I don’t have a fix for you, but a note: I dunno what driver you’re using, but if it’s xpadneo, as of this 2022 issue:

https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/issues/374

…it sounds like even on Bluetooth, what’s being done is a limited-functionality version of what the pad supports. It sounds like the kernel API presently just supports emulating rumble functionality on the triggers, whereas the game controller apparently is capable of providing (more elaborate) force feedback, variable levels of resistance at various points as you depress the trigger.

There used to be a convention of having authors who would, at least occasionally, write deliberately-enraging opinion articles in magazines. In my experience, they were typically at the end of magazines. Maybe not outright wrong articles, but they’d make statements that many readers of the magazine would object to.

The idea, as I understand it, was to — and this was before social media, in the Internet-based sense of the word, developed a focus on this — drive engagement. People would write letters to the editor complaining and arguing against it, and then the magazine could print some of these in the next issue in the letters section.

John C. Dvorak was the most-prominent example of this that I recall — he put articles in a few computer magazines — and was notable in that I recall him publicly-admitting on one occasion that he did this, that it wasn’t just that he happened to have controversial opinions.

Huh. Looking at his WP article, it looks like he just died last week.

Anyway, my point is that I could believe that publications might still have authors who do this sort of thing.

If you’re using other mods at the same time, I’d try doing the binary search thing — turn them off, see if the problem goes away, if so, turn half of them off, see if the problem goes away, then of the problematic half, try turning half of that off, etc.

searches

It sounds like Bethesda says that something similar can happen in their games if you have a 5.1 configuration with nothing hooked up to some of the speakers.

I vaguely recall some bug on very old versions of Proton, something with the sound subsystem, that caused speech to not show up in some Bethesda game, though I think it was a problem that showed up after a while, not always not present from the start of the game. Trying to deal with that was what initially got me to use Proton GE. I doubt that it’s what’s going on here, but you could try switching Proton versions.

I don’t have Fallout 4 installed at the moment, but Skyrim has separate volume sliders in the settings for voice and music, so I assume Fallout 4 does too. You might check that.

They can’t make competitive dedicated memory in a near-term timeframe — the kind of timeframe that would matter, if they are to get something in during the shortage — and Cook has explicitly said that Apple will not try.

However, they do make their own CPUs, and they could maybe make a large-onboard-cache version, kind of akin to what AMD has been doing. That’d make the CPU more amenable to use of slower memory for most applications, which might open up more memory options.

We can desalinate all the water we want in California — we already have a bunch of desalination facilities, and can build those out as far as need be — but desalinated water isn’t as cheap as already-fresh water. That’s mostly an annoyance for, say, residential use. But it’s harder to competitively do agriculture on desalinated water. Israel has done some limited agriculture on desalinated water, but farmers are not generally going to be okay with that as an option. Most agriculture uses a lot of water.

searches

Someone ran the numbers to see roughly what it would cost if we did only desalinated water for everyone in the US.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation

Producing enough drinking water for someone — assuming 3 litres per day — costs just $2.30 for the entire year. That’s less than the cost of a single bottle of water in many countries.

We actually use way more water than we do for drinking — we’re pretty prolific with water to do things like lawns.

If the average person in the United States uses 310 litres of water per day for domestic uses, it would cost them $0.42 per day. Or $154 per year.

We’d probably want to conserve more nationally in such a scenario (Californians use less than the national average). But even with no conservation, it’s very much doable.

It’s a cost that we’d rather not pay if we don’t have to, as a society, but we certainly are able to do so for residential needs.

But if there isn’t enough freshwater to do agriculture, then who gets the freshwater determines which farmers go out of business (or at least have to shift to something else) and which get to keep operating.

That’s a good sign that they’re going to sell enough product that it won’t be a flop. I was pretty pessimistic on their chances of being able to introduce new hardware successfully during the RAM shortage, but perhaps I will be wrong!

She went for him in late 1993:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993. He was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.

Fedora won’t have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Fedora Linux[10] is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project.

