So, there is actually a point there in that there is a lot of movement data harvested from cell phones, and I think that we could probably improve on the situation there if we wanted. The town government level is probably not in a great place to do that, but compared to ALPRs:

• Cell phones can be turned off.

• Cell phones can have their GPS stuff and/or location services disabled, though I realize that a limited number of people are going to actually do so. You cannot legally cover up a license plate.

• For Android (and I assume iOS, though I haven’t looked at the situation there), the OS permission system permits restricting an app permission to data that would permit it to infer location. It may not be perfect — for example, I’ve seen research projects that try to do things like use accelerometer data and match it to street maps to try to figure out where someone is without access to Bluetooth/WiFi beacons or GPS data. But certainly there are real efforts to limit that.

They are trash like any other laptop as thin and unventilated as that.

I mean, it depends on what you’re using a laptop for.

Like you, I have pretty consistently also pointed out, when people talk about, say, doing heavy LLM crunching on laptops, that the form factor just is not great for heat dissipation or using a lot of power.

But, I mean, that’s not everything that people do on a laptop. I’m writing a comment on a Lemmy Web page right now. That’s not a terribly compute-intensive task.

Honestly, what irks me more about thin laptops is that they invariably have limited battery size. I’d be quite happier with a thicker laptop if it meant 100 Wh batteries, but most laptop vendors have smaller batteries. Lithium batteries are a lot cheaper in 2026 than they were some decades back. A lot of laptops ship with something like a 50Wh battery. Sure, it’s great to shave down cost, and a lot of consumers don’t think about battery life when buying a laptop, but in 2026, it’s less than ten cents per watt-hour for lithium-ion cells. From my perspective, the return here is just not great.

Yeah, we’ve also generally improved power efficiency, and USB PD is a thing, so you can carry powerstations, but I’d rather have a laptop that knows how much time it has left and don’t need to haul out an external battery and eat up a USB-C port. And you can always do something useful with laptop battery life. Brighter screens. More USB-connected devices. Degrading your battery less over time by not completely charging and discharging it. More fan cooling, more CPU capability, more GPU capability. The only people who don’t get anything out of more battery are people who always use their laptop as a portable desktop, never use it unless it’s plugged into wall power.

There’s some weight argument, maybe, but if that’s what you want, back when lithium batteries were more expensive, a number of laptop vendors used to provide the option of smaller batteries, often shipping laptops with an option of a smaller battery or a larger (more expensive) one. That could still be done today, and if you have a smaller battery, the laptop is lighter.

I can maybe understand someone arguing some thinness benefits from an ergonomic standpoint, but…desktop keyboards are almost always thicker than laptops. Desktop touchpads that I’ve seen generally are as well. If, given a situation where you don’t have size constraints for actual usage, users choose thicker devices, it’s hard for me to see the argument for a laptop form factor.

I mean, it’s doesn’t make the memory shortage entirely vanish, but if you’re a CPU manufacturer and the question is “what can you do in the next two years in terms of your CPU products to adapt to this”, selling a relatively-high-performance CPU that can (a) use older-spec memory, of which there is an existing supply in PCs that can be reused and (b) has a lot of on-CPU-die cache to help mitigate the performance limitations of that memory, that’s probably about the most you can reasonably do.

EDIT: I can imagine other things that a CPU vendor could also do, like maybe supporting “tiers” of on-motherboard memory for future motherboard specs for your CPU, where OSes could be aware of high-speed memory and low-speed memory and access both, but stuff like that isn’t going to be done inside in the two-year (well, now maybe year-and-a-half remaining) timeframe where we expect the RAM shortage to be really significant.

There have been cars that can manage it.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/amphicar-president-johnson-1960s/

The Amphicar was manufactured in West Germany and first made an appearance in America at the 1961 New York Auto Show.

Originally designed by Hanns Trippel, these amphibious cars hit the US market from 1961 to 1967. Most notable for their ability to cruise on land and operate in the water, these cars were a fun new invention in the car world for that time.

One of the most famous owners of the Amphicar was President Lyndon Johnson. Those leisurely rides created the opportunity for a clever prank that Johnson enjoyed playing on his passengers.

It involved barrelling the vehicle down a hill into a lake and exclaiming to his passengers that the brakes had malfunctioned, while they had no idea the car was designed to float in water.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/grapevine-lake-tesla-cybertruck-arrested-wade-mode-jailed/287-f60869e6-bd78-4008-9241-6e5e61a013c2

Police arrested Jimmy Jack McDaniel, 70, after he and two visitors from Germany to whom he was giving a ride became marooned near the Katie’s Woods Park Boat Ramp around eight o’clock at night.

Making sure that they get the full tourism experience, I see.

www.businessinsider.com

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

In 2023, Business Insider shifted its organizational model, adding multiple artificial intelligence (AI) products in 2024, and reducing its staff by nearly 40% between April 2023 and May 2025.[7]

I suspect that the author is more likely to be impacted than most of the people involved.

Journalism’s been having a rough time for some decades from technological change, though that predates AI as we know it today.

First — in the US, not sure about everywhere else — there was a shift away from local news towards focusing on national news. You don’t need as many journalists to cover a limited number of national stories. IIRC, that started before widespread Internet adoption, but the Internet accelerated it a lot:

https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/local-news-democracy-risk/

The appearance of news deserts across counties and communities in the U.S. has been a widespread phenomenon in recent years. But why? In an interview with the HPR, Jeremy Meserve, the Staff Producer and Archivist for the Belmont Media Center, pointed to the over-corporatization of media consumption as a cause of the decline in quantity and quality of local journalism.

The rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has fundamentally changed how people consume media. Social media platforms like these have spelled the end for many local newspapers as people have shifted their media consumption priorities to more convenient options. Meserve believes that part of the downfall of local newspapers had to do with the old business model, where many local papers were free. So when social media emerged, people stopped reading, as social media platforms provided faster and equally free media. As a result of this, newspapers lost their audience and their benefactors which led to that old business model being unsustainable.

Second, Google basically took over the ad market that a substantial amount of journalism relied on for revenue. Sure, some money came from subscriptions, but a lot of magazines and newspapers relied on their ability to put ads in front of a broad demographic’s eyeballs. You don’t want to pay a newspaper for relatively untargeted ads when you can pay Google, which can hit exactly the demographic that you want to advertise to.

Third, my understanding is that some stuff — like “business news” articles, where one just wants a summary of earnings reports or someone talking about the general movement of stocks and a vaguely-plausible explanation attached — became largely automatically generated some time back. This predates the LLM boom as well:

searches for an example

https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/automated-earnings-stories-multiply/

The Associated Press, working with Automated Insights and Zacks Investment Research, is now automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter, a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously. Here, Assistant Business Editor Philana Patterson, who has been overseeing the rollout of this process in the newsroom, gives an update on AP’s automation efforts that began last summer.

That might sound like something happening today, but…that’s a story from June 2015, over a decade ago.

roughly 3,800 internal repositories

I suppose that part of the moral here is to compartmentalize information internal to a company. Like, if you’re not on the team working on X, then you probably shouldn’t have repository access to X.

it’s the ram

The reason this CPU is interesting is because it can use DDR4 DIMMs.

That’s an interesting thought.

thinks

Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.

But is $130 actually fair?

Well, a flat fee doesn’t take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.

But…I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.

EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too — fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle’s VIN, and I’d be very surprised if charging companies aren’t monetizing that data.

I don’t think that they have much to do with the shortage one way or another. The companies described in the article aren’t AI companies or even memory chip manufacturers (I wouldn’t have called them “RAM makers”, personally). They’re companies that buy memory chips and assemble them into things like DIMMs.

EDIT: The mentioned seven companies all appear to be Taiwanese, but the American PNY is a company that also operates in this space that I could name off-the-cuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE

Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?

The family exits the car

Bobby: Oh my God! It’s like standing on the sun!

Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance!

EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)

That’s a neat tidbit.

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

The heat in the tunnels is largely generated by the trains, with a small amount coming from station equipment and passengers. Around 79% is absorbed by the tunnels’ walls, 10% is removed by ventilation, and the other 11% remains in the tunnels.[3]

Temperatures on the Underground have slowly increased as the clay around the tunnels has warmed up; in the early days of the Underground it was advertised as a place to keep cool on hot days. However, over time the temperature has slowly risen as the heat sink formed by the clay has reached its thermal capacity. When the tunnels were built the clay temperature was around 14 °C (57 °F); this has now risen to 19–26 °C (66–79 °F) and air temperatures in the tunnels now reach as high as 30 °C (86 °F).[3][4][5]

Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?

The problem with new video formats is their performance requirements as that they generally assume playback via dedicated hardware. The catch is that it often takes years before such decoders appear in GPUs and processors, leaving all devices purchased before then without support.

This is one thing that’s kind of frustrating about laptops. With desktops, you can stick in a new GPU. With laptops, maybe you can do an eGPU, but generally you’re stuck with whatever the thing originally shipped with.

Sure, you get some other benefits from buying a new laptop, but the rate of CPU performance increase has fallen off a lot, and now GPUs are the thing that are advancing quickly. A CPU upgrade used to be the primary reason to get a new computer. Throwing out a whole computer if you’re basically fine with it other than wanting a more powerful GPU is kind of a bummer.

Last I looked — not recently — Facebook was one of the more-competitive Bay Area tech companies in terms of base salary (though there are places where people can do better in terms of equity compensation), so they probably have some leeway to ask their employees to do stuff.

searches

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-salaries-revealed-how-much-engineers-researchers-made-in-2025-2026-4?op=1

This is only part of a larger list linked to above, but for 2025 engineering salaries only, base salary only, stock options and other forms of compensation excluded:

ASIC & FPGA Engineer: $299,880

ASIC Manager, Design Verification: $258,940.00 to $299,880

Director, Production Engineering: $354,123

Embedded Software Engineer: $169,313 to $269,081

Front End Engineer: $178,000 to $282,461

Production Engineer: $108,098 to $317,242

Production Engineering Manager: $258,524 to $309,797

Senior Staff Software Engineer: $311,029

Software Engineer: $124,000 to $450,000

Software Engineer (Leadership) - Infrastructure: $317,797

Software Engineering Manager: $200,907 to $328,000

Software Engineer Manager: $277,837 to $318,000

Sr Staff Hardware Engineer: $294,520

Staff Software Engineer: $258,524 to $263,803

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

I don’t know why you’d need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?

If an error, what happens when you do:

$ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point

?

I was going to mention that, but also that while I’m sure that it’d handle power loss while it’s unmounted the filesystem I don’t know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it’s in use.