Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
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.
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:
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.
That said, the Steam Machine only ships with DDR5-5600 with poor timings, so there may be more performance gains from installing faster RAM, if indeed any tuning can be done.
I mean, far be it from me to get in the way of anyone’s hobby. There are people who have hacked all kinds of hardware.
But…the point of the Steam Machine is to be a pre-packaged, off-the-shelf plug-it-in-and-play console. From a practical gaming standpoint…if you’re going to be doing something like modifying the system at that level, why wouldn’t you just roll your own system from scratch?
I mean, if we were talking, say, a closed console, sure, I get it. If you could get some kind of edge in playing Game X that only runs on that console, that’d be unique.
But, I mean…this is the PC. It’s an open platform. You can just, you know, build a faster system if you want a faster system, and plenty of vendors will sell you one if you want, or you can build one as a DIY project. My desktop will greatly outperform a Steam Machine. Costs more, but it also is gonna cost more to rip the memory out of a Steam Machine and put faster stuff in.
Like…if I were doing a critique of the Steam Machine, I’d expect it to be something like “what is the user experience like versus the Playstation when just plugging it into a television and setting it up”, not “if I replace hardware in the thing, how fast can I get it running?”
Why does the same cost less in Kazakhstan for example but it’s overpriced in the US for American players
There is an optimal price for a market to produce the biggest return for the publisher.
If I make a widget and then sell it for one cent above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell a lot of units. But I won’t make much profit on each.
If I make a widget and then sell it for ten thousand dollars a pop above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell few units. But I will make more profit on each.
There is a point where a seller maximizes their return. They’ll try to price their product at that point.
An input to that price at which one maximizes their return, as @Hapankaali@lemmy.world points out, is the price elasticity of demand in each market.
People in Kazakhstan are not as well-off as people in the US. They’re more price sensitive, will just not be willing or able to buy something at a given price than people in the US. That means that that optimal price for the seller to set is going to be higher in the US than in Kazahkstan.
What you’ll probably also see — because a digital download of a video game has a marginal cost of production that’s basically zero — is prices slowly decreasing over time, approaching zero. Once a publisher has sold it to everyone willing to buy it at a given price, they’ll probably lower the price to try to sell it to more people who wouldn’t have bought it at the higher price. It’s why you can often get old games sold at lower prices — for example, Doom and Doom II are currently selling on Steam together for $3.99, much less (especially in inflation-adjusted terms) than they originally sold for. So down the line, that game may be selling for less, in both the US and Kazakhstan.
For anyone else who, like myself, doesn’t know what a BC-250 is:
AMD BC-250
A PS5 APU’s second life as a budget Linux gaming PC
Originally built for crypto mining, these cut-down PS5 APUs were headed for the scrap heap. Then Linux driver support arrived — and everything changed. Now they’re surprisingly capable mid-range gaming PCs with 16GB GDDR6 that double as local AI inference machines.
I mean, you can definitely get drives. I bought a LibreDrive-flashed USB 4k/UHD Blu-Ray drive last month, because I wanted to (legally) play UHD Blu-Ray movies on Linux — I don’t know how much longer they’ll be around, and the quality is generally higher than streamed video. I don’t think that there will be a successor physical video format to UHD Blu-Ray, that this is basically the end of the line. But just saying…the infrastructure to use the optical media directly is not generally there any more, I think, on most out-of-box PCs. That’s an additional barrier if you want to sell the stuff in that media format.
goes to skim Dell desktops
Yeah, it doesn’t look like they have optical drives these days.
Most laptops don’t have an optical drive any more. I haven’t looked at desktops.
You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but…
Audio optical media sales peaked a long time back and have massively declined since then.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
Quarter-century back that they peaked.
Successor physical audio formats haven’t caught on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRC_(file_format)
For time-synchronized lyrics.
It looks like my Scandroid audio files from Bandcamp have embedded non-synchronized lyrics.
$ metaflac --list *08*.flac
[snip]
comment[12]: UNSYNCEDLYRICS=Beware the shadows of the drones
Destruction wrapped in pretty silicone
They’ve taken everyone I’ve known
And now I walk these empty streets alone
In my memory the past is fading
The future has been redesigned
It’s hard to focus on it when I’m running out of time
Surrounded by streetlights at midnight
My destination is unknown
I walk these empty streets alone
Digital dreams thrive in the moonlight
I’m only flesh, circuit and bone
I walk these empty streets alone
Beware the faces of the clones
Deception sent from Neo-Tokyo
They’ve erased everyone I’ve known
And still I walk these empty streets alone
I don’t know how widespread that is.
Note that lyrics are themselves copyrighted works, regarding simply sharing them. That is, if you want to create, say, “Lyricsnet, the new Fediverse service” or something like that, you may attract attention from IP owners.
I think that we’re going to be multiple generations of HMDs away from enough resolution to do text as well as today’s monitors, unless someone gives up on having it projected into 3D space.
