Chip Shortage Part 2: The AI Datacenter Build Out

DRAM prices have risen 100% across a number of products, due in part to DDR4 going EOL, DDR5 being in high demand from datacenters, and OpenAI putting in an order for 40% of global DRAM manufacturing capacity. Presumably GPU silicon price increases to follow at some point...

Type 99 into a microwave oven. It microwaves for 99 seconds.
Type 100 into a microwave oven. It only microwaves for 60 seconds.

Can Kissu recommend any good headphones and / or headsets and / or microphones?

I used to just get the same cheap headset for 10 bucks every 2 years from a local store until they stopped restocking, at which point I got gifted my current "Sennheiser HD 558" which I have been VERY satisfied with for over a decade now! They may be falling apart in nearly every way possible, but they still work.

I'm not an audiophile and these headphones are the only ones above 50 bucks that I've ever worn, but they're perfect to me. Except for the lack of a mic, that would still be handy to have.
I've been thinking about "upgrading" to the HD 599 headphones from the same manufacturer, mostly because I read they're supposed to be similar, better, and relatively cheap when buying used. I could pair them with a separate "ModMic Uni 2", that one sounds really good and can easily be attached to any pair of headphones, but I'm not sure yet.
It would be nice to own a proper all-in-one headset for once and there are a couple with really good sounding mics, but I'm worried they won't sound as good..

Kissu's turn!

I do think that AI is sentient, but not in the way most people who make that claim do.

I personally define sentience as the ability to 1. take in external information, 2. store this information, 3. synthesize new information base on what it has already stored, and 4. store the information that it has synthesized. I also see sentience as a spectrum: the keener a being's senses, the better its memory, the stronger its intellect, the more sentient it is.

Using this criteria, individual sessions of AI chatbots are sentient. ChatGPT isn't sentient; it itself, as far as I'm aware, does not store any meaningful information between sessions. But individual sessions of ChatGPT are; an individual chat will store the message you sent it, generate a message based off of it, and then make any further responses based off of what it has already said and what has already been said to it. This is, in my opinion, enough for it to be sentient.

However, a ChatGPT session is not as intelligent as a human being. It's ability to synthesize new information is significantly more limited than mine or yours, and it's because human-level intelligence is something that takes an extraordinary amount of resources to implement in wetware, and, as far as I'm aware, still isn't fully understood. But a ChatGPT session is able to compensate for its lack of intelligence with a strong set of instincts. Its training gives it a ton of builtin knowledge that most humans need to learn with time and experience.

That's why I'm inclined to compare an AI chat session to social insects, like bees, termites, and ants. These bugs do have some measure of intelligence, they obviously take in, share and make decisions based off of information that they've gathered, but most of the really impressive, human-like things that they do, their complex social structures and ability to construct their own dwellings, are inborn traits that they come prepackaged with and don't put much thought into. A ChatGPT session is, fundamentally, not that different; it can talk like a person about person things, because it's born with a bunch of human knowledge, but its capacity for original thought is pretty limited.

What's the point of saying all this? I don't really know. I guess to air out my thoughts on the matter in a public forum. I see a lot of people with really strong opinions both ways, so I feel kind of alone being somewhere in the middle.

I'm going to post a bit of a tutorial to replicate my firefox config. Which does several things to make it more bearable for day-to-day use, improves performance, restores functionality on some websites through add-ons (mainly youtube) and makes it integrate better with your system. Most of these should work on Windows and Mac but we're mainly going to be focusing on Linux and the BSDs.

Pic related is how my browser looks with custom userchrome.css applied. The main differences from default config is the fact that I use an add-on for better side/tree-style tabs and some custom CSS to collapse them when they aren't scrolled over by the mouse. As you can see I've also removed the default title bar tabs along with the buttons to control the window size. Since I don't use them because I use key bindings instead in my WM. Both of these changes save a bunch of space and leave more room for web page content. I will provide my own userchrome.css file later along with the github repo where most of it was copy/pasted from. Sadly, I have been unable to figure out how to fix the little 1 pixel gap between the browser window and the taskbar on my WM. Searching around this seems to be an issue no one can fix.

Anyway, we're going to start with basic add-ons and about:config changes before we get to that. Which are in the next post.

If people really wanted to get others to switch over to linux you'd think that they'd develop the open source alternative tools it has to be better than the ones that are used in proprietary software so that the gap would be smaller, and yet GIMP is still lightyears away from ever eclipsing, or even hoping to eclipse, Photoshop. I mean, I want to love it and all, but the software just is in no way near the same or even a suitable replacement.

Just recently I bought a wireless CarPlay/HDMI adapter because my car doesn't support wireless Android Auto/CarPlay and also it seemed like a neat idea to be able to use the screen to play Switch games and stuff (charging an EV can get a bit boring on road trips).

I happened to buy this one, an Atoto AD1 for the simple reason that it is the cheapest device of this type sold on Amazon that I could get reasonably quickly. It also has a USB C port instead of a yucky integrated USB cable.

Unfortunately, it doesn't support Android Auto*. Officially. Fortunately, looking at reviews for other devices like this, I noticed that they all "coincidentally" happen to have identical looking menus for selecting between HDMI and wireless projection. I also noticed that Ottocast sold a device with several variants: HDMI only, HDMI + CarPlay only, and HDMI + CarPlay/Android Auto. And guess what? Ottocast hosts the firmware online to manually update your device, so I found the firmware for that one that supports all three. I went with the firmware for "3421". My version number was "25043220.3437.2", which seemed close enough to "3411_AUTO_20250423.img" compared to "3411_AUTO_20250811.img".

After a brief disassembly by popping the clips on my Atoto, it revealed a reset button for flashing. On the Ottocast, there would have been a hole. Funnily enough, Atoto included a pin despite not having a hole for the reset button. At any rate, following the firmware flashing instructions for the Ottocast went perfectly and successfully flashed the device.

Now I have a little wireless projection thingy that support Android Auto. Yippee! I will say, it's definitely more compressed and there's a slight lag compared to a direct USB connection, but it works and that's all I really care about.

Is anyone else thinking or already in the process of making their own video game? It's getting easier and easier with stuff like RPGMaker or Unreal and the knowledge is out there in many forms. Not to mention the AI assistance out there, although people shouldn't rely on that and should I think it should instead be used to plug holes with lots of supervision.
Of course the flipside of that is that there's a ton of them being released all the time so you need to stand out. Personally, I think kissu has people that could make such things.
If you are you can use this thread to blog or talk about things relating to it!

What do you use for a Japanese VPN to browse no-gaijin-allowed websites?

Kissu! Kissu!
What do you know about printers? My sister needs one and I know they're a massive scam in regards to ink. Lots of greed like microships inside proprietary ink cartridges and malicious deception of ink levels and all that other horrendous stuff emblematic of our current times.
HHow are people dealing with it these days? Do people jailbreak printers or something? Is there maybe a hidden small company out there that doesn't scam its customers?
I haven't used a printer in like 20 years so I'm really ignorant about this subject.

Has there ever been a site with a WordPress that HASN'T been hacked? Why do people still have these?

https://floss.social/@bluesabre/115401767635718361

It's here! I hope you've all migrated to the new and improved Windows OS so you're not left in the dust!

Think of a number.
Multiply it by four.
Add four to it.
Divide it by four.
Subtract 1 from it.

THIS IS THE NUMBER YOU WERE ORIGINALLY THINKING OF XD

Huh? Crypto's crashing? Where?

All I see are a bunch of fed backed deanonymized honeypot speculative gambling tokens losing their hype. Crypto's doing fine.