Merry Christmas to you, too, and to all that read this.

A relevant verse about a sometimes stressful day:

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.

- Matthew 6:34

What a lovely hit of nostalgia on this cold winter morning. Thanks for sharing this, and thanks to the people who made it. Cruising through Besaid Village and Ironforge brought back some strong memories. I could hear the music in my head even though the room was silent.

Wow, I did not expect to feel the things I did flying through Ironforge.

So, you say that AI has made you "ridiculously faster", but then admit you've always been terrible at estimating how long something would take?

I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories.

All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.

Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.

Hopefully this blows over in a few years and you’re right and I’m just catastrophizing.

One way or another. Either the AI stuff cools off, or the RAM people spin up more fabs.

Well there's like 4 RAM manufacturers, so probably they will spin up new fabs but continue to collude to keep prices high.

They were previously colluding into the most profitable production volume. If demand stays high, the most profitable volume increases.

That means that yes, it will probably by more expensive than before this raise, but no, not nearly as much as today.

They already said they aren't going to increase supply, most likely because they think the AI bubble will pop and they'd be stuck holding the bag.

Businesses occasionally change their mind in response to market conditions.

Yh, my moderately capable machine is from 8 years ago and had already waited for an upgrade. Was going to be this Black Friday. Crabcakes.

There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses

I can afford it. Other people cannot, and the hobby is driven by a market existing for games. If newer people don’t enter the hobby as others die out, it fades away.

The silver lining could be that game developers spend more time on actual gameplay, and less time on chasing graphical fidelity.

Silksong is playable on an 8 year old Nintendo Switch.

Yeah. Thanks for trying to keep me positive.

Hopefully this all calms down eventually. But it's hard not to feel like shit in this situation.

I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.

The prices are wild tho.

I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL

It’s frustrating that it’s been one thing after the other, seemingly aimed directly at the thing I enjoy most.

> In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.

This is like saying "Spotify's subscriber count grew by 800% over the last 10 years. Music is doing better than ever!"

If the complaint was about access to music, then yes, that would valid. Which seemed to be the complaint implied regarding RAM as it related to PC gaming.

> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.

What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?

What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.

Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.

They didn't mess up Valve yet :)

Try buying GTA San Andreas on Steam - if you didn't buy it before some cutoff date a few years ago, all you can get is the shit AI textures "remaster".

Steam is a powerful force, and I applaud them for staying private and not IPO'ing - but their founders won't be around forever (hell Gabe, please transfer Steam into some sort of public-good trust or whatever, or have provisions in your will making it impossible for whomever inherits the company to enshittify), and sadly even they can't beat down on the studios too hard lest they end up like Netflix.

It's not exactly Valve's fault what Rockstar has decided to do with sales of their games.

secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.

And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.

>Is there religious DRAM?

RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C

If only this were the case.

Isn't every distro a custom distro, by definition?

Anyways, I get that this is a "risk" to consider, but installing a new distro isn't so bad that it should prevent one from trying and using a currently extant distro if it works for them.

I'm not sure I'd define the atomic Fedora variants as "distros" in the traditional sense.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Bazzite, Bluefin, etc, are basically just Dockerfiles that use Atomic Fedora as the base image.

So you are basically getting a pre-built docker container that is "Fedora + various configs added on top", and then you are booting that docker image.

Since it's just a container file, anyone could theoretically just fork the Bazzite repo, make some changes to the Dockerfile, then push it to github + let github actions build a custom docker image.

So is that custom docker image a distro? Some would say yes, others would say no.

Interesting. So Bazzite could be, theoretically, remade as just a NixOS configuration file.

Ironically, I'm considering installing Bazzite alongside NixOS because it's proven to be nearly impossible to run SteamVR properly with how Steam is packaged

From what I’ve seen so far from people I know who run Valve Indexes, Linux SteamVR performance is pretty poor compared with Monado+OpenComposite. Hopefully this situation changes with the release of the Frame, in which case I (and likely others) will be revamping the SteamVR package and NixOS modules as Monado may not fully support it for some time.

Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.

Dropping back here to say that I have been playing around with Monado + OpenComposite + WlxOverlay and while it's been plenty janky, it has actually usable performance when it works.

Thanks for the information~

They mean "custom" as "pre-configured to do <X>" where X is gaming. Generally most distributions are not pre-configured outside of a general suite of standard applications.

haha, is Windows a custom distro? is it going away anytime soon?

I mostly use Ubuntu for my gaming PCs but I put Bazzite on my living room PC and it works a treat. It’s much more of a console-like experience and kind of gets out of the way. It also works better with Steam Remote Play.

Give it a shot, not like it costs anything!

Same, it’s been great on living room PC for a console like low maintenance experience

I just don't see the point in installing a version manager specifically for the JDK. It's fine to have multiple installed, and at least on Debian-likes you have the built in update-java-alternatives method to switch between them.

On macOS I wrote my own 9-line Zsh function that lists the JDKs available and sets JAVA_HOME.

In containers you'll never switch at all, just install whatever you want and be done with it.

ETA: I see in another comment someone said this doesn't work for things that aren't OpenJDK. But I've yet to run into a situation where I'd want to install anything except OpenJDK. That said, I think update-java-alternatives would work with them if they provide deb files to install themselves.

The update-java-alternatives tool is suitable for adjusting the JDK for everything at once, but it lacks the ease of use of something like SDKMan when you have one project stuck at Java 8 and another on 11, and another on 17, or perhaps you're testing a branch on 24, etc.

Then it's just:

  sdk use java 11.0.29-tem

And in that terminal it will use that, while another terminal happily uses a different version. That's useful when you are running two tools on different Java versions which interact. Installing another version is trivial too.

You can also check in an .sdkmanrc into each respective project which defines the required Java version.

Then SDKMAN! will perform the switch automatically when you enter the directory.

https://sdkman.io/usage/#env-command

What does it do, other than presumably switching PATH and JAVA_HOME? The documentation on the website doesn’t really say.

Does it have any interaction with e.g. Maven Toolchain?

direnv is great for switching any envnvariables let given directory.

I use it when I have projects with different jdks or nodejs.

Tailscale is definitely not one of that crowd. Their CEO had some very reasonable takes on AI and developers on LinkedIn / their blog (linked in a sibling comment).

But Tailscale IS VC funded which means an exit is imminent and around the corner.

Not good.