It looks like there were Linux distributions at the time, but they were very early:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

Early distributions included:

• Torvalds’ “Boot-Root” images, from v0.95a onwards “Root” was maintained by Jim Winstead Jr., the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started (0.10: 4 November 1991)[12][13][14][15]

• MCC Interim Linux (3 March 1992)[16]

• TAMU Linux, based on MCC with simpler installation and X11 (14 July 1992)[17]

• Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which included the X Window System and was the most comprehensive distribution for a short time (15 August 1992)[18]

• H.J. Lu’s “bootable rootdisks” (23 September 1992),[19][20] and “Linux Base System” (5 October 1992)[21][22]

• Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution (alpha: 8 December 1992)

• The two oldest, still active distribution projects started in 1993. The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new SLS-based distribution, Slackware, was released by Patrick Volkerding.[23] Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian in August 1993, with first public BETA released in January 1994 and first stable version in June 1996.[24][25]

I think that there are two possible takeaways from this:

• Not clear what distro was used — if any — but if it was, it won’t have been a presently existing one. It’s possible that he was just rolling his own setup, not using a distro at all.

• Linus’s date with Tove derived from an email exchange. What ninja chicks look for in a guy is possibly an email client, not a Linux distribution at all. It sounds like Linus was probably using Pine at the time (though someone could go dig up mail headers from old emails to check).

He’s also married.

On further thought, one edge use case that might make sense — suppose you’re a multiplayer online gamer who is only interested in getting an edge in multiplayer online games and don’t really care at all about what a game looks like. OLED displays can offer considerably higher reasonable framerates than past monitors, maybe 500 Hz or more. You might be able to crank the texture settings in a number of games all the way down, just look at a blurry mess, and use an OLED display and have a video card that can, as long as it isn’t crashing into memory limitations, render high framerates.

There are also a handful of games that don’t use textures on polygons, sort of the Avara or Star Fox style. Most of those are older and target systems before hardware acceleration, but I can think of a few newer ones. I personally like Carrier Command 2*, and that has almost-entirely untextured polygons, and where it does use textures, they’re low resolution. I don’t know what the VRAM requirements are for the geometry, but the listed system requirements on Steam are for 1GB VRAM cards. I don’t think that any of those are actually games where framerate matters much, but if you wanted to render those at very high resolution or on multiple monitors or something (if the game can support that?), it might make sense.

I mean, this is really just a mental exercise — I don’t think that the OEM in question is really trying to develop a system that’s actually well-suited to any entry-level-gaming users. But if you were looking for very specialized gaming niches, you could maybe find something that the system could actually serve well at.

“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure," Altman said, adding that things have gone in this direction.

He explained that people now have more time for leisure and a higher quality of life than in previous points in history.

"But somehow we never get the promise of the 4-hour workweek on a mass scale in society. And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman said.

OpenAI CEO added that people’s expectations always go up, and they want more.

“We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” he said.

Altman then spoke about the competition that drives the economy and people’s desire to be useful to others and to create.

Altman’s predictions are in stark contrast to the vision of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the company behind the chatbot Grok.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Musk envisioned a future in which jobs are optional, and money doesn’t matter, but he didn’t provide much detail on the transition to this level of abundance.

Yeah, I think that Altman is probably closer to being right than Musk is, at least for some time to come. If you’re talking about the kind of systems that OpenAI and xAI are working on, then certainly.

A lot of people — on the Threadiverse I see plenty posting — are really worried about permanent expanding structural unemployment. Something like “there will be no jobs” or something like that. And, okay, it’s not immediately obvious why that wouldn’t happen. And there have been some very prestigious people who have predicted otherwise.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.” It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week. David Kestenbaum with our PLANET MONEY team tried to sort out where Keynes went wrong.

To date, what has consistently always happened over time is that as our productive capacity increases, someone finds some way to create a higher standard of living using that productive capacity. That higher standard of living has always been more-appealing than the leisure time. If we wanted the standard of living that was present in 1900, say, we could work a lot less and just accept that standard of living. What happened instead of increasing leisure was increasing standard of living. Larger houses, air conditioning, cars, video games, elaborate movies, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, all that.

