Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer

To be fair, most languages end up using English words for stuff that’s tech related. For example, I’ve been learning Italian and actually laughed out loud when I learned that the Italian word for coach (which seems to be used for both buses and trains) is “Pullman” it gets even more obvious when it’s a computer-related technology

Probably next year I might try to learn a bit of German because I keep encountering Germans writing in German on various parts of the internet and it would be fun to join the club (plus I’d love to visit Germany sometime so that would remove one barrier for sure)

A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her

When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community

Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.

So honest question, what is everyone’s hopes with the increase in Linux desktop use?

Like when I think about it the only thing I really care about is that I have decent hardware/driver support and holdouts for anti-cheat give up on requiring other operating systems (mostly so that my wife and eldest child stop complaining that I can’t play Fortnite with them) as well as other random stuff that flat-out blocks use with Linux and requires either extra configuration or to keep a spare computer around with Windows.

Basically I hope that Linux can be where MacOS was about a decade ago, a second platform that vendors are aware of and will put in some amount of effort in to support (and will be clear about limitations/lack of support otherwise) and it won’t be as weird to employers or schools if you have a preference for the platform

For an rail network that runs 24/7 they’re going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That’s a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.

I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it’s been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say “oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!” (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)

This is the real consideration, depending on your career so far, such a role might be easier just left off the resume. But they did say it was an internship so they likely have no good career experience to speak for. Personally, I’d aim for purely talking about the experience and just say that “the internship ended”

Flying out of Madison recently I saw so many people bringing cases of Spotted Cow as their stowed carry-on. There’s a store right by the gate with a pile of cases for exactly this purpose of course

I love the one time they didn’t like the hard drive expansion bay with vents in my laptop but decided it’s okay because it can’t be opened by hand but didn’t care about the screwdrivers in my carry-on bag that I forgot about which would allow me to access the expansion bay in flight if desired

Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don’t have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation

There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there’s these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There’s been some nasty ones too

The unavoidable conclusion in today’s world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can’t be cleanly turned off and back on, it’s wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how “yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don’t hear hissing after drilling”) during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it’s extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable

As someone who just lost one grandparent to dementia and has another entering treatment (and in the process of being moved into a care facility) he definitely has dementia or a similar cognitive decline. If you watch him now when he’s publicly speaking and compare it to his 2016 campaign he’s just not the same person anymore. He’s now seeming to not remember what he was to be speaking about, going on random unexpected tangents, needs to be led around by someone else when anywhere other than the White House (and may also need to be led around within the White House, but that’s not as visible) occasionally walks completely a different direction from where he should be going, and he’s lost his talent for remembering names, mixing people’s names with associations when he speaks (“Tim Apple” of Apple CEO Tim Cook, or “Tim Minnesota” of Tim Walz) or occasionally naming someone who hasn’t held the position in a very long time, looking directly at the solar eclipse while the eclipse glasses were in his hand (or pocket? I can’t remember now) its all really clear dementia behavior. Also the tests he’s described taking, he describes them exactly as coherently and in an extremely similar manner to my grandmother’s descriptions of probably the same tests. She also knew she had an MRI (and named the wrong thing it was for) and kept saying it was tomorrow for a week, which is pretty comparable to how Trump has been talking about his MRIs.

Like, for a normal person in an assisted living facility, I’d say with his mix of ailments he might not even make it until the end of the year, but he has quite frankly the best access to healthcare of anyone in the entire world. We’re going to watch this poor man regress until there’s no sign of him left because his team refuses to publicly admit that their guy is dying. Honestly it feels like elder abuse, letting him act like a toddler on the world stage (which is what dementia does, its like the person regresses in age) instead of publicly announcing his decline and how his team will be reviewing his work and slowly taking over his duties as he becomes less capable, letting him decline not in the spotlight but in privacy. It’ll be an interesting next few years for sure, because I’ll be shocked if he survives to the end of his presidency

Ah so Chessboxing basically!

Hey it’s never too late to get things better under control! My parents only just started that journey and they’re old enough to be grandparents

Honestly the questions you’re posing require a level of market analysis that could fill an entire white paper and be sold for way more money than I want to think about. Its a level of market analysis I don’t want to dive into. My gut instinct from having worked in the tech industry, working with datacenters and datacenter hardware at large companies is that the AI industry will contract significantly when the bubble pops. I’m sure I could find real data to support this prediction but the level of analysis that would require and the hours of work are simply more than it’s worth for an internet comment.

You have factors including what hardware is being deployed to meet AI bubble demand, how the networking might be setup differently for AI compared to general GPU compute, who is deploying what hardware, what the baseline demand for GPU compute is if you simulate no present AI bubble, etc. etc. it’s super neat data analysis but I ain’t got the time nor appetite for that right now

That’s super interesting! I didn’t know other languages handled side thoughts better!