There was an article from someone critiquing it a while back, talking about some of the issues with the Apple Vision Pro (a rather expensive, high-resolution HMD) as a monitor replacement.
https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/
https://kguttag.com/2023/08/09/apple-vision-pro-part-5b-more-on-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/
Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.
Web development is now especially notorious for completely disregarding accessibility, user device capabilities, and regulations. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern developers.
goes to archive.org’s copy of Yahoo from the golden era of 2006
https://web.archive.org/web/20061212011659/http://www.yahoo.com/
Why miss out?
To see all the new Yahoo! home page has to offer, please upgrade to a more recent browser.Supported browsers include:
Internet Explorer 7 optimized by Yahoo!
Firefox 1.5
Safari 2.0
Opera 8.5
On the negatives:
- Online abuse: AI is fueling the spread of sexual abuse material and sexually explicit deepfakes, with women and children most at risk.
Eh. I don’t see this as that fundamental. I mean, Photoshop lowered the bar too to making synthetic pornography, to slapping a head on someone else’s body. The ability to do image warping allows resizing body parts in a convincing-at-first-glance look, and I remember when that was a fad. It just doesn’t seem to have changed society all that much in the past. It may be that people just stop caring much about pornographic images of a particular person. I’m not saying that it won’t have an impact, but I have a hard time seeing a scenario where it really deeply alters society.
- Disinformation: AI can generate false information that is as convincing as the truth, undermining trust in public debate and democracy.
Yeah, that’s a bigger issue.
It is not one that is impossible to deal with. It was a situation that we had to deal with prior to recording technology. And there were problems — like accusing politicians of going to one place and saying one thing in their speeches, and then to another and saying something else was a real thing in the US back when the only record we have was from newspapers printing summaries of what they said. We had solutions for that era, like people who would put their reputation on the line to attest to various facts. We could do it again. But we’ve benefited from having easy technology that made it pretty easy to make a credible record cheaply and easily of all sorts of things, audio recording, photographs, and video recording, and the bar for that might rise.
It was always going to happen one day, whether-or-not neural networks were involved. Computer graphics and audio synthesis have only gotten more-accessible and convincing over the years.
I think that one new issue is the ability to synthesize propaganda using the bandwagon effect on social media. That is, it used to be just financially impractical to have a zillion people online trying to influence people. But…if chatbots drastically lower the cost to that, that could be a real issue, and one that we haven’t had to deal with before, ever.
Crime: Criminals are using AI to carry out cyberattacks, fraud and social engineering scams.
Yup. Some of this we can fix, and is because we have outdated authentication mechanisms (like recognizing someone’s voice on a phone because the phone network has basically no authentication mechanism). Some of it is going to be harder. I think that this is largely not fundamental problems, but some things are going to have to change.
- Mental health: Some AI systems can reinforce harmful beliefs or behaviours, leading to mental health crises, including suicide.
Ehhh. I mean, yes, but so can all sorts of other things. Sitting alone watching TV all the time. I remember distress when the Internet became more widely-available about how people could enter into harmful forums. And we’ve always had crackpots with weird ideas out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
Ray didn’t need AI to develop his theories.
Honestly, I’m kinda more concerned about stuff like cults and scams, cases where someone is actively attempting to maliciously manipulate people than “random person goes and spends time talking to a chatbot and feels that it reinforces his crackpot views”.
- Loss of control: As AI becomes more autonomous, experts warn it could become harder to monitor and govern without stronger safeguards.
Yeah, this is a big one. The Friendly AI problem is a hard one. I don’t know if there are practical solutions, not for self-improving advanced intelligences, which we are certainly going to try to build.
- Environmental impact: The energy-hungry data centres which power AI are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions which leads to global warming.
Eh, yeah, but this is basically the same as our existing energy problems. Like, we were already emitting an unsustainable level of carbon dioxide emissions. The answer has to be shifting to different generation methods. The answer was never going to be “we keep burning coal and whatnot and everyone just reduces energy usage enough on a per capita basis to keep human-driven carbon dioxide emissions at a sustainable level”.
But you’re not selling that as a service.
No, but…is your concern the ability to run a commercial service involving AI compute? I mean, there are certainly a ton of startup companies doing that. Heck, there are people selling access to their GPUs for parallel compute on vast.ai.
I’m just saying that I don’t believe that the ability to run neural nets on parallel compute hardware is something that is going to be terribly exclusive over time, and certainly isn’t today something limited to someone with a net worth of a billion dollars.
As I’ve commented before, we’d need a lot more RAM than exists in the world today if everyone’s going to do it. Like, AI companies are buying more 2026 RAM production than the rest of the world combined, on the order of two-thirds of global production. If they get something like 100% capacity utilization of their hardware, and a typical user doing local AI compute would get something like 1% capacity utilization of their hardware, then we’d need about a hundred times that much memory to let everyone run comparable stuff locally. That’s a pretty stupendously large amount of memory. But if, over time, there’s demand for it, I expect that it’ll happen. We’ve scaled up parts of the computer industry by orders of magnitude in the past.
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.