I don’t presently need to use any service that requires use of a smartphone. I’ve never had a smartphone tied to a Google/Apple account. I don’t even think that I currently have any apps from the Google Store on my phone — just open-source F-Droid stuff.

It’s true that hypothetically, you could depend on a service that does require you to use an Android or iOS app to make use of it. There are services that do require that there. Lyft, for example, looks like it requires use of an app, though Uber doesn’t appear to do so. And I can’t speak as to your specific situation, but at least where I am, in the US, I’ve never needed to use an Android or iOS app to make use of some class of service.

But I will say that services will track what people use, and if people are continuing to use other interfaces than smartphone apps to make use of their services, that makes it more likely that that’s what they’ll provide.

I can’t promise that somewhere in the world, or in some country or city or specific place, someone might be required to use an Android or iOS app, or if not now, down the line, and not have an alternative. They can, at least, limit their use to that app, rather than using it more-broadly. I don’t make zero use of my smartphone software now — like, when I’m driving, I’ll use the open-source OSMAnd to navigate. I sometimes check for Lemmy updates when waiting in line or similar. I don’t normally listen to music while just walking around, but if I did, I’d use a music player on the phone rather than a laptop for it. But I try to shift my usage to the laptop as much as is practical.

I don’t intend to get rid of my smartphone, but I do carry a larger device with me, and try to use the phone increasingly as just a dumbphone and cell modem for that device to tether to.

That may not be viable for everyone — it’s not a great solution to “I’m standing in line and want to use a small device one-handed”. And iOS/Android smartphones are heavily optimized to use very little power, and any other devices mean more power. It probably means carrying a larger case/bag/backpack of some sort with you. And most phone software is designed to know about and be aware of cell network constraints, like acting differently based on whether you’re connected to a cell network for data or a WiFi network for data.

However, it doesn’t require shifting to a new phone ecosystem. It also makes any such future transition easier — if I have a lot of experience tied up in Android/iOS smartphone software, then there’s a fair bit of lock-in, since shifting to another platform means throwing out a lot of experience in that phone software. If my phone is just a dumbphone and a cell modem, then it’s pretty easy to switch.

And it’s got some other pleasant perks. Phone OSes tend to be relatively-limited environments. They’re fine for content consumption, like watching YouTube or something, but they’re considerably less-capable in a wide range of software areas than desktop OSes. A smartphone has limited cooling; laptops are significantly more-able to deal with heat. Due to very limited physical space, smartphones usually have very few external connectors — you probably get only a single USB-C connector, and no on-phone headphones jack. You’re probably looking at a USB hub or adapters and rigging up pass-through power if you want anything else. Laptops normally have a variety of USB connectors, a headphones jack, maybe a wired Ethernet connector, maybe an external display jack. Laptops tend to have a larger battery, so it’s reasonable to use the laptop to power external devices like trackballs/larger trackpads, keyboards, etc. You get a larger display, so you don’t have to deal with the workarounds that smartphones have to do to make their small screens as usable as possible. You don’t have to deal with the space constraints that make a touchscreen necessary, having your fingers in front of whatever you’re looking at (though you can get larger devices that do have touchscreens, if you want). You have far more choices on hardware, and that hardware is more-customizable (in part because the hardware likely isn’t an SoC, though you can get an SoC-based laptop if you want). Software support isn’t a smartphone-style “N years, tied to the phone hardware vendor, at which point you either use insecure software or throw the phone out and buy a new one”.

He says that he doesn’t like the official software.

I’ve never used it, but:

https://github.com/Vidi0/scratch-io

Says that it’s a Rust-based command-line client, which is probably the sort of thing that I’d use myself, if I were on the hunt for a client, sorta analogous to lgogdownloader for GOG.

Note that it says:

Due to how the itch.io API works, it is not possible to update a game in-place. To update a game, you must remove it and install it again.

Relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

Glancing at that still in the thumbnail, it also looks like she doesn’t have a driveway.

I don’t know if that’d be the situation that the woman has, but I’ve been in old neighborhoods in the US with housing built before about WW2 or so, and they don’t have off-street parking, as they predate the automobile becoming very common.

