Part of it is not finished DRAM that was sold yet, it’s wafer capacity at the factory.

Sam Altman has promised orders for a kazillion wafers that don’t exist yet. It’s been argued this is less legitimate demand and more an effort to crimp the scaling ambitions of other competitors.

If his cheque bounces early on, the manufacturers are likely to reassign his slots to other buyers.

The manufacturers are taking a fair bit of risk though. If they aren’t getting paid before work starts, and the bubble pops in the middle, thry could end up with a lot of (partially or fully) finished wafers that they can’t just slice up and sell to Corsair and G.Skill.

I have a 7900X3D and the Peerless Assassin 120 worked well. I swapped for a Zalman CNPS20X because you could get it for next to nothing at the time; it’s not much better (the RGB fans look neat but it’s so big it doesn’t fit well in some cases and the fans are prone to chattering noises at specific speeds)

The benefit I can imagine for an AIO is that it reduces cramping around the CPU, so you can essily release RAM or the GPU slot clip. But I suspect VRM cooling suffers; some vendors made an add-on fan to compensare IIRC.

Going back to (x)nedit where it’s safe.

It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.

I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.

I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs

There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.

It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.

You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard

When they first launched, their whole main message was “it’s a cheaper cut for the devs!” Perhaps I’m being selfish, but that’s not a message that resonates to me as a buyer.

Hint: most of us don’t get hot and bothered about exactly how much margin Walmart lets Tyson take on their chicken nuggets, so trying to apply that message to games is weird.

It worked well from that perspexrive. Remember that when it started, always-on connectivity rich enough to download hundreds of megabytes was a novelty, but you could get a Slackware CD that just worked.

They did a whole WIMP BIOS design back in the Socket 7 era. AMI “WinBIOS”. I had it on a PCChips M560TG, whose most notable feature was that it cost $48 for an almost-working motherboard.

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

If only it were.

I took a coach for my last holiday. It was seven hours and $85 where a flight would have been 30 minutes and $60. I was willing to begrudge it, since this has hardly been a banner year for aviation safety in the US.

The Wifi didn’t work, sort of a dealbreaker when you’re traveling through remotest desert with no signal.

The bathroom door lock didn’t work reliably, so it was rattling all the way. Somehow I got assigned a seat next to it on both legs. At least it didn’t smell much.

They left the emergency roof exit/vent popped, a dubious choice on a trip to Las Vegas with temperatures around 40C.

The return bus broke down 15km from the destination so we had to wait sweating for a replacement.

OTOH, no TSA hassle. I still wish Amtrak was an option.

The complete silence of the powwrs that be abput the whereabouts of the lost weapon “Pluton”?

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?

There are a million guys with ideas for cars that will go 750km on a thimble-full of Fresca, robot butlers that can’t turn evil because they don’t have red LEDs in the eye positions, and 200:1 data compression as long as you never have to decompress it. They must all be looking at Altman and company and asking where their bubbles.

I sadly suspect the charm is “we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers”

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

I always figured they should have gone towards custom architecture as a product.

This would have dovetailed well with the Itanium-driven extinction of a lot of high-end architectures. If you can get one more generational upgrade for some bespoke platform running MIPS or M88k or whatever, you might pay $10k per chip instead of conpeting with commodity x86.