…roughly four months ahead of schedule.

One of the new memory fabs under construction.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

This has new 2x8GB 3200 DDR4 DIMMs being a bit over $200 at the moment.

A year back, it was $50, but not now.

Recent leaks suggest that Sony will either have to sell its upcoming PlayStation 6 console at a minimum of $960 or push the launch date back into 2028 or even beyond that.

I seriously think that they should push it back to 2028.

I think that Valve’s making a mistake by not pushing back the Steam Machine to 2028 too, though at least for Valve, a hardware platform flopping isn’t a big deal, since they don’t rely on it alone to make sales.

Or maybe I’ll be wrong, and gamers will be significantly less price sensitive than they have been in the past. But my guess is that they aren’t gonna be jumping on consoles with a pricetag that’s that high. As I said before, the only console to be successful in the past that cost nearly that much in inflation-adjusted terms was the Atari 2600. Everything else failed.

I just recently sold one of my houses for 900k. Which I bought for 300k 25yrs ago. And it even was due for major renovations. Well, could have. Actually sold to them for 500. Didn’t wanna be an idiot but also didn’t want to rip them off. I did nothing of value to justify that gain. And they were very happy. Still unfair…

300,000 euros in 2001 is, inflation-adjusted, 512,000 euros in 2026. If you sold at 500k euros, you sold for slightly less than you bought it for in real terms.

I mean, they’re all WireGuard. ProtonVPN is WireGuard. Mulvad VPN – what I assume you’re referencing — is WireGuard.

If you don’t like a given WireGuard VPN provider, then just switch to some other VPN provider that supports WireGuard and use that service instead.

Maybe someone will make a way to use DDR3 in a DDR4 system. :-) Make the impossible possible.

This country

The city in question is in Canada, if you’re thinking that it’s the US (as you appear to be in the US).

people are just shitty

Well, some people. Not like the whole of humanity lined up there to trash it.

I shouldn’t have thrown out all that DDR3 memory that I did.

They don’t say the scenario where that’s happening, though. Unless your editor supports large file editing, a mode where it doesn’t load the whole file into memory, unless it has filesize restrictions that make it just fail, if you throw a large enough file at it, it’s invariably going to use a bunch of memory.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=out.bin bs=1M count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes (524 MB, 500 MiB) copied, 0.100949 s, 5.2 GB/s
$ vim out.bin

On my system, after it (slowly) finishes opening that file, vim’s using 511MB RSS. I know that vim has some sort of large file editing support, though not how to use it.

On emacs, large file editing support is from the vlf package.

$ emacs
M-x vlf RET
out.bin RET

Emacs is using 75.3 MB RSS after opening that.

Well, China would rather have AI in China than in the US. I don’t think that that part is what’s dumb about this.

I think that if I were the current American far-right, I’d stop dragging the pope into this stuff. Like, there is an anti-Catholic strain in the far-right that’s been around for a long time, but as I’ve commented before, if you start getting those anti-Catholic Protestants riled up, you’re also probably going to antagonize the Catholics, and a Catholic-Protestant schism in the US would be really bad for the Republican Party, since they’re trying to keep social conservatives as a bloc in their coalition.

I guess it’s more-understandable with Thiel than when Trump was having a spat with the pope, since Thiel isn’t as directly a political operator, but still.

If the pope says something that you don’t like, and you’re a prominent right-wing figure in the US, even if you really have it in for Catholics, you’re probably better-off biting your tongue and just addressing the thing they said, not turning it into a conflict with the person. Like, if I were Thiel, I’d have said “AI is really important to make the US competitive on the international stage” or something. Whatever, but avoid referencing the pope in particular.

I mean, there are a bunch of people who are involved in the oil and gas (and coal, but those guys are are a corpse) industry who are terrified of things going away. If coal goes, so does, say, Gillette, Wyoming. That’s part of where Trump got support from.

But it’s not gonna change the general trajectory all that much on carbon. They might kick the can down the road a little more, but it’s gonna die sooner or later.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Budget-constrained segments, including government procurement and education, experienced a slightly steeper decline than the commercial market. Both are expected to remain under pressure through the end of the year, although Omdia believes they could see a meaningful recovery in 2027.

The text and the above graph expect PC purchasing to shoot back up in 2027. I don’t buy it.

Purchasing on PCs is down because prices on memory are up. There are only two ways that prices on memory come back down in 2027: a lot more supply enters the market, or demand drops significantly.

There are going to be new fabs coming online in 2027, but they won’t be running at full bore until 2028. A lot of unexpected supply seems unlikely to suddenly materialize in 2027.

I am also pretty skeptical that everyone is going to suddenly stop purchasing memory for AI purposes in 2027. If one wants to bet on a huge retraction in AI-related demand, that might do it. But I think that if that’s what this was based on, they’d be pretty explicit about it.