It’s possible that that phenomenon will end, but I’d bet against it in the near term. We’re really good at finding new things that people would like.

Now, I do expect that there will come a point where you can produce an AGI that is truly superhuman in the sense that it’s more-capable in every significant way than a human. I do not think that that is going to happen in a year or ten years, but it might not be that far down the road. And then, unless you see demand specifically for something made by humans — think of the way that there is demand for, say, expensive handmade fountain pens, something like Veblen goods — we’re going to have to rejigger things for a post-scarcity society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2]

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

But I would be pretty confident that ChatGPT isn’t getting humanity to a post-scarcity society in the near future.

And I think that there are a whole host of other things that would change in human society in such an environment that I’m not sure that structural unemployment would be the first thing I’d think about. Like…what does the military balance of power look like in a world where an individual can hypothetically manufacture robots that manufacture factories that manufacture military drones, say? I mean, it’s a awfully different world in a lot of ways.

I have never actually played Minecraft itself, just open-source clones like Luanti, but I could very easily believe that those have extremely low VRAM requirements, even if the engine isn’t optimized. Most VRAM goes to storing textures, and Minecraft normally has few textures and very low-resolution textures.

Thing is, I also would guess that unless the engine is really inefficient, that GPU isn’t really buying much, either. Like, you have lot of crunching power and bandwidth, sure, but you probably don’t have many visible triangles either.

Maybe some modded Minecraft?

searches

https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/31es0c/cpu_bottleneck/

It’s not abnormal for shaders in minecraft to more than half your FPS.

If that’s true, if people have done some really crazy shader mods or someone’s using ReShade or similar, maybe they could be soaking up that GPU compute power. Though…I have no idea what kind of system this guy is talking about. He could be talking about a cell phone or something too…

I mean, you can do things with limited VRAM and a lot of compute power, if you’re going to program stuff targeting this particular system. Like, the idea of such a system isn’t intrinsically crazy.

But given this:

The Radeon™ RX 9050 4GB was developed specifically for a partner system designed to deliver strong overall value for entry-level gaming customers.

I can’t help but think that the OEM selling this is doing nothing other than trying to exploit people who have trouble navigating the technical specifications.

A year and a bit on from taking the reigns, Folmann’s put up a post reflecting on the new regime’s first year running the modding site and outlining hopes to turn it into “an operating system for user-generated content in gaming” in the long term.

I think that that’s a nice idea, but I think that ultimately, it’s going to be really hard to do that on the distribution side.

There are definitely improvements that can be made on that side.

• Trying to deal with malware. Some of this is arguably more of a platform vendor or Steam problem — almost all games really could run just fine in a sandbox, without access to the broader system. But mods massively exacerbate the problem, because you have lots of very small programs from anonymous authors and little review present.

• Making it easier for end users to diagnose conflicts. I remember Conflict Catcher, an extension manager for the classic Mac OS, that had quite a good system for this — I’ve set to see a similar software package that implements this to the same level. The first bit I have seen elsewhere: when you have a problem, switch off approximately half of the mods (though if you have mod dependencies, you’ll need to take that into account in selecting the ones to flip off). Ask the user if the problem is still recurring. Repeat. For a single-mod problem (this mod just doesn’t work on this system), this isolates a problematic mod in O(log N) tries, where N is the number of mods. But what Conflict Catcher would do is to also extend this to identify conflicts between two (and IIRC, more) mods that had problems with each other.

• Improve the creation and distribution of “mod sets”. For very moddable games, where you’re dealing with maybe thousands of mods, this is important. Right now, Wabbajack does something like this — I actually just used this successfully under Linux for the first time the other day, using Jackify — things have come a long way on Linux — and while they build on NexusMods, NexusMods doesn’t natively have the ability to do this.

• Improve the situation for load order dependency. Maybe let mods provide partial ordering recommendations WRT other mods and versions; not sure what the best solution is here.

But a lot of the work to make games moddable in the first place, or to work well when being modded, really needs to happen on the game developer side:

• Some of the ability to diagnose problems with mods really has to happen on the game side.

