tal

That's a good sign that they're going to sell enough product that it won't be a flop. I was pretty pessimistic on their chances of being able to introduce new hardware successfully during the RAM shortage, but perhaps I will be wrong!

That's pre-atomic-weapons-testing steel right there.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/close_enough_for_government_work

Adjective

close enough for government work (not comparable)

1. (US, idiomatic, humorous, derogatory) Adequate; acceptable as government work, imperfect but not worth the time nor effort of improving.

Synonyms: good enough for government work

You have very probably seen its logo on various websites that are using it, showing up before the content does:

She went for him in late 1993:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993. He was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.

Fedora won't have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Fedora Linux[10] is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project.

It looks like there were Linux distributions at the time, but they were very early:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

Early distributions included:

• Torvalds' "Boot-Root" images, from v0.95a onwards "Root" was maintained by Jim Winstead Jr., the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started (0.10: 4 November 1991)[12][13][14][15]

• MCC Interim Linux (3 March 1992)[16]

• TAMU Linux, based on MCC with simpler installation and X11 (14 July 1992)[17]

• Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which included the X Window System and was the most comprehensive distribution for a short time (15 August 1992)[18]

• H.J. Lu's "bootable rootdisks" (23 September 1992),[19][20] and "Linux Base System" (5 October 1992)[21][22]

• Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution (alpha: 8 December 1992)

• The two oldest, still active distribution projects started in 1993. The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new SLS-based distribution, Slackware, was released by Patrick Volkerding.[23] Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian in August 1993, with first public BETA released in January 1994 and first stable version in June 1996.[24][25]

I think that there are two possible takeaways from this:

• Not clear what distro was used

if any

but if it was, it won't have been a presently existing one. It's possible that he was just rolling his own setup, not using a distro at all.

• Linus's date with Tove derived from an email exchange. What ninja chicks look for in a guy is possibly an email client, not a Linux distribution at all. It sounds like Linus was probably using Pine at the time (though someone could go dig up mail headers from old emails to check).

He's also married.

Ah, fair enough

didn't know what the prize was.

On further thought, one edge use case that might make sense

suppose you're a multiplayer online gamer who is only interested in getting an edge in multiplayer online games and don't really care at all about what a game looks like. OLED displays can offer considerably higher reasonable framerates than past monitors, maybe 500 Hz or more. You might be able to crank the texture settings in a number of games all the way down, just look at a blurry mess, and use an OLED display and have a video card that can, as long as it isn't crashing into memory limitations, render high framerates.

There are also a handful of games that don't use textures on polygons, sort of the Avara or Star Fox style. Most of those are older and target systems before hardware acceleration, but I can think of a few newer ones. I personally like Carrier Command 2*, and that has almost-entirely untextured polygons, and where it does use textures, they're low resolution. I don't know what the VRAM requirements are for the geometry, but the listed system requirements on Steam are for 1GB VRAM cards. I don't think that any of those are actually games where framerate matters much, but if you wanted to render those at very high resolution or on multiple monitors or something (if the game can support that?), it might make sense.

I mean, this is really just a mental exercise

I don't think that the OEM in question is really trying to develop a system that's actually well-suited to any entry-level-gaming users. But if you were looking for very specialized gaming niches, you could maybe find something that the system could actually serve well at.

I'm not sure that this is a good idea. Futures markets on things like assassinations have always run the risk of incentivizing people to do things that they shouldn't, and this is similar.

Ukraine probably has a military plan in place to hit specific targets. You want people to target the targets judged to be optimal. If someone in the Ukrainian military can make money by making such a bet and then targeting the target that they have bet on, there is now an incentive separating their interests from that of the state.

Additionally, depending upon whether the betting information is made public (and whether that information, even if not made public, is properly secured), if someone bets using insider information, it may leak target information ahead of time, which may be detrimental to the Ukrainian state. Russia will have nation-state intelligence agency levels of capability in going after things in the war like strategic air targets.

“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they're going to have all this leisure," Altman said, adding that things have gone in this direction.

He explained that people now have more time for leisure and a higher quality of life than in previous points in history.

"But somehow we never get the promise of the 4-hour workweek on a mass scale in society. And I don't expect AI to change that,” Altman said.

OpenAI CEO added that people’s expectations always go up, and they want more.

“We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” he said.

Altman then spoke about the competition that drives the economy and people’s desire to be useful to others and to create.

Altman’s predictions are in stark contrast to the vision of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the company behind the chatbot Grok.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Musk envisioned a future in which jobs are optional, and money doesn’t matter, but he didn’t provide much detail on the transition to this level of abundance.

Yeah, I think that Altman is probably closer to being right than Musk is, at least for some time to come. If you're talking about the kind of systems that OpenAI and xAI are working on, then certainly.

A lot of people

on the Threadiverse I see plenty posting

are really worried about permanent expanding structural unemployment. Something like "there will be no jobs" or something like that. And, okay, it's not immediately obvious why that wouldn't happen. And there have been some very prestigious people who have predicted otherwise.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren." It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week. David Kestenbaum with our PLANET MONEY team tried to sort out where Keynes went wrong.

To date, what has consistently always happened over time is that as our productive capacity increases, someone finds some way to create a higher standard of living using that productive capacity. That higher standard of living has always been more-appealing than the leisure time. If we wanted the standard of living that was present in 1900, say, we could work a lot less and just accept that standard of living. What happened instead of increasing leisure was increasing standard of living. Larger houses, air conditioning, cars, video games, elaborate movies, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, all that.

It's possible that that phenomenon will end, but I'd bet against it in the near term. We're really good at finding new things that people would like.

Now, I do expect that there will come a point where you can produce an AGI that is truly superhuman in the sense that it's more-capable in every significant way than a human. I do not think that that is going to happen in a year or ten years, but it might not be that far down the road. And then, unless you see demand specifically for something made by humans

think of the way that there is demand for, say, expensive handmade fountain pens, something like Veblen goods

we're going to have to rejigger things for a post-scarcity society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2]

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

But I would be pretty confident that ChatGPT isn't getting humanity to a post-scarcity society in the near future.

And I think that there are a whole host of other things that would change in human society in such an environment that I'm not sure that structural unemployment would be the first thing I'd think about. Like...what does the military balance of power look like in a world where an individual can hypothetically manufacture robots that manufacture factories that manufacture military drones, say? I mean, it's a awfully different world in a lot of ways.

Not quite answering your question if what you want

understandably

is it gone now, but "time". If you're in your teens, to some extent, it's a phase in life. Lot of people get it around then, and it tends to go away on its own later in life.

I had some when I was a teen. Went away.

I have never actually played Minecraft itself, just open-source clones like Luanti, but I could very easily believe that those have extremely low VRAM requirements, even if the engine isn't optimized. Most VRAM goes to storing textures, and Minecraft normally has few textures and very low-resolution textures.

Thing is, I also would guess that unless the engine is really inefficient, that GPU isn't really buying much, either. Like, you have lot of crunching power and bandwidth, sure, but you probably don't have many visible triangles either.

Maybe some modded Minecraft?

searches

https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/31es0c/cpu_bottleneck/

It's not abnormal for shaders in minecraft to more than half your FPS.

If that's true, if people have done some really crazy shader mods or someone's using ReShade or similar, maybe they could be soaking up that GPU compute power. Though...I have no idea what kind of system this guy is talking about. He could be talking about a cell phone or something too...