tal

@tal@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that it’s fair to say that AI is not the only application for that hardware, but I also think that carpelbridgesyndrome’s point was that they aren’t really well-suited to replace conventional servers, which is the sort of thing that ouRKaoS was worried about. I’d also add that the physical buildings have way more cooling capacity than is necessary for that too, so they probably wouldn’t be the most-cost-effective approach even if you replaced the computing hardware in the buildings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Myanmar junta deploys AI-powered Russian and Chinese tracking system to target 50,000 individuals for new wave of arrests⁩ ⁨⁨32⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  Once all of those who objected to the government and presented possible opposition have been eliminated one way or another, society will be harmonious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  checks

  The 5700X3D looks like it goes for about $350 on eBay. The 5800X3D looks like about $450.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I sat down to log into a couple MUDs yesterday. Didn’t stick with it — the combat still hasn’t evolved enough for me — but you could play that on anything capable of displaying text on a screen and running telnet.

  It looks like some crazy person has been doing a TCP/IP stack for the 128K Mac, the first Macintosh ever released, from 1984, as well as a telnet client. So you can technically lug a 42-year-old computer out of an antique store and play currently-being-developed Internet games…though you won’t be getting color, since that came a while down the road.

  If you get some device that can expose a serial console on some system to TCP/IP — not sure how far back you need to go for that — you could technically play it on a teletype from the 1930s.

  The “some device” will have to be later, though, so that’s maybe kinda cheaty.

  Technically, Debian Linux has been run on an Intel CPU from 1971, but it isn’t fast enough to be a practical host for such a teletype in that environment. Even stripped down forms of Linux are going to be “too big” to be such a host.

  It does sound like the Commodore 64 has a package, Novaterm 10, that runs TCP/IP and telnet, but I don’t know whether it can output to the C64’s serial port rather than video display; you could play locally on one of those, but probably not run on a teletype. That being said, it probably shows that it’s technically-possible, since I’m sure that if it can run a virtual terminal program, it can just dump the text to an actual terminal. I’d guess that there’s probably some system out there circa 1980s that someone has probably built that can both run a TCP/IP stack and expose a serial console.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with you that it’s a good game, and it’s very playable on an older computer, but it’s actually not the lightest-weight game from a CPU standpoint. I mean, realistically, that thing should be able to get by with very little CPU usage and essentially none if you’re not pushing buttons, but it actually uses a fair bit of CPU time when you’re just sitting there staring at the screen. It’s actually kind of bugged me, because while it’s irrelevant on a desktop, it really consumes more battery on a not-plugged-in-to-wall-power laptop than is necessary, and it’d otherwise be such a phenomenal game for disconnected laptop use.

  Go run top and just leave the game sitting there and it’ll be keeping an average of multiple cores hot on my laptop at 240 Hz running at vsync rate. And the world state isn’t changing – the game is turn-based.

  You can constrain the framerate down to 10 FPS — and that significantly reduces CPU usage, down to an average of 37% of a core at the cost of limiting the speed at which the game runs autoexplore, since it will always draw at least one frame in a given state, and at the cost of making the game feel sluggish and unresponsive.

  And you’ll get that CPU usage even if you turn off all the graphical “glitz” have it just showing ASCII.

  My guess is that they probably could probably benefit by (a) having a lightweight visual “display” thread that doesn’t do anything expensive, just update any animations and draw that to the screen, and if there are no animations, not even run a refresh at all, and (b) having a separate “heavyweight” thread for game logic that only runs if the world state has changed (autoexplore, automove, resting, or the player has pressed a key).

  Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a similar game (internally a turn-based game that’s basically generating an ASCII grid that can provide some light graphical glitz and tiles) also consumes a lot of CPU time when idle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s still running. I submitted an article last month about how Micron was buying a facility that had actually just opened quite recently and was apparently producing DDR4 to refit it to make HBM; faster than building a new memory factory from scratch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  My guess — without trying to dig up statistics — is that the single component most-likely to fail in an old PC is gonna be rotational hard drives. Virtually all of my rotational drives have eventually died, aside from a few that were just so small and taking up space where I could mount other things that I no longer bothered using them.

  I’ve seen fans die (not necessarily completely wedge up, but have the bearings go and become increasingly-obnoxious in sound).

  And those are basically the only mechanical components in a computer.

  Behind that, there’s input devices with keyswitches wearing out, but unless you’re using a laptop, replacing the input device is just unplugging the old one and plugging in a new one.

  I’m not gonna say that motherboards don’t fail, but I can’t immediately think of something that would die. Decades back, I remember that there was a spate of bad capacitors that made their way to a bunch of motherboards and would eventually fail, but I haven’t seen anything like that recently.

  searches

  Looks like it was 1999–2007:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

  The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers,[1][2] due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation; this often resulted in rupturing of the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

  High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.

