lti wrote on 2026-01-31, 02:40:

The problem for most of us is the cost of a basic (for modern software bloat) 16GB of RAM. People with more modest needs are more likely to have a smaller budget at the same time, so RAM prices are going to hit them harder.

For modest needs the small budget person will currently pick up 8 GB of DDR4 or 16 GB of DDR3 for less than 30 euros second hand. For double that they get double the RAM.

I'm so happy I updated my Cyrix 486 to 64MB RAM last summer. Future proofing ahead of time is definitely worth it.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-28, 15:08:

Few people would admit this but the reason these things don't happen to the Linux kernel is because there is a tyrannical quasi-autistic Finnish guy obsessively making sure it stays up to his standards. I don't think Microsoft has anything equivalent anywhere down the chain of command where the Windows codebase is concerned.

🤣!

Wasn't Linux criticized at some point for being a bunch of cheap hacks that just happen to work?

UCyborg wrote on 2026-01-31, 14:17:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2026-01-28, 15:08:

Few people would admit this but the reason these things don't happen to the Linux kernel is because there is a tyrannical quasi-autistic Finnish guy obsessively making sure it stays up to his standards. I don't think Microsoft has anything equivalent anywhere down the chain of command where the Windows codebase is concerned.

🤣!

Wasn't Linux criticized at some point for being a bunch of cheap hacks that just happen to work?

Well it was like that, then he let the reins looser and it's been a rodeo for backward compatibility for the last 7 years.... and linux forums can't get it through their thick heads that just because a problem was discussed at length 2 years ago, and had an easy solution, that that solution was invalidated about 2 months later, so YES I am asking this question again. It will continue to be a question with something that gets broken every damn release.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-01-30, 19:41:

It's a trap. […]
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vvbee wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

So list your own uses for the hardware and we can compare.

It's a trap.

Joke aside I can already tell you are in the AI bro camp, likely a vibe coder or slop creator pretending the LLM is real AI.

All AI is thus far is a hardware whore sucking up vast quantities of hardware, power and money with zero ROI.

It's interesting that vvbee is the only AI bro I've seen that doesn't try to tell us that LLM outputs are 100% accurate and should never be questioned. On the other hand, they're saying the rest of the bullshit, like recommending 8GB of RAM immediately after I said that software has bloated to the point where 16GB is the minimum for simple web browsing. My parents' computers both have 8GB of RAM (a laptop running Windows 11 and a desktop running Lubuntu 24.04), and they both run out of RAM and hit virtual memory (with at least Firefox freezing and sometimes the full system) with nothing open except Firefox with only one tab.

Your parents struggle to browse the web because a $30-60 RAM upgrade would hit them hard, yet you have 64 GB of RAM in your personal computer just because you could and you work in tech running 'serious simulations'. The priorities aren't adding up here.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-01-31, 14:17:

Wasn't Linux criticized at some point for being a bunch of cheap hacks that just happen to work?

That must be why it's so unstable and isn't widely used in high reliability environments.

Both Windows and Linux suuuuuuuck.

AmigaOS laughs at both of them. 😁

I must have come across what Theo de Raadt supposedly said over 2 decades ago (didn't know until now the quote is that old).

https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-u … l_0616theo.html

Well, my previous smartphone, when it ran Android 4.4, in months before replacing the OS with newer Android 7 based LineageOS, FSCK would always find errors on /data partition. Couple of months ago, when I had to use the reset button after Pale Moon hung and somehow rendered everything unresponsive, KUbuntu's partition was rendered unbootable and had to run FSCK from live USB. Every once in a while, my car's infotainment would hang and reboot. It runs Linux beneath.

So I've seen enough to have my doubts about Linux being a savior, although it's a question how much the kernel is at fault.

I also wonder, is Git really that good or is it popular just because Linus came up with it? Though AFAIK, those old versions before another developer took over were horrible and difficult to use.

The whole Internet pretty much runs on Linux, so I don't think the robustness of the kernel is into question. Maybe if some of the old Unix variants had gone with a smarter business model without the ridiculous costs and vendor lock-in bullshit they could have prevailed, but that wasn't the case. And I would never trust anything Windows on a critical server.

Linux on consumer desktops/laptops is a different scenario though, it's nice that there are so many distros to choose from, but I think it's difficult for many non-technical users when you have a gazillion options and switching between one and the other requires you to learn slightly different things to do basic stuff. The lack of support for certain Windows-specific software is also a big deal, but I think stuff like Wine/Proton have really gotten things to a point where it's not longer a show stopper.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-01-31, 18:44:

I also wonder, is Git really that good or is it popular just because Linus came up with it? Though AFAIK, those old versions before another developer took over were horrible and difficult to use.

Git is good because it addressed the weaknesses of the previous de-facto version control systems (such as Subversion, and CVS before it). It makes easier to keep things under control when you have different teams working in parallel on different initiatives of the same codebase. Anyone who experienced big merges with lots of conflicts during the SVN/CVS days can probably tell you it wasn't fun to deal with.

I don't have a grudge with Git, just the sceptic in me wonders. My workplace still uses the freaking Subversion. Doesn't look like it will change until older generations die out, if the company will even survive until then (why anyone still buys from it is anyone's guess, but at least I don't have to stress about looking for another job, for now).

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:57:

There is already clickbait circulating with the “new Ai chip” million times faster 1/10 the power. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:11:

its interesting to see that games are no longer the most demanding tasks a graphics card can undertake

There is already clickbait circulating with the “new Ai chip” million times faster 1/10 the power.

