Readit NewsClose a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)
It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
That period of time had some benefits. Programmers learned to squeeze absolutely everything out of that hardware.
Perhaps writing software for today's hardware is again becoming the norm rather than being horribly inefficient and simply waiting for CPU/GPU power to double in 18 months.
I was lucky. I built my am5 7950x Ryzen pc with 2x48gb ddr5 2 years ago. I just bought 4x48gb kit a month ago with an idea to build another home server with the old 2*48gb kit.
Today my old g.skill 2x48gb kit costs Double what I paid for the 4x48gb.
Furthermore I bought two used rtx3090 (for AI) back then. A week ago I bought a third one for the same price... ,(for vram in my server).
A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.
I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.
As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.
The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.
Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.
I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.
Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.
Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.
Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.
I had an interesting experience during a high speed car crash years ago.
I was driving on a newly built motorway going south from Gdansk(in Poland) around 2am, in the rain in a very old rented VW Golf.
Before, when I got to the (cheap)rental place the seatbelt on the driver's side was caught behind the interior plastic panel. The guy that owned the place looked at me (wearing a suit, I just gotten off a plane) and said "You don't mind driving without a seatbelt don't you? This is the only car I can give you." To which I replied "no way", and "do you have a screwdriver"?
Then I proceeded to take off that interior panel. I freed the seatbelt and got on my way. This has saved me from very serious injury.
So, coming back to that moment. I'm driving at around 140kmh (which is normal speed at these roads, only 30kmh over limit). It is raining. I'm coming over a gentle curve and I see red lights of a big truck in my lane, so I flip the indicator with intention to overtake it (still maybe 300m away). As I'm changing lanes closing on it around that gentle long curve I suddenly see there is another set of lights in the left lane in front of the truck. That driver must have got startled by my lights because the moment I saw him his brake lights lit up (and I'm accelerating maybe 150m behind, gaining on him fast). I have to brake hard. I know my Golf at home with my tires would make it. This one didn't.
I lost maybe a third of the speed when it started fishtailing strong. By the time the other cars moved far enough so I could let go the brakes a bit, but instead of straightening it, the car spun sideways and slammed into the barrier.
I remember braking, turning, counter steering like in slow motion, then the last moment once car spun and was just about to hit I thought "That is going to hurt". Last thing I remember was a feeling of surprise how "soft" the crash felt.
I expected to feel a hard slam, it felt like I jumped into a soft bed and suddenly darkness and I feel wet on my hair. An instantaneous transition like in a movie. My first thought is "blood, I'm seriously injured", but no, this was rain. Suddenly I see some light and I remember I sit in a dark smashed up car in a middle of a motorway (it bounced off the barrier) over a hill and another car is quickly approaching without seeing me....
So I jump out of this car and (I didn't feel any injury with so much adrenalin) I push the screeching lump of metal on the driver side pillar as hard as I can, trying to get it off at least the left lane.
Thankfully the other driver saw me from far away, could slow down and stop in time. He helped me push the car onto the shoulder.
When police and ambulance came. The Police guy looked at the car, looked at me and said "where is the driver?" I said "I am" and he says "are you sure? If you're pretending for someone drunk that escaped it is a criminal offense"... Other than few scratches I was completely uninjured. The car looked horrible.
The police guy also said "we're having accidents on this stretch of the road every time it rains, they are going to replace the surface so I'm not going to fine you"... Well, good to know. They did rip it out few months later.
I estimate I couldn't be going that fast during that crash, as I was fine, or maybe I was lucky, but the car was totalled. I remember I paid £750 to the rental guy. That is how much the car was worth in it's entirety...
I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.
One may think, any existence is better than nothing.
Interestingly some medications like tadalafil restore my dreams... My smart watch also tells me the phases like remand deep have normal lengths. So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
As someone on the "senior" side AI has been very helpful in speeding up my work. As I work with many languages, many projects I haven't touched in months and while my code is relatively simple the underlying architecture is rather complex. So where I do use AI my prompts are very detailed. Often I spot mistakes that get corrected etc. With this I still see a big speedup (at least 2x,often more). The quality is almost the same.
However, I noticed many "team leads" try to use the AI as an excuse to push too difficult tasks onto "junior" people. The situation described by the OP is what happens sometimes.
Then when I go to the person and ask for some weird thing they are doing I get "I don't know, copilot told me"...
Many times I tried to gently steer such AI users towards using it as a learning tool. "Ask it to explain to you things you don't understand" "Ask questions about why something is written this way" and so on. Not once I saw it used like this.
But this is not everyone. Some people have this skill which lets them get a lot more out of pair programming and AI. I had a couple trainees in the current team 2 years ago that were great at this. This way as "pre-AI" in this company, but when I was asked to help them they were asking various questions and 6 months later they were hired on permanent basis. Contrast this with: - "so how should I change this code"? - You give them a fragment, they go put it in verbatim and come back via teams with a screenshot of an error message...
Basically expecting you will do the task for them. Not a single question. No increased ability to do it on their own.
This is how they try to use AI as well. And it's a huge time waster.
I'd love to have a nice solution to run run old windows XP and 10 on modern Linux with even 50% native performance (on Nvidia) but it's not looking like my wish I'd getting closer to being fulfilled.
So perhaps it is better Microsoft is actively trying to kill windows. Once it is dead it will be less of a moving target. We have amazing ways to run DOS. I hope one day the same can be said for windows. I have decades and decades of software I like to fire up once every few months to use (ham radio antenna simulation, PCB design, etc. Software I own actually own fully paid licenses for that becomes a pain to run). Currently I use kvm/virt manager and I'm suffering the bad GPU performance and crashes if I try to standby the PC.
(Still better than last year's award which wasn't really physics at all!)
(Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and you can run them at home if you have the hardware or for peanuts on a variety of providers. Cheap-er hardware like strix halo (and Nvidia dgx) made 128gb vram achievable to enthusiast. And Google is eating their punch with Gemini.
All while their CFO starts talking about government bailing them out from spending they cannot possibly fund.
Of course they will attempt to blow up the entire hardware market so if they AI flops they will be able to at least re not you hardware like AWS.
Of course they