When Samsung had to sell memory at a loss after COVID, no one came to save them. They buffered their memory division using profits from their other businesses. That’s how Samsung survives memory downturns.
According to some stories, this is how Samsung convinced TSMC to not enter the memory business - that you need a nation or other lines of business to prevent bankruptcies.
Making memory is easy in the sense that any company that makes JEDEC compliant DDR5 can sell you their product and you can put it into your mainboard (soldered or not).
You can't do that with Intel or AMD CPUs. There is no spec. Each vendor does CPU socketing and chipsets in their own unique way.
Not to mention that your design needs to be good. For DRAM manufacturers, they just need to design one really good cell design and spam it a billion times.
The problem is that DRAM is a specialised product that has a specialized process. Your fab is a one trick pony that can't take advantage of other markets. Since you're stuck with fixed costs on a single design, you're cranking up the volume to make your money back, but everyone does that and if everyone does it, then the market is flooded with cheap memory that won't recoup the costs.
Now that AI memory is something the companies can specialise in to increase the margins, they can exit the contested market with low differentiation. If anything, they will prefer it of a single company is left doing consumer DRAM, because it is one less company in the AI memory space.
You’re confusing two independent things. There are simple processes that are extremely capital intensive with long lead times and then there are complex processes that require lots of R&D and industry secrets. Memory is the former in the chip world.
Other examples from outside of tech of easy but capital intensive processes are power generation and railroads. Very easy to do, but easy to end up broken by overbuilding for demand that fails to materialize or stay stable for the duration of your financing.
Of course there are stupid questions. Just look at Stack Overflow, it's full of them. The better approach is "Invest as much time answering a question as the other party spent thinking about how to formulate it".
And there is no house in pool betting, poker or backgammon either. We still count all of them including betting exchanges (what has now been rebranded as prediction markets) are still normally regulated as gambling.
There are tons of behind the scenes pictures and video of the Rocky puppet being used on set, and Andy Weir talks in interviews about how almost no CG was used to enhance the puppet. I guess it's possible to fake all that, but it's a lot of lie to cover up.
Andy Weir is a wonderful novelist and was truthfully relating his understanding but he's not a VFX person.
I didn't see the quote you did but he probably confused the fact that PHM used physical elements in place of some CGI in certain scenes and the separate fact that a realistic physical puppet was used on set for reference. Some parts of that puppet are seen on-screen in some shots but most of the creature in most shots was CGI or CG enhanced (which looked great thanks to the ideal in-camera puppet reference it replaced). I explained more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198851
Is it weird? Pretty much everyone's writing and speech is influenced to some degree by what they've read and heard in conversation. For better or for worse, it's only getting harder to avoid exposure to LLM generated prose.
Why? I clearly presented my comment as a personal opinion. These are formed based on my personal experiences among my friends and family, and at work. At work Claude Desktop is overwhelmingly popular, people love it. Even our internal chatgpt + RAG clone is used by over 90% of desk workers monthly and has a great net promoter score. The only place is see all the AI hate and backlash is on social media and discord.
You, on the other hand, are vaguely alluding to “surveys” with no context or detail. How many? How rigorous? Who did them? Why no links?
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