Brand recognition cannot be overstated.
If there was a better-than-YouTube alternative right now, YouTube would still dominate.
If there was a phone OS superior to Android and iOS, they would both still dominate.
If there was a search engine that worked far better than Google, Google would still dominate.
The average person won’t look into LLM reasoning benchmarks. They’ll just use the one they know, ChatGPT.
There are other even more dyslexic-legible fonts that IMO look better
The UK has among the lowest road deaths in the world.
I’m not quite sure why that is (although anecdotally as a pedestrian, you seem to be treated like royalty in the UK in comparison to other places I’ve been - so much as glance at a zebra crossing and cars come to an immediate stop).
Given how UK drivers often use summer tyres year-round, the weather is dark and cool, and the roads are usually damp, you’d logically expect poor results, but we see the opposite.
Perhaps it’s due to the rather strict yearly MOT safety check? Who knows.
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.
Blame the HDMI consortium. Bastards.
That said, I’m not sure why it’d be a deal-breaker. In 2026 this will be a low-end PC. It’s using a 2 year old laptop GPU that Valve has dumped more power into.
Because TV OEMs are the ones in the HDMI consortium.
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.
There’s probably a distinction between a Meta account and a Facebook account.
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.
OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s DRAM.
They bought them as whole wafers (not finished chips!) from SK Hynix and Samsung.
Then they put them in a warehouse
All of that is confirmed, btw. The part below is my speculation:
To me, that reads as if they’re using VC money to drive up RAM prices, hoping that their competitors (who are catching up) can’t buy more RAM.
It’s so anticompetitive it’s unbelievable. And of course, normal buyers are the most fucked over.
Indeed.
I have a model running locally on my NAS that does image recognition for photos in my Immich app (think Google Photos, but private). It does a decent job and runs well on AMD integrated graphics on a Ryzen 5 3400G. I just search for [daughter’s name], and there she is.
I use Firefox’s translation feature (that also runs locally and can run on low end hardware).
My sister is blind and uses an AI assisted screen reader that works way better than what she was using before.
The issue isn’t AI/machine learning in itself, it’s this tech bro arms race. It’s them manipulating models to push agendas. It’s them shoehorning an LLM into every fucking Google query. It’s them telling companies they can fire all their staff and rely on LLMs.
A decent chunk of that is due to DDR4 production shutting down. If you look to the past you can see that DDR3 prices rose a while after the introduction of DDR4 too. In fact it got more expensive than DDR4, before vanishing completely.
Another thing driving up prices is tariffs and trade restrictions - usually when the main players like Micron, SK Hynix, or Samsung want to stop selling certain chips (say, DRAM at a certain binned frequency), they sell to Chinese manufacturers who are willing to sell slightly lower quality NAND for a lower profit margin.
But that’s not happening - the Chinese companies aren’t buying up the machines like they used to, because a tariff could easily wipe out their margins. It’s not worth the risk.
Add AI to that (not that many are using DDR4), and it makes a bad situation worse.
The AI aspect may get better soon, but the top two won’t. I don’t think you’ll be able to get new DDR4 for a good price at any point going ahead. Your best bet is to buy used if you see a reasonable deal.
God forbid someone who’s made their life tech is very excited that Torvalds has come to visit them and turned out to be a really nice guy.
Torvalds will probably be the highlight guest of his entire career, and he knows it. Of course that’s enormously exciting.
You know the silly stuff at the start was actually Torvald’s idea, right?
Linus (Sebastian) spoke about how he didn’t even get the reference but Linus (Torvalds) prompted him to go and watch Highlander (“there can only be one!!”)
You should’ve kept watching it. There’s some good stuff there.
Phones have been doing a lot of post-processing for a long time.
Tbh, most phone cameras would look crap without it. It’s something of a miracle what they can achieve with a tiny sensor and a tiny fixed lens.
For most it absolutely is viable.
Linux is great for the average person, great for experts.
It’s the “pro-sumer” people that struggle most often. They’re the ones who know windows pretty well, know what apps they want to install, and have became used to the quirks of windows. They struggle to adapt.
Most people use their laptops for web browsing, YouTube, Spotify, and basic document editing. They’d be fine with Linux. They just don’t use it because laptops are sold with Windows.
Love this.
The more I’m hearing about the Pebble Time 2, the more I’m liking it and looking forward to my delivery.
But fuck the 30 day warranty. Stuff sold in the UK is usually 6 years of cover (albeit only 5 for Scotland). 30 days is actually pathetic.
Oracle recently put out a ridiculously optimistic forecast that had them matching AWS within 5 years. At first the market loved it.
Now I think people are beginning to realise that was a load of bollocks.