If companies are going to place increasing reliance on review due to having lower-quality submissions, then they should probably evaluate employees weighting review quality (say, oh, rate of bugs subsequently discovered in reviewed commits or something like that).

I never really got into the Assassin’s Creed series, but I did enjoy Saboteur, which I understand is somewhat similar, albeit getting a little long in the tooth these days. I don’t think that there are going to be any new games in that series, though. Users might consider taking a glance at it.

On another note…the live service elements going in also highlights one major concern I have with games purchased on platforms like Steam or on console download services or whatever. Publishers can push updates. So, normally you sell a game once, and there’s no future revenue from it. But…if you go out of business or just want to sell the rights, you can sell it to someone else, who now has the ability to push updates to the software to the computers of people who own the game, and can include, say, ads, data-harvesting, live-service stuff, microtransactions, or whatever else might generate money.

Traditionally, that’s not how games worked. A player buys a game on physical media, he can always use that game. It won’t be worse in the future.

Yeah, there’s some nuclear power plant here in the US that uses sewage for cooling. It’s out in the middle of the desert, Arizona or New Mexico or something, somewhere where it’d be a pain to bring in a bunch more water.

searches

Arizona.

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

The Palo Verde Generating Station is a nuclear power plant located near Tonopah, Arizona[5] about 45 miles (72 km) west of downtown Phoenix. Palo Verde generates the second most electricity of any power plant in the United States per year, and is the second largest power plant by net generation as of 2021.[6] Palo Verde has the third-highest rated capacity of any U.S power plant. It is a critical asset to the Southwest, generating approximately 32 million megawatt-hours annually.

At its location in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not located adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. Up to 26 billion US gallons (~100,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year.[12][13] This water represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.[14] At the nuclear plant site, the wastewater is further treated and stored in an 85-acre (34 ha) reservoir and a 45-acre (18 ha) reservoir for use in the plant’s wet cooling towers.

New York City is a port city. It has an effectively infinite supply of salt water, which you can use for evaporative cooling, albeit with some extra complications.

EDIT: Hell, you can use the waste energy from an evaporative cooler to drive a distiller to generate fresh water from some of the evaporated salt water, if you want. Microsoft is doing that combined datacenter-nuclear-power-plant thing. IIRC, if I’m not combining two different cases of an AI datacenter using full output of a power plant, they have the entire output of a nuclear power plant never touching the grid (and thus avoiding any transmission cost overhead and as a bonus, avoiding regulatory requirements attached to transmission and distribution from power generation):

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/09/re-opened-three-mile-island-will-power-ai-data-centers-under-new-deal/

Re-opened Three Mile Island will power AI data centers under new deal

Microsoft would claim all of the nuclear plant’s power generation for at least 20 years.

From past reading, desalination from reverse osmosis has wound up being somewhat cheaper than via using distillation, but combined generation-distillation using waste heat is a thing. IIRC Spain has some company that does combined generation-distillation facilities.

And in a case like that, you have the waste heat from generation and the waste heat from use all in one spot, so you’ve got a lot of water vapor to condense.

EDIT2: Yeah, apparently distillation used to be ahead for desalination, but reverse osmosis processes improved, and currently hold the lead:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359431124026292

As desalination is a process of removing dissolved solids such as salts and minerals from water, there are two main types of technology commonly used in the industry: thermal-based and membrane-based [22]. The thermal-based desalination processes, such as multi-stage flash distillation (MSF) and multiple-effect distillation (MED) were once predominantly used in the water sector until membrane-based desalination technology, such as reverse osmosis (RO), matured and offered lower operating costs [23]. Hence, RO is the most used desalination process today, producing between 61 % and 69 % of the total global desalinated water, followed by MSF (between 17 % and 26 %) and MED (between 7 % and 8 %) [9], [16], [19], [20], [24].

If you can use Termux, you can use the command-line lftp, which supports SFTP; I use this on Linux, so I’m familiar with it.

$ pkg install lftp
$ lftp sftp://foo.com

I also use rsync in Termux after being exasperated over the lack of a reasonable F-Droid graphical client for that.