  A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a mis-copied formula for capacitors’ electrolytes. He then took the faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China, where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the scientist’s staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes.[3]

  Those would probably be from the DDR/DDR2 era, though.

  I do think that it’s probably possible that some motherboard components might age out. Like, people may want to use newer versions of radio stuff, like WiFi or Bluetooth. You can maybe do that via USB, but the on-motherboard stuff might become more of a liability than the CPU or something.

  I don’t think that I’ve ever personally had other computer components just up and fail other than the 13th and 14th gen Intel CPUs that internally destroyed themselves. It’s always been non-solid-state stuff, things with moving parts, that fail for me. I mean, I’ve damaged solid-state components myself via things that I’ve done, but it’s always damage that I incurred.

  thinks

  Oh, CMOS batteries eventually fail, but they’re usually — not always — mounted on motherboards with holders that permit replacement. I’ve had to replace those.

  I did have a headphones amplifier that was attached to my computer where some solder joints got a bad connection and I had to open it and resolder it, but I don’t know if I’d call that a “computer component” just because it was plugged into a computer.

  thinks more

  I did have the power supply used for a fluorescent backlight in a laptop display start to fail once. But, honestly, my experience has been that unless you actively go in and damage something, most solid state parts will just keep on trucking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jason Schreier says Sony is backing away from putting single player games on PC⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I also kind of think that the strongest argument for console gaming is competitive multiplayer, not single player.

  The fact that the consoles are closed and locked down inherently provides resistance to cheating and such, where the open PC world tries to replicate the stuff via kernel anti-cheat stuff. The console world having (well, more-or-less) one option when it comes to hardware means that everyone playing against each other has a fairly-level playing field — same input hardware, people don’t get an edge from having fancier rendering hardware.

  For single-player gaming, those console strengths become weaknesses — for single-player games, it’s preferable for the player to be able to do things like freely mod games, upgrade hardware to get fancier graphics, provide a lot of options as to what input stuff to use, etc.

  If I were a console vendor and I were worried about the PC as a competing platform, I’d think that I’d try to emphasize my competitive multiplayer games, not single-player.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hidden surveillance network sending Californians' license plates to Border Patrol⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The real problem with this sort of thing is that there’s no legal way to avoid it. If you’re operating a motor vehicle on public roads, you need to have a plate visible. You can’t obscure it.

  The laws requiring that visibility were made in an era where it wasn’t possible for someone like Flock to enable anyone who can aim a camera at a road to mass-log and aggregate and data-mine the movement it provides.

  The only real technical solution would be to back out the laws requiring license plates to be visible (and it wouldn’t be perfect, since Flock will still look for identifying oddities on a vehicle and try to log that too, like collision damage). But if you do that, then you lose an important tool for dealing with motor vehicle theft and finding vehicles involved in crimes.

  And there aren’t restrictions on selling or doing whatever companies want with the data. Or with data that they get from facial recognition/gait data in the future, or that sort of thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, honestly, if it becomes enough of an issue, maybe eBay and similar should create separate sections for machines with memory and those without. I mean, there are reasons people would want to get a system without memory too, especially if one’s looking for other parts, but I do totally get that it’s super-obnoxious if there isn’t a way to filter those out and one is looking for one with memory.

  checks

  It doesn’t look like eBay has a “0 GB” memory category, annoyingly enough, but they do have a “Not specified” category with a ton of listings. That’s not absolutely the same thing, since I’m sure that it might also exclude some listings that have an unknown amount of memory, but I’d guess that that’d get you most of the way there, and I do see people clearly listing machines with no memory in that category.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delta Green⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Green

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, there was a pre-existing used memory market, so some scavenging was already happening, but yeah, I’m not saying that increases there will fully cover the shortage. Just reduce it, which will reduce the degree to which prices rise relative to the scenario where the only memory available is newly-manufactured.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There is existing DDR4 in existing machines that can be scavenged that would otherwise probably just be thrown out. I understand that secondhand memory was an industry even before the surge, remember reading a recent article some California company that would strip servers of old DIMMs and sell them, mostly to China. The CEO was being interviewed, said that sales had surged recently.

  searches

  I don’t think that these guys are them, think this is a different California company doing basically the same thing, but illustrates the point:

  www.ramexchange.net

  1GB–128 GB modules (DDR2 / DDR3 / DDR4 / DDR5)

  At Ram Exchange, we supply new, used, and refurbished RAM for a wide range of applications. Whether you’re upgrading a personal computer, laptop, data center, or need on-board ICs for custom projects, our team is here to help.

