frickfrack

Chinese giant salamander (娃娃鱼) a.k.a ‘baby fish’ due to the sound they make that sounds like a baby crying.

The Chinese giant salamander is one of the largest salamanders and one of the largest amphibians in the world. It is fully aquatic and is endemic to rocky mountain streams and lakes in the Yangtze river basin of central China.

The Chinese giant salamander is considered to be a "living fossil". Although protected under Chinese laws, its population has faced severe declined over the last 70 years and is currently (2022) listed as threatened. There are evidence indicating that the Chinese giant salamander may be composed of at least five cryptic species, further compounding each individual species' endangerment.

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

Because AI.

To paraphrase a comment on a Gamers Nexus video, the reason computer parts are getting so expensive is that a huge amount of RAM and storage that have not been produced yet were purchased with non-existent money to put in gpus and computers that have also not yet been produced to put in data centers that have not yet been built, to be powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist, to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

So that’s fun. But it means that already owning computers that actually do the thing is SO MUCH BETTER than hiring other people to build more capacity to buy more computers to do the thing.

How bad is the RAM crisis? The price of ddr3, which is like 10-15yo tech, is going up. The price of DDR5 is now stupid expensive, 4+ times as expensive as it was a few months ago.

Mostly because there’s only one company in the world that is capable of generating the kind of chips needed and everyone uses that company because the modern world is a very precarious house of cards held together by tissue and string and we have a 50 foot toddler playing Godzilla with international trade.