Will these even be useful on the second hand market, or are these chips gonna be on specialized PCBs for these machines?

If I understand aright, it’s going to be HBM, so it won’t be in DIMM form. Like, can’t just go stick it in a PC.

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Some countries have compulsory military service for all of its citizens.

North America…

While the US hasn’t had a need for peacetime conscription — its war planning has assumed that its peacetime military, especially its navy and air force, could hold off an invader for six months, long enough to train up untrained infantry from scratch – that’s not all countries in North America. I’d guess that Cuba likely has it.

checks Wikipedia

Looks like they have two years of mandatory service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Cuba

Conscription is inscribed in the 1976 Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in article 65, stating that “Defense of the socialist homeland is the greatest honor and the supreme duty of every Cuban citizen.”

Cuban nationals were required to serve under the Obligatory Military Service (SMO) system. Under this structure, it was compulsory to complete three years in military service, the militias of territorial troops, or the brigades of production and defence.[2] The SMO was reinforced by the first Law of Military service which was established in November 1963.

As of August 1991, the SMO changed to the General Military Service Law and the requirements of active military service were reduced to two years, with enlistment being obligatory between the ages of 16 and 28, however most nationals were not called to service until they were 17.

EDIT: Here’s a map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription

Mexico apparently also has it, though there it’s only a randomly-selected subset that are required to serve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Mexico

Military Service in Mexico (Spanish: Servicio Militar Nacional, or SMN) currently involves all males reaching the age of eighteen years. Selection is made by a lottery system using the following color scheme: those who draw a black ball must serve as “availability reservists”, that is, they are not required to perform any activities whatsoever and will receive their discharge card at the end of the year. Those who draw a white ball must serve “framed” which means, they must start service immediately from 8am-1pm for one year in total, until they receive the discharge card.

Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.

Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.

Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.

Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.

TECO’s kinda-sorta emacs’s parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi’s parent.

I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.

It’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.

Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name “compcache” (“compressed cache”). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]

Open-source RAM is better.

Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.

been the case for decades

One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you’re using the vlf package or similar.

TECO and ed might not. Dunno.

Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900.

If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven’t jacked up prices yet.

https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28

My first hit for “2x16gb 32gb ddr5” sorted by price is this:

https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram

Kingston Fury DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL40 RAM KF556C40BBK2-32

$100.00

They say that they have two in stock.

These guys are next lowest:

https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm

Price: $103.06

IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).

I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.

According to the YT description, it was inspired by the comic that OP posted, even.

I was gonna say that he might simply not have been around when Red Alert 2 came out, but

https://www.whitepages.com/name/Samuel-Sott-Axon/Los-Angeles-CA/Pl8a1drMk8b

40s Age Range

So he’s gotta be born no later than 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert_2

Release: NA: October 25, 2000

So he couldn’t have been younger than 15 at the game’s release (and could have been as old as 25).

That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won’t have been born when it was released. Can’t just assume any more.

Where can I see more of this “Corvette man?”

checks

https://www.patreon.com/thebacklot

I had a Spanish teacher who required students to use only Spanish in class, including when called upon. However, she was okay with the response no se (“I don’t know.”) After hearing several other students say that a zillion times as a universally-acceptable response, I will never, ever forget that sentence.

Sounds like it’d most-likely just pass through the system.

https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/what-to-know-silica-gel

Is Silica Gel Toxic?

Silica gel is non-toxic but it is a choking hazard for young children.

However, in some rare instances, manufacturers coat silica gel in cobalt chloride, a toxic compound. Eating cobalt chloride-coated silica gel will likely cause nausea and vomiting. Cobalt chloride is a moisture indicator that is dark blue when dry and pink when saturated with water. Cobalt chloride-coated silica gel isn’t usually used for consumer products.

What Happens if You Eat Silica Gel?

Children can mistake silica gel for food or candy and eat either the silica gel or the entire packet. Adults sometimes mistake silica gel packets for the salt or sugar packets commonly found in takeout food.

Accidentally eating desiccant silica gel shouldn’t make you or your child sick because it’s chemically inert, which means that it won’t break down in the body and cause poisoning. Most of the time, silica gel will pass through your body without any harmful effects.‌

But this doesn’t mean that eating silica gel is entirely without risk. Desiccant silica gel is a choking hazard. Also, if eaten in large quantities, desiccant silica gel may cause intestinal obstruction. This is why manufacturers often label the packets with “Do not eat” or “Throw away after using”.

In rare cases, other toxic components (e.g., cobalt chloride and strong alkali) are present in the silica gel packets. Therefore, it is important to check for any symptoms (e.g., vomiting and stomach pains) after the silica gel has been eaten.

I mean, they did make a lot of money, but they also had an extremely high valuation.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/pe-ratio

NVIDIA PE ratio as of November 20, 2025 is 48.45.

Something like 20 is typical for a mature company. Tech companies have, in the past, often had higher ratios, but that’s based on their expectation to grow a lot rapidly, and expecting NVidia to dramatically grow from their current — already very high — valuation is asking a lot.

If NVidia were a small tech company that was doing well and clearly had a lot of market to expand into rapidly, that would be one thing.

I think that in general, the market has been pretty good to NVidia. Their share price is up 31.22% since the start of the year. 1,247% over the past five years.

There’s Mono. I don’t know what portion of .NET compatibility issues that addresses in 2025.