If purchasers in 2027 suddenly decide “the hell with it, I’m willing to pay a lot more for memory than I was last year”, if price elasticity of demand suddenly falls off, that’d do it. But I don’t see a reason for that to happen. Heck, even if it did, I’m not sure how many other memory consumers there are to try to outbid. The market cannot increase production in that timeframe, so the only way for PC purchasers to use more money is to outbid someone else, to get some memory that would have gone to someone else. It sounds like the big AI companies mostly have contracts in place, so you probably can’t outbid them in 2027, even if you rolled up with more money. I guess maybe you could try to outbid cell phone users for available memory or something.

I’ve also seen a number of articles predicting that memory prices in 2027 will, if anything, be somewhat higher than in 2026.

I think that PC purchases are going to stay low in both 2026 and 2027.

Last time I bought them was the Close Combat series from Slitherine/Matrix Games, which does war games.

checks

Looks like they stopped last year:

https://www6.slitherine.com/news/important-update-last-chance-to-purchase-physical-manuals-and-editions-before-march-1st

Dear Wargamers,

We want to share an important update with you.

Starting March 1st, 2025, Slitherine will no longer sell physical game manuals or physical copies of our games through our website. This marks the end of an era, and we understand how much these editions have meant to many of you over the years.

There is a trend away from Physical purchases to digital, and a decreasing number of new PC’s even have DVD drives and very few laptops meaning the potential market has been shrinking for years. This, combined with increasing delivery costs, environmental awareness, and more red tape on international deliveries, all combine to make it unviable.

For those who appreciate the tactile experience of a physical manual or a boxed edition, this is your final chance to secure a piece of wargaming history. You have until February 28th, 2025, to purchase from the remaining stock, after which these products will no longer be available.

Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake

https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/some-indexes-accelerate-entry-massive-ipos

Some Indexes Accelerate Entry for Massive IPOs

FTSE Russell: FTSE Russell announced the results of its index consultation on May 26, 2026, with changes effective as of the same date. Russell’s U.S. Equity indexes will now allow fast entry for very large IPOs on the fifth trading day, instead of waiting for the next quarterly rebalance. However, the weight of the IPO in the index will be based on investable market capitalization. In other words, only shares available to public investors will be considered when calculating the company’s size. Plus, IPOs must have at least 5% of shares available to public investors, either on the IPO date or within the next 12 months.

Uh. So does that 5% count towards the minimum float amount that triggers automatic buying by some index funds?

Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian.

Debian has a non-free repo containing non-open-source software that it hasn’t historically enabled by default, but I don’t think that that’d apply to qemu. I’m pretty sure that’s all open-source.

goes looking.

qemu’s been in the Debian repos since…checks sarge, which was released as a stable release in 2005.

And it was in main, not non-free, so it should have been there as an out-of-the-box enabled repo:

https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20050312T000000Z/pool/main/q/qemu/

QEMU only came out in 2003.

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

QEMU is free software originally developed by Fabrice Bellard; the first preview release was in 2003.

It looks like it was packaged in Debian unstable since 2004, though I wouldn’t recommend jumping right on unstable to a new user.

$ apt changelog qemu-system 2>/dev/null|tail -n 15

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:56:25 +0100

qemu (0.5.2-2) unstable; urgency=low

  * Fix build problem so bios.bin etc. can be found. (Closes: #237553)

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:43:00 +0100

qemu (0.5.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Initial Release. (Closes: #187407)

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Wed,  3 Mar 2004 02:18:54 +0100
Fetched 314 kB in 0s (1,431 kB/s)
$

I mean, Valve doesn’t sell games on physical media in the Steam Store either that I’m aware.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clippy

Clippit, better known as Clippy, is the default animated character in the English Windows version of Microsoft Office Assistant, an interactive user’s guide that came pre-installed with Microsoft Office bundles from 1997-2003. Due to its impractical and intrusive nature, Clippy quickly became a subject of mockery among Office users, inspiring a series of satirical images and parodies addressing its overall incompetence.

I guess we’ll see if Round 2 goes better than Round 1.

True CLI…How do you currently automate screen capture on…Linux?

Under Wayland?

$ grim

How many different tiers of YouTube are there now so Alphabet can skim off slightly higher margins from each user possible?

I’d rather have more tiers.

I’d pay for a tier where they had a no-log, no-datamining policy, which they don’t currently offer. I’m not demanding that they change their existing tiers. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are not interested in paying for that and don’t care if Google is plonking everything they do into a database. But that’s what I’d like, so I’d like to have a different tier.

I like YouTube. It has a lot of content that I like watching that I get a lot of value out of. But I don’t like having someone trying every way possible to profile me. Right now, I can’t get the first without the second.

I want to just pay up front, not pay via selling my personal data or pay via selling my eyeball time. Same way I pay for most products out there.