I wound up using some non-open-source graphical SCP or SFTP client out of the Google Play Store using Aurora Store’s anonymous login at one point, which worked but wasn’t what I wanted to use.

deleted by creator

Do any of you expect that there’s going to be substantial drops in RAM prices within the next year?

I would not bet on prices dropping substantially in 2026. I don’t have the ability to first-hand assess the situation, but what I’ve seen from articles suggests that you’re most-likely looking at sometime in 2028 before memory prices start really coming down.

I am confident that memory prices will come down. From what I’ve read, it (normally) takes about 4-5 years to build a new factory from scratch. That’s probably an outer bound, since as long as memory manufacturers can get capital (which hasn’t been a problem; lots of companies want to give them money for memory), they can build out production.

Micron announced a second facility in Boise, Idaho in mid-2025, and said that it would start producing in 2027 (though from what I’ve read, it normally takes additional time to come up to scale).

https://boisedev.com/news/2025/06/12/micron-boise-second/

The company said production output is scheduled to start in 2027.

If you use that as as a baseline, maybe three-ish years if a company can build where they already have facilities.

What you might do is, if you have four DIMM slots and can live with just upgrading two, just upgrade two. Then in 2028 or whenever, upgrade the other two slots.

I’d also add that prices probably won’t get down quite as low as they were about a year or so back, because memory manufacturers were losing money then (well, unless cost of production drops, which does happen to some degree over time).

Also, there’s going to be a lot of pent-up demand by that time, so I’d guess that prices will more-likely come down slowly than quickly. A bunch of businesses will have extended their upgrade cycle, and they’re going to want new hardware. Various hardware devices that may be deferred (maybe the Steam Machine 2, for example) will start being manufactured. Individuals are going to want to do upgrades that they’ve been waiting in exasperation to do, just like you. So I’d expect prices to slowly walk down, with people willing to pay more getting an earlier spot in the line.

Are there scenarios where they come down quickly in 2026? Well…major wars/disasters/etc that cause demand to drop more than supply. If everyone in the AI industry decides that the future is down some path other than needing a lot of HBM (which I don’t think is going to happen in 2026, though maybe it’ll happen down the road). If investors by-and-large decide that AI providing major returns is all way, way out much further than expected, and that more research needs to be funded before memory purchases do, which I wouldn’t bet on. I can’t think of many ways in which demand for DRAM would suddenly unexpectedly collapse or supply suddenly unexpectedly explode.

Neural net computation has predictable access patterns, so instead of using the thing as a random access memory with latency incurred by waiting for the bit you want to get around to you, I expect that you can load the memory appropriately such that you always have the appropriate bit showing up at the time you need it. I’d guess that it probably needs something like the ability to buffer a small amount of data to get and keep multiple fiber coils in synch due to thermal expansion.

The Hacker’s Jargon File has an anecdote about doing something akin to that with drum memory, “The Story of Mel”.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

I’m assuming that the point is the bandwidth.

goes looking for HBM bandwidth

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

It says that HBM 4, which came out one year ago, can do 2 TiB/s.

A little bit, but normally Token Ring didn’t just keep data running around in a circle on and on — Token Ring works more like a roundabout, where you enter at a given computer on the ring and then exit at another device. Without looking, I suspect that, like Internet Protocol packets, Token Ring probably had a TTL (time-to-live) field in its frames to keep a mis-addressed packet from forever running around in circles.

Also, I’m assuming that an implementation of Carmack’s idea would have only one…I don’t know the right term, might be “repeater”. You need to have some device to receive the data and then retransmit them to keep the signal strong and from spreading out. You wouldn’t want to have a ton of those, because otherwise it’d add cost. On Token Ring, you’d have a bunch of transceivers, to have a bunch of “exits”, since the whole point is to move data from one device to another.

Creating workable consumer-grade alternatives

I think that this is intended not to replace DIMMs in PCs, but to replace HBM for AI use. If you’re doing neural net computation, you have very predictable access patterns, so you can store your edge weights such that the desired data is showing up at just the right time.

Note that this is from last month, though I haven’t seen it submitted.

Note that the article is from the beginning of February.

For what platform?