makes those economies suspect and probably vulnerable to exploits, especially in the AI age. We've seen how crypto has created black markets capable of capturing governments, so maybe we should be careful what we wish for.
But really I just don't want to type my password anymore.
Nit: IPFS is never a "permanent cloud", even with pinning services - you stop paying, eventually the data will be gone as no one will serve it anymore. You might be looking for Arweave for better permanence, which 4EVERLAND also supports as a storage target (although there is no way to "update" the data as well)
I'm a little late to the show, but wanted to leave a note here explaining why this article about spintronics in semiconductors may potentially relate to excitonics and twistronics in superconductors.
Traditional superconductivity is limited by the masses of atoms vibrating in the lattice, which sets an upper temperature threshold because thermal noise acts like a phase change that returns the superconductor to being an ordinary conductor or insulator above its critical temperature.
Electrons are fermions with half-integer spin, meaning that their total quantum wave function must be antisymmetric. Swapping any two electrons flips the sign of their wave function, meaning that they can't overlap with the same spin, by the Pauli exclusion principle. But two electrons with opposite spin form a spin-singlet state where their spatial wave functions can overlap. Which is why two electrons with opposite spin can be in the same atomic orbital forever.
For larger quantum wave functions in molecules, electrons occupy larger molecular orbitals forming covalent bonds, and in conductors form what's known as a Fermi sea. If many electrons spontaneously align their spins via the exchange force which arises from exclusion and electrostatic repulsion (the same effect which causes Fermi holes, conceptually analogous to electron vacancies in semiconductors), their magnetic moments become large enough to be observed at the macro-scale as ferromagnetism.
At low temperatures, electrons have restricted momentum states at the sharp edge of the Fermi sea, so by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, their spatial wave function uncertainty (coherence length) expands, causing them to overlap. Below the critical superconducting temperature, they pair up to become composite bosons. Bosons have integer spin and symmetric wave functions, so they aren't bound by the exclusion principle and undergo Bose-Einstein condensation.
In Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory, these composite bosons are known as Cooper pairs. They share a wide coherence length and act as a unified macroscopic quantum state that flows around atomic nuclei without scattering, even in the presence of atomic vibrations (phonons) or imperfections in the lattice. In effect, this makes the superconductor a macro-scale orbital, similarly to how a permanent magnet is macro-scale spin.
BCS theory explains superconductivity from the bottom up like an engineering approximation. More foundational frameworks like Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory use spontaneous symmetry breaking to explain it from the top down.
Using GL theory and going back to first principles, instead of avoiding phonons/vibrations to raise the critical temperature, we can manipulate lightweight electron clouds. To do this, we use electron-hole pairs (excitons) in semiconductors to dynamically polarize the electron clouds. This electronic framework leads to orbital fluctuation theory and excitonic superconductivity.
It was recently discovered that graphene layers twisted at a 1.1-degree magic angle create superconductivity. The overlapping atomic lattices form a Moiré superlattice that slows electrons down in places to restrict their momentum and expand their spatial uncertainty. This mimics the effects of low temperatures spatially instead of thermally, and is known as twistronic superconductivity.
Note that I wrote this summary by hand after doing a deep dive with AI, which also helped me edit it. While it's notable that AI can explore large problem spaces and find solutions independently, I'm at least as fascinated that it can now help us tackle complex topics in an approachable manner, which should lead to new insights and hopefully inspire future researchers.
I maintain that war in Ethiopia (and the wider Horn) is not inevitable. The current outbreak of war reflects the fact that Ethiopian elites keep choosing war over peace. Unfortunately, despite repeatedly choosing war, Ethiopian leaders continue to enjoy support from a cast of warmongering academics, journalists, public intellectuals, civil society actors, and a whole host of foreign actors — all of whom have long taken sides and become cheerleaders for their respective camps.
In name only. But they are actors.
The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.
Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.
Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?
Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.
Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.
Musk becoming a trillionaire because people value the shares of his ventures for stupid amounts doesn't actually make the poor poorer. If anything things like starlink help connect the more distant places.
That anti-intellectualism developed because the self proclaimed intellectuals were so persistently, consistently wrong about so many things that many people lost all trust in them. Academia moved away from the foundational principles of the scientific method, that the truth of a model lies in its ability to repeatedly make correct predictions, to treating what they thought sounded morally good as true regardless of how far from reality it was.
I’m in this camp as well. I can’t stand the anti-intellectual trend, but the cultural elites in America got high on their own supply and just untethered themselves from reality, while our economic elites betrayed everyone by changing the economy into a machine that only benefits some people with college degrees while tricking another giant swath into buying useless degrees on credit. It’s more anti-elitism going on than anti-intellectualism. And they brought it on themselves. They should have offered something better.
It works great except it can have z-fighting issues, especially near t-junctions.
I'm wondering if there's a way to calculate scan lines along 2 or more axes, then choose the ones with the least uncertainty.
A similar issue happens with convex hull algorithms. If we wrap along the x axis, we might get a different triangle mesh than if we wrap along the y or z axis, because vertices may be coplanar along an axis. I've considered wrapping along all 3 axes, then choosing the mesh that matches in the most axes.
Is there a general solution for this? Some point clouds have sets of vertices that are coplanar regardless of which axis we use. I suspect that the number of axes needed might be proportional to the number of vertices. I wonder if we could use something like change of coordinates to wrap the mesh from the frame of reference of each vertex.
If we had that technique, we could apply it to Slug and render glyphs having minimal error, regardless of how they're transformed, if we're willing to sacrifice some performance.
It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.
Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.
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