All other methods obsolete .

See if the datacenters getting built end up as ewaste before construction finishes

I know what you mean but Im not so sure.
AI is a good solution looking for a problem at the minute.
Thats why people are so confused by it. You only have to read some of the threads on this forum to see the confusion about it. Its polarised.

Generative AI is not a solution. It is a problem. And the solution is to remove it.

I am not affected by the price hikes because I'm still happy with DDR3 and I am building a DDR1 machine.
But when AI is finally finished munching RAM the prices won't go down as low as what they were just like other kinds of shortages have happened.
The thing i worry about is inflation.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-02-13, 17:24:

Generative AI is not a solution. It is a problem. And the solution is to remove it.

Yes. Absolutely.

zapbuzz wrote on 2026-02-13, 17:41:

The thing i worry about is inflation.

“Money in the bank” has three properties:
- It’s not money,
- It’s not yours,
- It’s not there.

Money is created out of nothing at zero cost by banks whenever money is borrowed, whether by governments or citizens.

Say a government borrows a billion units of fiat at 5% for two years with a garden variety bond. The billion units are created out of nothing if borrowed at the reserve bank, with a hundred million units of additional fiat that must be paid back in interest during the life of the bond. Problem is, that hundred million units owed back don’t exist (yet) and the only way to get them is to borrow more.

That is why the US is 38 trillion units of fiat in debt, with an economy that turns over somewhere in the twenties of trillions annually.

This can can only be kicked down the road.

That is also why the system does not reward hard work. Hard work only makes you tired. Ownership is rewarded. Owning assets positions you to benefit from the rising tide of fiat.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-02-13, 17:24:

Generative AI is not a solution. It is a problem. And the solution is to remove it.

What's the plan to remove generative AI from the world? I didn't even realize radicalized consumerism was a thing, but of course it has been.

st31276a wrote on 2026-02-15, 13:12:

Money is created out of nothing at zero cost by banks whenever money is borrowed, whether by governments or citizens.

...

That is also why the system does not reward hard work. Hard work only makes you tired. Ownership is rewarded. Owning assets positions you to benefit from the rising tide of fiat.

one quality money has that is sometimes overlooked when comparing it with non government backed currencies is precisely that its government backed, setting aside everything else around economics and alignment with some representation of reality, it means someone will turn up and use force to support the currency (whether its tax, money supply, contract etc). Its that which means, in most relatively stable economies, the price of ram works along the notions of supply and demand and we can talk about the price of ram, while in a volatile non backed currency if the currency itself could shift around rapidly we might even end up talking about the ram as the more stable anchor upon which to assess the currency

also, yes indeed - owning is key. Own RAM manufacturing and times are 'good' when demand rises (conversely, if the market collapsed the owner suddenly ceases to be "rich" and can quickly end up in debt, not always an advantage)

That is the practicality of it, yes. We don’t count off gold pieces or bitcoin fractions at the grocery market.

However, we know that stability is biased in a way to inflate over time. It is not a good store of value.

Therefore, owning assets is key, as assets tend to suck up some of the newly created money even before it works through the economy, bidding up the price of goods and services.

But volatility is a thing, therefore, it is a long plan. Assets are best accumulated, it is a sad day when they must be sold for whatever reason 😀

https://wccftech.com/western-digital-has-no-m … acity-left-out/
I bought 13x 26TB WD drives (last year) instead of Seagate for my home server after only using Seagate for years. No issues.
Had to purchase 4x Seagate 30TB drives for one of my NAS for offsite backup storage.
I'll be good for quite awhile since I just freed up 30TB of dedupe data (My backups aren't dedupe but my Dedupe datastore on my server is so no diff there) and I'll be slowly going through my 80+TB Dedupe datastore so should be able to free up some more but nothing that drastic.
Currently down to 400GB free out of 80+ TB on my Synology NAS after clearing out that 30TB but at least it's all current now. Previously only had my Games backed up on another NAS that doesn't go offsite while the Synology NAS hasn't been kept up to date for quite awhile due to being out of space. Going to purposely not buy drives so I'm forced to clean it up but it's going to take a lot of time sorting through versions of games since asshole devs no longer want to version their games (In a lot of games they use the game engine version in the file properties WTF? so you have to start the game to identify the version and I don't use game launchers)
The only hangup will be when a HD dies which is rare, hopefully warranties are honored with non refurb drives.

I am continuing my homelab project with some ... obsolete... parts.

I recently was gifted an MSI Z97A SLI Krait Edition, with an OLD i5, and 8GB of (DDR3) RAM. It has 2 16x PCIE slots, which will be adequate for the SAS HBAs I need to stuff in it...
It's completely underwhelming for this role, and needs more RAM to properly handle the disk compression and other tasks I want to make use of on my old NetApp SAS shelves... But given THE PREVAILING CIRCUMSTANCES, it's what I have and can afford until conditions improve.

I have some spinning rust I can use, along with a "It's nearing its end of life" cast-off 128gb NVMe drive from work. (It went on my 'To be disposed of' pile after I replaced it with a proper WD Blue NVMe drive before the AI craze made everything 5000% more expensive, or straight up unobtanium) That should be enough to throw some "Swap" at the problem, even though this is very much unideal.

With any luck, once I get my fancy cables tomorrow, I can at least turn everything on for the first time...

We'll see.