Exactly. The only solutions is to make keeping people’s data a liability rather than an asset. That if there is any sort of beach there are criminal investigations and make the company liable for any and all losses stemming from that breach. Plus if their security was found negligent, than every one of their customers gets cause of action to personally sue them.
The next company to have a breach like this will go bankrupt. And that will sufficiently frighten the others.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
Yup!
Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.
It is absolutely foul play.
OpenAI made secret deals with DRAM manufacturers, not for memory chips but for finished wafers straight out of the Fab. Then announced them both on the same day, meaning they had a one fell swoop purchased 50+% of the world’s memory supply for 2026.
OpenAI does not (as far as anyone knows) have the machinery to process these wafers, to slice them up and package them into memory chips.
Which means the only purpose of this move was to kill the global DRAM supply and drive up prices for the competition.
Personally I wish regulators would take a hard look at this deal.
Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.
You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.
https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Home-TH6320ZW2007-Programmable-Touchscreen/dp/B0BHTQF8NL
That is the one you want. Honeywell t6 pro Z-Wave version, specifically that link which is the newer Smart start version.
Z-Wave is 100% local, not Wi-Fi, and secure.
I use these in my house and couldn’t be happier.
Look up a product called Thrift. You can get it on Amazon. It’s a type of flake drain cleaner, comes in a bottle. Basically run your shower on super hot for a few minutes to heat up the pipe, then pour a bunch of this stuff down, and a bit more hot water. Leave it alone for a few minutes, then flush with hot water. Unlike Drano, this stuff actually works. Originally I found it on a plumbing subreddit. I’ve done it to my shower a few times and it seems to have a longer lasting effect every time, like it’s actually cleaning out the pipe.
Yeah exactly. 150% is good. 1500% would be better.
Is OpenAI likely to fold?
They bought in one day a significant % of the worlds memory output for 2026. Two huge deals with two huge companies, announced at the same time. Neither company knew of the other deal. But those deals weren’t even for chips- they were for finished wafers. I doubt very much OpenAI has the facilities to slice and package wafers. So it seems to me the only point of the deal was to kill the DRAM supply market and drive up prices for their competition.
Wouldn’t be surprised if those finished wafers are going straight in the dumpster.
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,”
I would correct that to say ‘for this to not be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this a. Exist and b. Are significant enough to justify the extreme costs of building these systems’
Right now I don’t see anything coming out of this that justifies even 1/10 of the $trillions being poured into AI.
In fact I think you could make an argument that the net result is negative, even for businesses that adopt it, due to the increased prices they will pay for hardware over the next few years. If it makes your employees 5% more efficient great, if it makes your technology 50% more expensive in return, not so great.
It becomes an everybody problem when we can’t buy memory chips
Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.
I’ll add to that- within a year’s time, less than 50% of the affected devices will even have a patch available.
The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad.
As the old quote goes- “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.””
In such an environment, nobody wants to admit they are not mad, lest they be attacked.
Or as someone else said- I want a future where machines cook and clean and do menial work, so us humans can focus on art and poetry and writing. Instead we have a world where machines create art and poetry and books, so the humans can focus on cleaning and menial work. I don’t like this timeline.
Exactly this. I would love to see just one tech company stand up and say we are not doing AI, our AI budget is $0 and our product will not ship with AI. If you really want to use AI with our system you can download a plug-in or something but we won’t waste our time writing one.
They would get a million users overnight.
If only that was a legal cause of action…
What’s there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.
That’s why I said, different approaches.
My approach is targeted at somebody who just wants to get clean as quickly as possible, and the machine can help them do that faster and with less effort than a manual shower.
If you are going for luxury, or if you need help doing it like an elderly person, then the sit-down submerging spa is absolutely the way to go.
How so?
I think there’s two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness.
Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.
If you want a ‘human washer’ you don’t need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.
Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.
If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn’t get water or soap in your face.
You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.
What about second breakfast? I’m not sure they know about second breakfast Pippin…