Debian… Gonna go out on a limb and say nobody uses debian on a personal machine

All of my personal machines run Debian.

EDIT: Well…I have Termux installed on an Android device as well. I guess that could be considered a Linux distro.

Eh, this one’s fixable, because you only have a few sources of legit imagery, and it’s all contemporary and digital. Just have Google Earth render the image server-side and add a cryptographic signature to any legit satellite images that someone saves.

You can have AI-generated satellite imagery and image-is-proof satellite images coexisting. Can’t do that for most images, but for this particular niche, you can.

Similar to HBM, HBF relies on multiple memory dies that have been stacked together, but instead of DRAM, it utilizes NAND flash to increase storage capacity.

What’s the lifetime on the flash memory in such a setup? I mean, if you’re constantly shoveling 3TB/sec into said flash memory, even if you have a lot of memory behind that interface, I’d think that it’d have a limited life.

thinks

Maybe if the stuff is rarely-written? Like, say you use HBF for static data that you mostly just read, like the model edge weights, and HBM-accessed DRAM just for the dynamic stuff?

reads more

Oh. Maybe this is really more a replacement for M.2 or whatever is currently used for flash on compute servers, not as an HBM alternative:

Its primary role will be to complement capacity limits rather than outright replace HBM. LLMs can be processed through HBM, which is immediately required for computing, with HBF storing data in a larger capacity.

Might eliminate the need to load a model from flash to DRAM, if it can just be used directly from flash.

considers

That might legitimately reduce demand for DRAM. Like, a lot of AI DRAM usage is (presently, though might change for more-advances AI) for data that doesn’t change much. Like, you’re only putting it in DRAM so that the parallel compute hardware has fast access to it, not because it needs to be written to much.

EDIT: It also might provide parallel compute manufacturers a way to price-discriminate between more-price-sensitive GPU (gaming) users and AI (often much less price-sensitive) users via a route other than capping on-card DRAM for gaming users. It’d kind of suck for gaming users if texture memory gets capped because GPU makers don’t want to cannibalize their AI market. If you make your parallel compute cards have a ton of onboard flash, that’s something that gaming users don’t care about — they need their memory to be mutable — but AI users do.

Honestly, GNU/Linux isn’t better today from a user standpoint. I mean, Linux has the technical subsystems to sandbox software, yes — like, the move to Wayland makes isolating graphical software possible, where X11 imposed major limitations on one’s ability to do that. Various containerizing systems exist. But the typical software package distributed via Steam, say, in 2026, can see the filesystem as a whole.

Like, I can hack something up with something like firejail using that functionality that may-or-may-not work for a given game on a given system, but that’s not a real, universal solution for users. My mother is not going to do that.

Mobile OSes at least isolate most apps from most of the filesystem and some sensors, and provide some level of reasonably-accessible transparency into what apps can do. They still have their own issues that annoy me, like software normally being able to phone home with what information it does get. But that’s still way more isolation than a user who is playing a video game on GNU/Linux is getting.

Global, always-generally-available connectivity brought us a lot of nice things, but it’s also come with a lot of not-so-great things, and some of the not-so-great things is a loss of privacy and a loss of control over the things that we own. :-(

If you’ve already played Ace Combat 7, and are not yet familiar with it, you might look into Project Wingman.

I mean, that’s really true of products in general.

I think that there are some real consumer law issues to answer where someone buys a product and then a manufacturer can control the product subsequent to the purchase. Like, say I buy a BMW with the expectation that I am not going to be seeing ads, based on the way it acts at the time that I bought it. At that point, I’m locked into owning that BMW. Then the manufacturer degrades my experience, maybe to the point where I no longer consider the vehicle to be the one I wanted.

Like, what is my remedy here? If the vehicle has OTA updates, I can never know what it’s going to be doing down the line, so I can’t make an informed decision. Having informed consumers is one of the basic requirements for markets to be efficient.

Maybe I could say “Well, that’s just a case of let the buyer beware. We’ll rely on reputation…some auto manufacturers will piss off consumers and those will be avoided”. But…if someone doesn’t buy cars that frequently, that’s a long iteration cycle.

I’m actually more concerned about video games. Like, if I’m a publisher, once I sell a video game, I don’t normally have more revenue coming in from it. But if I do have the ability to update that video game down the line. And I can update it to go harvesting user data, which turns it into a revenue stream. A lot of video game publishers go defunct on a regular basis or sell IP or whatnot, so there, even the “rely on reputation” route is more questionable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Xbox_360-only_games

This isn’t a list of “on XBox 360, but not PC” games, since there could be games that came out on multiple consoles but not on the PC, but it’s probably a reasonable approximation to get a list of what games might be involved.

I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the ceiling for a long time.

I’m a little annoyed by a local sandwich shop having their ordering kiosk — which had a camera added — recognize me and start recommending things based on my prior purchases there.

Now when I order at a kiosk, if I see something that looks like a camera, I put my hand over it.

Based on past history of various VR HMD makers, for at least Linux users, I’d bet yes.

But…that’s assuming that the user is going to get an HMD in the first place. Like, one “option” is to just not use an HMD, just use a traditional monitor and forego VR-only titles.

The limiting factor is not raw materials to make memory chips, but the production facilities to convert said materials to a finished product.

It takes about four to five years to roll out a new fab from scratch, even if you are an existing manufacturer.

It’s absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California…

I do think it’s possible that some of them won’t delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law

That’s not failure to comply with the law if you don’t actually live in California.

People have a legal location of residence in the US.

If you want to establish legal residency in a state, you’re typically looking at doing something like spending the majority of the year there.

EDIT: I’d also be pretty confident, though the article doesn’t talk about it, that California won’t normally have jurisdiction for California state law unless a data broker is doing business in California, and that that will also be a constraining factor. Like, if a data broker company is only doing business in, say, Russia, the US will not enforce rulings against them regarding California state law in general.

Well, optimization takes dev time. You can use dev time for other things too — debugging, improving performance on systems with enough memory, adding features, improving security. Or not use the dev time and cost less. So it’s a tradeoff.

I bet you could strip it down. Like, replace Windows Explorer as the Windows shell with emacs or something.

Ehh. It’d kill browser “search text” functionality, as well as Reader Mode on Firefox.

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!