  Large-Scale Purchasing Power

  We buy excess memory in bulk from around the globe, including from publicly traded companies and Fortune 500 enterprises. With our extensive purchasing capabilities, no quantity is too large for us to handle.

  I mean, I’ve thrown out old DIMMs. Wasn’t worth my time hassling with trying to resell them. But if they’re worth enough due to price increases, it’ll increase the number of companies who are willing to recoup some of the value of the DIMMs. Companies can buy them, re-certify them, and sell them.

  Obviously, that’s not an unlimited supply, but the window in which it’s of interest is probably only something like three years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨coolpeertube: share peertube videos you like⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  One issue I do wonder about — the Threadverse is pretty small today compared to something like Reddit, but I also suspect that a lot of these Peertube hosts don’t have massive amounts of spare bandwidth to handle sudden, coordinated spikes in demand. I wonder if enough people start using this and a lot of people hit the same Peertube instance at the same time, whether it might be enough to produce bandwidth congestion on that instance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mini PC to replace fiber modem and wifi router. How to proceed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My consumer broadband router (which acts as a WAP, modem, and router) looks like it’s rated for a 36W power supply. Putting a Kill-A-Watt wattmeter on it shows it currently using about 14W.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mini PC to replace fiber modem and wifi router. How to proceed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this worth the effort?

  In terms of electricity cost?

  I wouldn’t do it myself.

  If you want to know whether it’s going to save money, you want to see how much power it uses — you can use a wattmeter, or look up the maximum amount on the device ratings to get an upper end. Look up how much you’re paying per kWh in electricity. Price the hardware. Put a price on your labor. Then you can get an estimate.

  My guess, without having any of those numbers, is that it probably isn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We conduct affairs of state in a building that’s riddled with asbestos and mice. Can’t Britain do any better?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The cavernous, ancient Westminster Hall, dating to 1097, where the late Queen Elizabeth II lay in state, is resolutely immune to getting any internet or mobile phone reception; highly impractical if you are arranging to meet people there who are running late and messaging you to say so.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picocell

  A picocell is a small cellular base station typically covering a small area, such as in-building (offices, shopping malls, train stations, stock exchanges, etc.), or more recently in-aircraft. In cellular networks, picocells are typically used to extend coverage to indoor areas where outdoor signals do not reach well, or to add network capacity in areas with very dense phone usage, such as train stations or stadiums. Picocells provide coverage and capacity in areas difficult or expensive to reach using the more traditional macrocell approach.[1]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI resets spending expectations, tells investors compute target is around $600 billion by 2030⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That does make me interested as to whether any of that reduction in intended spending would reduce spending on memory in the next, say, three years.

• OpenAI resets spending expectations, tells investors compute target is around $600 billion by 2030www.cnbc.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨6⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta: Can you please not announce every single porn community you create⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m fine with it — and I think that it improves searchability – but the posts need to be marked NSFW, and some of the announcement posts are not, which means that people who have NSFW stuff blocked are still getting them…

  My understanding is that this is something of an exceptional situation, as apparently lemmynsfw.com — the big NSFW community host — went down and the admin was supposed to be away for some months, so it’s not coming back up in at least the near future, and so it sounds like people are setting up alternatives on other instances.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenWrt & fail2ban⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You would typically want to use static ip addresses for servers (because if you use DHCP the IP is gonna change sooner or later, and it’s gonna be a pain in the butt).

  In this case, he controls the local DHCP server, which is gonna be running on the OpenWRT box, so he can set it to always assign whatever he wants to a given MAC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenWrt & fail2ban⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  except that all requests’ IP addresses are set to the router’s IP address (192.168.3.1), so I am unable to use proper rate limiting and especially fail2ban.

  I’d guess that however the network is configured, you have the router NATting traffic going from the LAN to the Internet (typical for a home broadband router) as well as from the home LAN to the server.

  That does provide security benefits in that you’ve basically “put the server on the Internet side of things”, and the server can’t just reach into the LAN, same as anything else on the Internet. The NAT table has to have someone on the LAN side opening a connection to establish a new entry.

  But…then all of those hosts on the LAN are going to have the same IP address from the server’s standpoint. That’s the experience that hosts on the Internet have towards the same hosts on your LAN.

  It sounds like you also want to use DHCP:

  Getting the router to actually assign an IP address to the server was quite a headache

  I’ve never used VLANs on Linux (or OpenWRT, and don’t know how it interacts with the router’s hardware).

  I guess what you want to do is to not NAT traffic going from the LAN (where most of your hardware lives) and the DMZ (where the server lives), but still to disallow the DMZ from communicating with the LAN.

  considers

  So, I don’t know whether the VLAN stuff is necessary on your hardware to prevent the router hardware from acting like a switch, moving Ethernet broadcast packets directly, without them going to Linux. Might be the case.

