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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • you may not need a dedicated GPU, the iGPUs on AMD CPUs have gotten really good lately, like better than a mid ranged dedicated GPU from even 4 years ago.

    My laptop has a 780m integrated GPU on its 7840HS cpu, and I’ve been blown away at its ability to run modern games. Like, sure, not running cyberpunk 2077 at max settings at 120 FPS in 4k, but running it at medium settings at 60 FPS in 1080? It’ll do it just fine.

    My laptop was a bit pricy, but I did a little searching and saw that there’s something called the GPD WIN Mini, the 2023 model was listed as having the same CPU/iGPU as my laptop and it was listed at 700$. It’s an odd form factor, and I couldn’t see it in stock anywhere.

    You might be able to get the kind of performance you’re looking form the iGPU on an AMD ryzen 7 or later CPU, and something without a dedicated GPU will probably be a lot cheaper.

    If you don’t mind a non-traditional form factor, as other’s have mentioned, definitely check out the steam deck. It’s very affordable and very capable, and other than the form factor, it is just a computer running Linux. You could even boot other distros on to it if you don’t want to run SteamOS (Valve’s arch derived distro).


  • The current situation is a bubble based on an over hyped extension of the cloud compute boom. Nearly a trillion dollars of capital expenditure over the past 5 years from major tech companies chasing down this white whale and filling up new data centers with Nvidia GPUs. With revenue caping out at maybe 45 billion annually across all of them for “AI” products and services, and that’s before even talking about ongoing operation costs such as power for the data centers, wages for people working on them, or the wages of people working to develop services to run on them.

    None of this is making any fucking profit, and every attempt to find new revenue ether increases their costs even more or falls flat on its face the moment it is actually shipped. No one wants to call it out at higher levels because NVIDIA is holding up the whole fucking stock market right now, and them crashing out because everyone stoped buying new GPUs will hurt everyone else’s growth narrative.


  • See that’s the kicker, windows has so many “are you sure” pop ups about stuff that most people just click through them without reading the fine print. People get desensitized to it and just ignore them, or maybe even they just assume microsoft is trying to sell them on a feature they don’t care about.

    And in this case it didn’t save the files to the trash can, I imagine because it was synching local files with what was in one drive. Not the user deleting local files.


  • I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.

    The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.

    One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.


  • Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.

    Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.

    The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.



  • It’s unlikely any of this will ever be profitable, the only one making profit from this right now is NVIDIA. Everyone else’s costs dwarf revenue, even just operational costs, not even counting capital expenditure to set this stuff up. None of these companies have a path to profitability, and most of the little revenue is coming from services burning investor money built upon other services that are also burning investor money, or temporary shenanigans like Microsoft trading OpenAI free compute time at their data centers in exchange for IP, or coreweave using their GPUs as collateral against loans to buy more GPUs that get collateralized in turn.

    At best the deregulation makes things less unprofitable and drags the bubble out a little longer.


  • I think it’s likely that Microsoft will start turning it on by default, and resetting it with updates for people who have opted out. Much like they did with edge and Cortana, intentionally making it harder to choose not to use it.

    More programs actively blocking it will make that harder, but I wonder how many will stick to their guns when pressured by Microsoft.

    I suspect that Microsoft will ratchet up the pressure to force it on people as the gen AI bubble pops, an attempt to keep the narrative alive to keep up demand for their overbuilt GPU data centers.





  • Any Linux distribution should work on AMD CPUs, well, Debian based distros can sometimes have issues with particularly new hardware due to the long time between releases. But bazzite is fedora based so you should be fine with anything.

    Nvidia GPUs work just fine with AMD CPUs.

    Realistically the question is how high end of a CPU do you want, the mid to high end range AMD CPUs tend to be cheaper than their intel equivalents, but the highest end intel chips edge out the highest end AMD chips right now. Realistically, that won’t matter unless you are doing something super CPU intensive and just want the most power possible for your machine.

    AMD CPUs also have better integrated graphics, not super important if you have a dedicated GPU, but, there are times when having a second somewhat capable graphics processor could be useful.


  • So, they’re really easy to work with and relatively affordable, so great for prototyping, and acceptable for production if a company wants to get stuff out the door without getting a proper custom built solution that would be better in the long run.

    When spin (electric scooter app rental company) pulled out of Seattle, they didn’t pick up a lot of the scooters there. People started pulling them apart when it was deemed they were legally abandoned, and it turned out they were all running on raspberry pi’s as their brains.

    Ultimately it’s save money on the development side since it allows companies to use less experienced or specialized employees. It’s obviously expensive in the long term since a custom built system that only does what you need it to would cost less