City-run ISP makes 10Gbps available to all residents and businesses.

In Salisbury, NC, of all places.

Fibrant’s site is unavailable — probably crashed due to the Ars link — but doing a 10Gbs fiber handoff is quite an expensive proposition for the average home.

First, you’ll need a switch like this if you want more than one machine to be able to use it at full speed.

That’s $1,300, and one of the cheapest 10gbs examples you can buy that supports SFPs.

Then you’ll need the SFP, which is around $270 for a generic.

Then you will need a 10Gbs NIC in one of your machines, which is around $240.

That’s if you want the possibility of full 10Gbs speed to all of your network (which you’ll never see from the internet in real world use yet, by the way).

If you want 10gbs on just one machine, you’d only need this or something like it.

So, yeah, not cheap! But still very cool.

I’m not against college — in fact, I think anyone who can afford it should absolutely go.

If you want any sort of a decent life, rampant credentialism now demands it. Heck, I’d recommend getting a master’s if you can swing it.

However, do it as cheaply as you can — start off at a community college and transfer. Anything to lower the price, as the risk premium is very high.

These days, I see master’s degrees required for jobs that a bright fifth-grader could do, so for most people (outside of IT and a few other rare fields) if you don’t go to college you’re going to be stuck in a low-paying job all your life, guaranteed.

You might still get stuck there — even back in the 1990s I knew a very sharp dude in his 40s with a chemistry degree working at Subway — but it decreases the chances.

Just don’t try to learn anything. Concentrate on graduating. Focusing on actually learning is not something to optimize in current society.

Here’s one thing I think that’s likely to happen in the next 10-15 years that will reconfigure the world, but that almost no one talks about: a quantum computer capable of easily cracking all past encryption schemes will be built, and it’ll be fairly cheap.

That’ll change things a bit, yep.

This is so extremely true.

Despite the fact that men 5’8″ and below are about 35% of the male population, there are basically no clothes made for men that size.

I’m 5’8″ and I’ve literally gone to eight clothing stores in a day and emerged with not a single casual shirt that fit. Not a single fucking one.

So that means for some reason the fashion industry ignores about 35% of the male market.

I thought with the sophisticated forecasting and acquisition software that this would’ve changed. But my guess is it went like this in MBA central: “No one is buying medium and small! So we don’t need to stock those!” (Despite the fact that they never really had any to baseline against.)

I wear the same shirt all the time because I can’t find any others that really fit well.

I always laugh when the FA idiots complain about not being able to find clothes that fit.*

Well, join the fucking club — that happens to damn near everyone as the fashion industry makes clothes for people who are about 5% of the population.

*These days it is much, much easier to find 3XL and 4XL+ and above than it is to find any mediums or smalls.

Sometimes you find the perfect paragraph in the most unexpected of places. Kevin Drum summarizes very succinctly why AI isn’t this magically impossible thing.

This, by the way, is why I’m so generally bullish on artificial intelligence. It’s not because I have such a high opinion of computers, but because I have such a low opinion of humans. We really are just overclocked chimpanzees who have convinced ourselves that our weird jumble of largely Pavlovian behaviors—punctuated by regrettably rare dollops of intelligence—is deeply ineffable and therefore resistant to true understanding. Why do we believe this? Primarily for the amusingly oxymoronic reason that we aren’t smart enough to understand our own brains. The silicon crowd should be able to do better before long.

“Largely Pavlovian behaviors” sums it up pretty well. We are complex, but not as complex as we think we are. And a lot of human behavior is easily predictable, despite what you’ve read.

The main problem (in my view as a non-expert, ahem) is that AI research has been math-proof focused rather than evolutionarily focused.  No one will write an AI. But it might write itself.

Math-proof focused is narrow and hopeless and will never lead to AI. Other paths will.

Physicists will tell you that the strong nuclear force is the most powerful in the universe.

Romantics will claim it is love.

Each religion will avow that its particular deity or troupe thereof hold power utmost.

But they’re all wrong. It is self-delusion.

Self-delusion is the most powerful force in the universe.

Come on, market! Crash harder. Crash wreathed in flame. I know you can do it.

I believe in you!

I have no idea who drew this, but it’s funny. Really needs Windows 2000 and ME, though.

Windows 2000: The head is blunt on both ends.

Windows Me: The handle is a razor blade and the head is a grenade.