  I suppose what you might do — from a network standpoint, don’t know off-the-cuff how to do it on OpenWRT, though if you’re just using it as a generic Linux machine, without using any OpenWRT-specific stuff, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible — is to give the OpenWRT machine two non-routable IP addresses, something like:

  192.168.1.1 for the LAN

  and

  192.168.2.1 for the DMZ

  The DHCP server serves DHCP responses for the LAN that tell it to use 192.168.1.1 as the default route, and 192.168.2.1 for hosts in the DMZ. So, for example, the server in the DMZ would maybe be assigned 192.168.2.2.

  Then it should be possible to have a routing table entry to route 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.2.1 and vice versa, just as as if the two addresses were actually physical routers.

  When a LAN host initiates a TCP connection to a DMZ host, it’ll look up its IP address in its routing table, say “hey, that isn’t on the same network as me, send it to the default route”. That’ll go to 192.168.1.1, with a destination address of 192.168.2.2. The OpenWRT box forwards it, doing IP routing, to 192.168.2.1, and then that box says “ah, that’s on my network, send it out the network port with VLAN tag whatever” and the switch fabric is configured to segregate the ports based on VLAN tag, and only sends the packet out the port associated with the DMZ.

  The problem is that the reason that you want to use NAT is to disallow incoming connections from the server to the LAN. This will make that go away — the LAN hosts and DMZ hosts will be on separate “networks”, so things like ARP requests and other stuff at the purely-Ethernet level won’t reach each other, but they can freely communicate with each other at the IP level, because the two 192.168.X.1 virtual addresses will forward packets between each other. You’re going to need to firewall off incoming TCP connections (and maybe UDP and ICMP and whatever else you want to block) inbound on the 192.168.1.0/24 network from the 192.168.2.0/24 network. You can probably do that with iptables at the Linux level. I think that all the traffic should be reaching the Linux kernel in this scenario.

  If you get that set up, hosts at 192.168.2.2, on the DMZ, should be able to see connections from 192.168.1.2, on the LAN, using its original IP address.

  That should work if what you had was a Linux box with two Ethernet cards and the VLAN stuff wasn’t in the picture. I’m not 100% certain that any VLAN switching fabric stuff might muck that up — I’ve only very rarely touched VLANs myself, and never tried to do this. But I can believe that it’d work.

  If you do set it up, I’d also fire up tcpdump on the server. If things are working correctly, sudo ping -b 192.168.1.255 on the LAN shouldn’t show up as reaching the server. However, ping 192.168.2.1 should.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The Slate Truck has them, so assuming that that goes into production, it’ll be an example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You probably want to flag this post NSFW.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is withdrawing support for older printers' drivers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, you can use something like the lightweight containers generated by firejail, where the program just lacks write permission to the filesystem or network access, stuff like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get wrong answer with 100% token confidence, and correct one with 0.000001% confidence.

  If everything that I’ve seen in the past has said that 1+1 is 4, then sure — I’m going to say that 1+1 is 4. I will say that 1+1 is 4 and be confident in that.

  But if I’ve seen multiple sources of information that state differing things — say, half of the information that I’ve seen says that 1+1 is 4 and the other half says that 1+1 is 2, then I can expose that to the user.

  I do think that Aceticon does raise a fair point, that fully capturing uncertainty probably needs a higher level of understanding than an LLM directly generating text from its knowledge store is going to have. For example, having many ways of phrasing a response will also reduce confidence in the response, even if both phrasings are semantically compatible. Being on the edge between saying that, oh…an object is “white” or “eggshell” will also reduce the confidence in token probability, even if the two responses are both semantically more-or-less identical in the context of the given conversation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Our last, best hope for the subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously rakes in money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could have legitimately competed with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.

  But Valve has all but dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, raising the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to the memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock specifically because of the memory crisis.

  I was pretty confident that Valve was not going to subsidize the Steam Machine form the start, even before it said that it would be priced comparably to a PC and even before it said that it was delaying determining pricing (which was a good sign that it hadn’t locked in a contract price on components). I commented along those lines.

  Consoles can do the razor-and-blades model because they are a closed platform. If you buy a Playstation, it doesn’t do you much good unless you use it to buy Playstation games.

  But the Steam Machine is open. I can go run whatever on it. And if Valve subsidizes it, people will just buy it instead of a comparable PC and then run whatever they want on it. Doesn’t make much sense for Valve, just because of the nature of the machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨eroticroleplay⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  fedinsfw.app

  I am thinking that lemmynsfw.com remaining down is going to result in a bunch of new NSFW instances showing up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is withdrawing support for older printers' drivers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I wonder if it’d be practical to containerize them by default.