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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Some of Mozilla’s AI integrations have been amazing, despite the community crying about it. Like private, offline translation (I don’t care what anybody says, this is much better than sending the contents of your web page to a proprietary Google Translate server), and enhanced screen reader functionality.

    But this one puzzles me. They’re not being very descriptive, but it seems like it’s just integrating generic LLM stuff? Not really what I’m after personally. At least it’s opt-in, I guess.


  • I work in IT and have since 2011… most people are buying $800+ phones for no reason

    I do actually agree, but it’s funny you say this in a post where you’re glazing the Galaxy S4.

    Adjusted for inflation that thing would cost $876 today.

    But yeah, people spend way more than they need to on phones. Midrange or used is perfectly fine.



  • On the contrary people expect this to be a step towards a general redistribution of manufacturing capacity towards HBM for parallel compute products.

    That is where much of the overall wafers are going. But that would be happening regardless of whether the Crucial brand is around or not. Even if Crucial was still a thing going forward, those same wafers would still be going towards HBM.

    I think he hit the nail on the head when he said that Crucial being cancelled is just a symptom of our shit market, not one of the causes. It makes zero difference.

    Who says the Samsung NAND couldn’t be bought by other OEMs to make consumer SSDs

    His point is that Samsung (the manufacturer) is scrapping production, not that Samsung (the consumer brand) is stopping selling products that otherwise are still being produced and sold under different brand names.

    Stopping production of something sold under many brands is obviously a lot worse than a brand stopping sales of something that other brands will still sell (albeit in lower quantities in previous years due to HBM production being ramped up at the cost of DDR5).










  • It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be.

    Wow, I feel the absolute opposite. Of all the UXes I have ever used, Gnome feels the most like they have a vision they’re committed to.

    Not everyone likes it, and I get it’s very different to the WinUX that most others have settled on, but they absolutely have a vision, and they execute on that vision.

    Extensions break with every update.

    Sort of.

    When a new Gnome version comes out, Gnome’s default behaviour is to mark extensions as unsupported. But in reality unless you’re upgrading to the first Beta releases, you’re unlikely to run into that, as extension developers will have marked their extensions as compatible long before the new Gnome version has hit stable and distros start pushing it.

    You can disable the check if you like, but hypothetically that could lead to issues (say, if Gnome radically changes the calendar applet, and then you force enable an extension that tweaks the old applet). Gnome, probably wisely, goes with the more stable option.

    If you just use the stable branch, you’re unlikely to ever get broken extensions.




  • I don’t really think it’s the same.

    Micron just became like Samsung. Samsung also doesn’t have a consumer DIY market brand. Companies like Kingston or G.Skill can still buy Samsung/SK-Hynix/Micron’s RAM, there’s been no actual reduction in supply.

    If Intel did the same as Micron did, it’d be more like third parties could sell the consumer stuff under their own names (say, the Corsair 5 XYZ), and Intel only sold Xeons directly.

    The anger for the RAM shortage should squarely be on OpenAI - they’re the ones who bought 40% of the world’s RAM supply (and not even from Micron, mind you, just Samsung and SK-Hynix) and kicked off panic buying. Maybe throw Nvidia in there for handing them the money to do it.

    I don’t like the killing of Crucial, fuck Micron for that, but OpenAI is who triggered the RAM shortage, and Micron is actually the least to blame of the big 3 RAM manufacturers for the issues we’re having.


  • OpenAI abruptly bought 40% of global supply, and announced it.

    Other companies found out about it when OpenAI announced and thought holy shit, if we hadn’t heard of this massive deal, what else haven’t we heard of?!, and so they started panic buying.

    On top of that, because of US tariffs and trade restrictions, the Chinese “B-tier” memory companies, who usually buy old machines from the big 3 (SK-Hynix, Samsung, Micron) and sell this lower spec RAM at lower margins, didn’t buy up these machines as much as they usually do. They weren’t sure they’d be able to make a profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.


  • On the one hand, I actually think this is a very good thing. Social media is especially damaging to children.

    However:

    The government says platforms must take “reasonable steps” to keep kids off their sites and use age assurance technologies, such as uploading official ID or facial/voice recognition, but they haven’t specified what technology platforms should use.

    I hope the law stipulates that Meta is not allowed to keep this data, or use it for any purpose other than the verification itself. Not for training, not for building a profile on someone, nothing. Unfortunately the article doesn’t elaborate on that.

    If they’re allowed to keep that data, then that needs to be addressed immediately. It’d be all kinds of fucked up.



  • I have experience in KDE being a bit buggy too. It’s kinda crazy how powerful it is, but I guess more “moving parts” means more breakage.

    After a while, I moved away from KDE.

    In fairness, it’s been more stable for me than Windows.

    I haven’t used KDE Plasma since Plasma 6 came out, though. I’ve heard people say it’s a lot less janky, so maybe my experience is no longer the case. Nowadays the only interaction I have with KDE is the 0.1% of the time my steam deck spends in desktop mode while I’m updating stardew valley mods.