TheGrandNagus
@TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 minute ago:
There are plenty of reasons to put SSDs in a home server.
- Comment on Why do you hate AI? 1 day ago:
Needlessly divisive identity politics that gets spread around a lot in the form of tweets/articles/memes because it’s controversial.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 day ago:
Unless the dataset, weighting, and every aspect is open source, it’s not truly open source, as the OSI defines it.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 day ago:
OpenAI is pretty well established.
I know Lemmy users avoid it, but a lot of people use LLMs, and when most people think LLMs, they think ChatGPT. I doubt the average person could name many or even any others.
That means whenever these people want to use an LLM, they automatically go to OpenAI.
As for to the degree of $300bn, who knows. Big tech has had crazy valuations for a long time.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 day ago:
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.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 day ago:
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.
- Comment on Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI 2 days ago:
There are other even more dyslexic-legible fonts that IMO look better
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 2 days ago:
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 a stop).
Given how UK drivers often use summer tyres year-round, the weather is dark, 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.
- Comment on Great British Railways flies the flag as logo goes back to the future 4 days ago:
It absolutely did not start here only after Brexit.
- Comment on Linux usage hits an all-time high in Steam Hardware Survey—and AMD processors continue their march against Intel 1 week ago:
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, 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 feel like people are for some reason unwilling to blame OpenAI for this.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung 1 week ago:
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 profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.
- Comment on Meta starts kicking Australian children off Instagram and Facebook 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Meta starts kicking Australian children off Instagram and Facebook 1 week ago:
There’s probably a distinction between a Meta account and a Facebook account.
- Comment on Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 update improves and breaks dark mode 1 week ago:
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.
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 1% of the time my steam deck spends in desktop mode.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 1 week ago:
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.
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.
- Comment on Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds 1 week ago:
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.
- Comment on Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds 2 weeks ago:
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 Torvalds prompted him to go and watch it.
You should’ve kept watching it. There’s some good stuff there.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Google's new 'Aluminium OS' project brings Android to PC: Here's what we know 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Pebble Time 2 has screws 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
Zorin is FOSS.
The fact that there’s a pro version where you can pay for support does not break the GPL licence.
FOSS does not mean everything must be free of charge.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
What a bizarre qualifier.
You may as well complain about a kitchen by saying “but can it roast my turkey without using that oven?”
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
So it doesn’t then. Cool.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
It’s based on Ubuntu LTS, that’s true. But Ubuntu backports device drivers to older (LTS) kernel versions, so the performance/hardware support is often similar/the same as using a newer kernel.
I believe they call this backporting of device drivers the “hardware enablement stack”, but I may be misremembering.
PopOS uses this, but Mint I believe is a strange one. You can get a variant of Mint that enables the hardware enablement stack, but I don’t think it’s a feature of standard Mint.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
Contrary to what many people thing, Gnome is extremely modular and customisable. It’s just not really exposed in the base Desktop Environment itself.
You can do literally anything with the extension system. It’s very powerful.
That does however mean that you can easily break things, which is why by default Gnome marks extensions as unsupported when a new Gnome versions come out, until the maintainer adds a text string inside the extension that flags their extension as being validated for the new version.
You can disable the version checks, of course, and just risk it. But usually I find you don’t need to. By the time a new release comes out, the Gnome beta has been available for over a month, and the extensions have already been updated in advance.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
In the UK it’s illegal to claim roadkill if you’re the one who struck the animal.
If you weren’t, it’s free game (unintentional pun, nice)
At first that didn’t make sense to me, but I now realise it’s to prevent someone purposely striking an animal just to take it.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 2 weeks ago:
You definitely get more in the US, but Europe isn’t free from ads.
Windows still shoves OneDrive, office, and other things in your face in Europe. They still have featured news stories and the like. They still have recommendations in the start menu and such.
These are all ads, though we’ve been conditioned into thinking MS plastering OneDrive and OneDrive recommendations all over their OS isn’t advertising. It very much is.
If you have an Android TV in Europe, 1/3 of the home screen by default is an ad banner, just like in the US. Etc.
We are not free from ads. We just have it slightly better than the US.
- Comment on AI is not killing jobs, US study finds - Financial Times 3 weeks ago:
Because they’re a lot less capable than these companies are telling us they are.
Don’t get me wrong, you can frequently get some excellent results with them… but you can also get some really shit ones.
So not only does the bulk of this work require someone to do all the prompts, they also need to thoroughly check the work afterwards, meaning you’re not really gaining much, if anything at all.
Sooner or later, the venture capital propping up AI will realise that these enormous savings from laying people off en-masse isn’t going to materialise, and they’ll want their money back. The market correction will be huge.