mhoye

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mhoye
🛡️ mhoye@mastodon-social.mostr.pub
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The cost of a manual pasta maker, the price of shipping replacements for the two broken plastic parts - the only two plastic parts - in the machine, and the price of the parts. Actual cost of the part is I suspect $1. I frequently find myself thinking, would it be cheaper to (a) buy the thing I want, (b) make it myself, or (c) build a _machine shop to build the machines I need to build the thing myself_ and it is genuinely upsetting how often the economical choice is floating between B and C.
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If I understand this correctly the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced has been bought with money that doesn't exist to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced to go in datacenters that haven't been built powered by infrastructure that might never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist and economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".
Any #mathstodon people following me who'd be willing to entertain a possibly dumb question? It's about prime numbers and the Collatz Conjecture, which I fully understand are a one-two punch of math crankery, but I'd like to put it to somebody who can tell me "this leads nowhere but crankdom for sure" so I can put it behind me.