• Trying to track down the performance impact of mods in anything more-sophisticated than a “restart and see if problem is present” Conflict Catcher-style approach — and some games don’t deal well with disabling some mods that have already been used in a game, so it can be very time consuming to run a pass.

• In particular, I’d like support from the game for trying to run mod code in parallel, where possible. Like, “this code module doesn’t mutate anything, just looks at the world state and computes a result”, and runs in a VM that enforces that non-mutability, so all of that code can run in parallel each frame. A lot of mods have historically relied on running in various game scripting systems that do not support parallelization, which is nice from an “avoiding bugs introduced by scripts written by people who aren’t writing correct parallel compute code”, but not so great from a performance standpoint, given that modern computers have a lot of cores and as the amount of script code run by mods increases, it can place increasing pressure on a single thread bottleneck.

• Improving startup times for modded games. For me, this is a pet peeve with very large modsets in Bethesda games. They need a system — maybe it’s building an index and caching it, or allowing init code to run lazily, or a dependency system or something (“this flag indicates whether this mod need to be loaded before the menus creen is displayed”) — to allow mods to be loaded intelligently in a way that doesn’t massively increase game startup time.

Tomatoes do have a wide variety of cultivars, some of which have considerably-higher sugar content.

searches

https://growingfruit.org/t/what-are-the-sweetest-tomatoes-highest-brix-lowest-acid-possible/69110

Many cherry tomatoes can brix between 12 and 16.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64b974963cb8f079e9f7c83f/t/652f1cf07f8b2f125c06fd7b/1697586417068/BrixRefractiveIndNologo.jpg

Botanically, yes. Not in common usage, though. Someone also tried pulling that regarding tariffs in the US and the US legal system said “nice try, but no”.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court unanimously held that tomatoes should be classified as vegetables rather than fruits for purposes of tariffs, imports and customs. Justice Horace Gray delivered the opinion of the Court in holding that the Tariff Act of 1883 used the ordinary meaning of the words “fruit” and “vegetable”, instead of the technical botanical meaning.[1]

https://grammarist.com/phrase/misery-loves-company/

“Misery loves company” is a well-known proverbial phrase we use in the English language. It is usually meant to describe situations where unhappy people want to share their misery with others. It’s been around for centuries, and we still actively use it today.

This age-old proverb was originally said in the 16th century by the demon Mephastophilis in a play titled “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,” created by Christopher Marlow. The excerpt was in Latin, but it translates to “It is a comfort to the unfortunate to have had companions in woe” or, more simply, “misery loves company.”

But guess what? Marlow actually isn’t the first person to use this Latin phrase. Dominick de Gravina, a 14th-century Italian historian, wrote this Latin phrase in his work, Chronicon de rebus in Apulia gestis.

The problem is that you have to be really careful about the laptop you buy if you intend to do that. A lot of laptops now have soldered, non-upgradable memory, as we’re hitting the bandwidth limits of what DIMMs can do, but the bulk of the industry hasn’t transitioned over to CAMM2 (the new removable standard) yet.

EDIT: Here’s a Reddit discussion from four years ago saying that even at that point, it was very difficult to find any laptop models that didn’t have at least partially-soldered memory:

https://old.reddit.com/r/laptops/comments/uzjmim/ultrabook_without_soldered_ram_do_they_even_exist/

Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that’s changed, I’m assuming that you’re running X11. A lot of my unknown here is “how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments”, because that — well, and systemd, but I’d bet that systemd is less memory-critical — is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.

searches

It sounds like it’s working in very preliminary form, but they’ve got a ways to go:

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

For Xfce 4.20, the plan was to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn’t mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).

For Xfce 4.22, the stabilization work continues. Reaching X11 feature parity is not yet our target.

We are now working on our own Wayland compositor. It is very early, under heavy development, and not usable yet. Please see its FAQ for further information.

