Huh. I had no idea that one would use an impact driver on Torx screws.
I kind of mentally associate Torx with (delicate) personal electronics and associate impact drivers with big, heavy pieces of hardware with rusty bolts.
So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices
as with anyone buying anything with memory
my guess is that it's a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It's been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
https://wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2025-apple-samsung-tied-for-tops/
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
EDIT: And I'm sure that AI consumers dwarf that, given announcements about how much OpenAI alone was buying 40% of global capacity.
EDIT2: And if one wants local LLMs
I'd like to run my LLMs locally, not have some cloud provider do it
and you assume maybe 1% capacity utilization, then we're going to need something like 100 times what the cloud AI companies are getting in RAM to get to that point.
So, yeah, Steam Deck purchasers do count towards demand for memory, but...I don't think that they likely move the needle all that much alone.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usa250/2026/03/19/gold-trump-coin-mint/89214207007/
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has taken a big step forward in a plan to etch President Donald Trump’s portrait on a 24-karat gold commemorative coin.
The Commission of Fine Arts, an advisory board whose members were handpicked by Trump, approved the general design on March 19 for a gold commemorative coin emblazoned with the president’s image.
Last week at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club, a group of religious leaders dedicated a twenty-two-foot golden statue to President Donald Trump, the resort’s owner.
There is just something not right about that man.
But Lisp is case-insensitive
looks bemused
I don't do that much Lisp, mostly use it for emacs, but I'm pretty sure that it's not.
opens emacs
(setq foo 1)
(print foo)
1
OK. So far so good.
(setq foo 1)
(print FOO)
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable FOO)
(print FOO)
(progn (print FOO))
eval((progn (print FOO)) t)
elisp--eval-last-sexp(nil)
#f(compiled-function () #<bytecode 0xf6febdfec01a>)()
eval-last-sexp(nil)
funcall-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil)
command-execute(eval-last-sexp)
Elisp sure doesn't look to be case-insensitive. Maybe he meant some specific variant? Common Lisp?
$ sudo apt install sbcl
Apparently sbcl's REPL doesn't support readline.
$ sudo apt install rlwrap
$ rlwrap sbcl
Huh. Looks like with readline, I also get cursor flashing to do paren matching, kinda like emacs can do. I had no idea that readline could do that. Apparently Common Lisp doesn't do setq either.
more experimentation
* (let ((foo 1)) (print FOO))
1
1
Huh. So, yeah, I guess that Common Lisp is case-insensitive. That is a bit wild. I guess I do remember vaguely seeing old Lisp stuff with keywords in all-caps.
Is Scheme?
$ sudo apt install guile-3.0
Apparently the guile REPL doesn't support readline either. God.
$ rlwrap guile
And it looks like "print" is "display" in Scheme-land.
scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display foo))
1
Okay, so that's the syntax. Case-insensitive?
scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display FOO))
;;; <stdin>:2:24: warning: possibly unbound variable `FOO'
ice-9/boot-9.scm:1676:22: In procedure raise-exception:
Unbound variable: FOO
Nope.
I kinda feel like there are Lisps that the author could have used if they wanted Lisp and case-sensitivity, if that was the major irritation.
They're in the same boat.
TP-Link plans on launching the Wi-Fi 8 router this October
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_8
IEEE 802.11bn, dubbed Ultra High Reliability (UHR), is an upcoming IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard.[1][2] It is also designated Wi-Fi 8 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. As its designation suggests, 802.11bn aims to improve the reliability of wireless communications rather than primarily increasing data rates.[1][3] The standard is projected to be finalized in May 2028.[4]
They may have implemented a preliminary version of what they think the standard will look like, but they can't really say that it's Wi-Fi 8 until the standard that they're claiming to implement is actually completed.
Maybe if Mastermind had made the pegs green and yellow like Wordle squares I’d still have my old set...Bit gutted about that now because I’d love to still have the original board game.
https://www.ebay.com/shop/mastermind-pegs?_nkw=mastermind+pegs
Looks like some of those are in colors that exclude the black that you dislike, too.
I'd probably use a software version, myself, but if you enjoy the physical board game, that'd be one option.
But I remember around 15 to 20 years ago reading similar claims about youth magazines and advertisements, that they were promoting unhealthy and unrealistic ideas of an ideal body image.
I'd say that most concerns about social media don't really differ all that much from past concerns about television.
Social media does permit more random parties out there to influence what someone sees, maybe permits for vulnerability to influence campaigns. And it permits a user to potentially view more-highly-personalized
and thus potentially more-appealing
content than stuff at the granularity of choosing a television channel to watch (though I think that you can raise very similar issues about online ads, not just social media).
But on the other hand, social media also has less of the "mindlessness" aspect of TV, I think. Like, people can engage and can point out issues in the material.
For data brokers, you can pay to have various services just run around and keep requesting that said companies purge data about you. They just full-time implement automating opt-out and deletion requests. E.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incogni
Incogni is a subscription-based personal information removal service that automates opt-out and deletion requests to public and private data brokers on behalf of users.[1] The service was created by Surfshark in 2021 and launched publicly in 2022; it was later offered as a standalone product.[2]
That being said, I'd imagine that if enough people do something like that
and setting aside the rather ludicrous situation that requires it
at some point, you'd just see data brokers operating in locales that aren't subject to requirements to honor such requests to insulate them. I don't think that it can really be a solution for society as a whole.
I'm pretty sure that a realistic whole-society solution needs to involve not leaking information in the first place, placing technical barriers rather than legal ones.
People who want to prevent their devices from being swept into botnets should install security updates in a timely manner and resist the urge to continue using software or devices that no longer receive them.
That doesn't really seem likely to happen on its own. I'm pretty sure that most IoT devices phone home and upgrade themselves (which, frankly, I'd be maybe more-concerned about as a vector than a lack of updates, since anyone can buy a defunct IoT maker and thus get control of all those devices, or penetrate the IoT maker's network) and I imagine that most people have no idea when a device has last been updated.
You can maybe have some sort of network protocol where devices can report their last update. That'd maybe permit for auditing that, if you had a device that would tell a user about an outdated device, which isn't really the case today. Also kind of hard to tell an end user what a device at IP address X is. If they're on the same Ethernet segment, maybe could try to identify it by OUI on the Ethernet MAC address, I guess, but that's not going to give you a convenient helpful-to-most-end-users product ID for a lot of devices. So if your audit program sees a device on the network that doesn't implement the "last updated" protocol, it may have a hard time identifying it to you in human terms.
Today, Steam suddenly wouldn’t start at all. Even though the last thing I did yesterday was play CS. I turned on my PC today and Steam isn’t working anymore.
You can run the Steam client from a terminal like Konsole, and it'll print a bunch of information about what it's doing.
Can also have it write that information to a logfile, like:
$ steam 2>steamlog.txt
This is probably a Hegseth thing, not originating with Trump. A while back, Hegesth went on some rant about how high command was too fat.