You know, that honestly does make me kind of wonder what an actually decent, modern low-memory configuration for a Linux desktop is. I generally avoid blingy desktop stuff, but I also usually max out the RAM on my systems. I did once, for the hell of it, use a 2GB (upgraded from 1GB) eeePC for a few years for work, just to see whether I could reasonably do it. Had a lot of other software engineers chuckling at me, but I put the thing on a cantilevered platform to put it right in front of my eyes, so the tiny screen filled most of my visual field, and used an external keyboard with it. I used it mostly to run a web browser and terminals on a remote Linux system, so mostly as a thin client, was doing compilation and such remotely. The basic configuration, aside from being Xorg, i3, and urxvt instead of Wayland, sway, and foot, was pretty similar to my current configuration — just that I had about 2% of the memory I presently do. I didn’t run heavyweight things, like games, compilations, etc. I’m pretty sure that I occasionally used LibreOffice locally, though.

I kind of wonder if I could reasonably use a 2GB Linux desktop system today without too many tradeoffs. A lot of games would be off the table, but outside of that…I wonder if current browsers could be made to run in a reasonably low-memory configuration.

You can definitely run a 2GB Linux system now if you’re using it like a traditional Unix system, console only — there are much smaller, specialized Linux systems out there, like OpenWRT routers. But I’m talking graphical and at least lightweight use of typical productivity software.

EDIT: Debian says yes for the current release:

https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/amd64/ch03s04.en.html

Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements

Install Type	RAM (minimum)	RAM (recommended)	Hard Drive
No desktop	512MB	1GB	4GB
With Desktop	1GB	2GB	10GB

The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers listed in this table. With swap enabled, it is possible to install Debian with as little as 350MB. The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you pick and choose which applications to install; see Section D.2, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks” for additional information on disk space requirements.

The installer normally automatically enables memory-saving tricks to be able to run on such low-memory system, but on architectures that are less tested it may miss doing so. It can however be enabled manually by appending the lowmem=1 or even lowmem=2 boot parameter (see also Section 6.3.1.1, “Check available memory / low memory mode” and Section 5.3.2, “Debian Installer Parameters”).

Installation on systems with less memory[2] or disk space available may be possible but is only advised for experienced users.

It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop environments; alternatives include xfce4, icewm and wmaker, but there are others to choose from.

That being said, there are going to be applications that can, based on workload, definitely not work reasonably on such a system. Dunno how Chromium/Firefox would do, as one of the two is kind of essential for most desktops today. The OS can only do so much there, aside from getting other things out of the way and maybe using compressed swap.

EDIT2: Apparently, on low-memory systems, Firefox will unload the content of background tabs, and has a priority list for unloading them; this is visible in about:unloads. That sounds like it’s a substantial part of its low-memory strategy. I suppose in the case of extreme memory pressure, you’d only ever have one tab, the visible one, actually rendered and residing in memory.

endorsement of the prime minister

Technically Starmer didn’t endorse him. IIRC his statement was something like “I don’t think that I’m actually allowed to endorse a member of another party” or something along those lines.

searches

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/08/clacton-byelection-likely-to-be-two-man-race-between-reform-leader-and-binface

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, even addressed his candidacy on the sidelines of the Nato summit. “I think it’s actually against Labour party rules to endorse another [candidate],” he said.

EDIT: Apparently, amusingly, “Count Binface is the establishment” is apparently the message that Reclaim (harder-right UK party than Farage’s Reform) is taking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Clacton_by-election

On 7 July Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim Party who lives in nearby West Mersea, announced he would be standing. Fox stated that he would “provide a voice on the ‘right’” while also criticising the major parties for not standing a candidate against Farage, saying: “This is meant to be a democracy.”[61][62][63] Fox has also said that Binface “literally is the establishment”.[64]

EDIT2: Starmer did say “put your vote in the bin”, which I suppose could be considered an indirect endorsement:

https://www.rte.ie/news/uk/2026/0715/1583501-starmer-primeminister-questions/

“My advice to everyone is put your vote in the bin,” Mr Starmer told MPs at his final prime minister’s questions in parliament, when the outgoing Labour leader was asked whether Farage and Binface should hold a televised debate.

Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey also chimed in with a swipe at Farage: “I cannot back joke figures with ridiculous policies, which is why I’m supporting Count Binface.”