We keep hearing that AI demand is driving up memory prices

Retail memory prices have more-or-less leveled off. I mean, they’re still much higher than they were before all this started, but they haven’t continued to increase much since the end of January.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

People solved this problem some time back.

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

An automat is a fast-food restaurant where food and drink are served through a vending machine, typically without waitstaff.

If you haven’t already, try clicking a mouse button in-game? Some games switch between gamepad and keyboard+mouse modes based on the last input they’ve seen, and don’t treat mouse movement (which might be very slight) as counting as a “mouse mode switching event”.

If you’re talking about the Lemmy Web UI and the list of languages that you want to see posts in, hold Control while clicking multiple items in the list. That’s a long-standing GUI convention for selecting multiple items in a list; it’ll work in other software too.

EDIT: That did make me curious how mobile browsers handle multiple select lists, since a soft keyboard won’t let you hold a key at the same time as you’re tapping in the webpage portion of the screen, and not all mobile users are going to have a physical keyboard attached. It looks like Firefox for Android just pops up a list with checkboxes as soon as you tap on a multiple select list:

https://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_select_multiple

I think that the major selling point of Notepad is that it’s installed everywhere already.

I haven’t read it in forever, and I took a look and…yeah, I have to agree with you on both the art and the writing.

Well…it is kind of hard to keep cranking out hits every day for decades on end, I guess…

That’s an interesting question.

I’m not familiar with it, but it sounds like it advises Congress as well as the President.

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

The National Science Board (NSB) of the United States establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation (NSF) within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the president and Congress. The NSB also serves as an independent policy advisory body to the president and Congress on science and engineering research and education issues.

As an independent federal agency, NSF does not fall within a cabinet department. Rather, NSF’s activities are guided by the National Science Board. The Board was established by Congress to serve as a national science policy body and to oversee and guide NSF’s activities. It has dual responsibilities to: a) provide independent national science policy advice to the president and the Congress; and b) establish policies for NSF.

While most of the government is under the Executive Branch, there are some institutions that are in the Legislative Branch, like the Congressional Research Service:

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

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a nonpartisan public policy research institute under the Library of Congress of the United States Congress. CRS works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis. CRS is sometimes known as Congress’s think tank due to its broad mandate of providing research and analysis on all matters relevant to national policymaking.[3]

CRS is one of three major legislative agencies that support Congress, along with the Congressional Budget Office (which provides Congress with budget-related information, reports on fiscal, budgetary, and programmatic issues, and analyses of budget policy options, costs, and effects) and the Government Accountability Office (which assists Congress in reviewing and monitoring the activities of government by conducting independent audits, investigations, and evaluations of federal programs). Collectively, the three agencies employ more than 4,000 people.[4]

I’m pretty sure that Trump doesn’t have authority over the CRS.

I suppose that there will probably be some lawyers opining on it, though given that it’s seven people, they may not bother challenging it.

Early_riser, if you want your next post to be “How did you feel when you heard that tal won the lottery?” I’m okay with that.

I use Eternity. It hasn’t been getting a lot of development, but it doesn’t really need anything that I’m aware of.

If I were picking one that’s getting a lot of development, I’d probably look at Interstellar. It’s less mature — it’s not a port of a Reddit app — but it works with all of Mbin/Lemmy/Piefed. I use it when I want to talk to a Piefed server from an Android device.

I mean, yeah, just saying that if lots of people want it done, it’s probably gonna be more-efficient to take that route. Like tinting windows or other popular aftermarket modifications.

I’d guess that it’s more that they’re refocusing on AI as a target of their parallel compute people. You need the same parallel compute engineers for both, and there’s more money in AI than in gaming.

https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/2025/as-intel-creates-new-ai-group-data-center-division-to-refocus-on-cpus-memos

In memos to Intel employees that were seen by CRN, company leaders indicate that what has been known as the Data Center and AI Group is being split up, with the newly renamed Data Center Group refocusing on CPUs and Sachin Katti taking over responsibilities for data center accelerator chips, like GPUs, in his freshly configured AI and CTO organization.

Katti Says His Group Is At ‘Center’ Of Intel’s Future

In his memo to employees, Katti said he will “lead the strategy, definition and execution for our data center accelerator portfolio as well as product positioning and customer engagements” in his new role as chief technology and AI officer.

The executive, who has been at Intel for more than three years, said his group has absorbed Saurabh Kulkarni, vice president of AI systems design, and the AI systems and GPU product management team. This team was previously a part of the Data Center and AI Group, as Eibschitz noted in her memo.

Katti said the CTO and AI organization will also take in Anil Rao and the systems architecture and engineering team as well as what is called the Intel Cloud Services team. The latter team was most recently led by Markus Flierl, who launched the Intel Tiber AI Cloud service last year and “has decided to leave Intel to pursue external opportunities,” according to Katti. Katti said he plans to name Flierl’s successor.

Same thing is happening at Nvidia.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/18/nvidia-ai-backlash-gamers-geforce-gpu.html

For its first 30 years, Nvidia wasn’t a household name unless you were a gamer. Now, some of its original fan base feel left behind as artificial intelligence has made the chipmaker the world’s most valuable company.

“The gaming segment is no longer the driving force of the company. There was one point when it clearly was,” said Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein Research.

Nvidia popularized the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that enable fast frame rates and rendering that make the best video game play possible.

When Nvidia released its first GPU in 1999, the GeForce 256, it laid off the majority of workers and approached bankruptcy to make it happen. Gamers snapped up the new type of processor, bringing Nvidia back from the brink.

Now, with demand for AI soaring, nearly all of Nvidia’s revenue comes from its products that serve that industry, instead of gaming. And as AI chipmaking shrinks the available memory supply, Nvidia has been forced to make tough decisions about priorities.

I mean, there’s obviously still demand for gaming hardware, and I don’t think that it’s going to go away, but you can’t just instantly magic more chip engineers into existence, so to some extent, they gotta pull people off gaming hardware if they want to do AI hardware quickly.

EDIT: Honestly, this might not be a terrible time to own existing gaming hardware, since my guess is that, even aside from the memory shortages holding back newer hardware, we’re going to see a slowdown in development of newer stuff, so I’d expect that existing stuff will probably become obsolete more-slowly.

The computer has determined that you require listening to some soothing music.

If there’s enough demand, I imagine that there will be shops that will do it without individuals having to research it.

“Popular web cartoonist has secret double life as popular web cartoonist.”

I’d guess that increasing pin count will probably tend to increase energy efficiency, all else held equal.

You need to pull the voltage up and down more quickly to run at a higher frequency clock if you want to move a comparable amount of data over a small number of channels than over many parallel channels.

That means more loss of electrical energy to heat from capacitive reactance.

The more you can do in parallel at a slower frequency, the less you run into problems there.

For a given user, I suppose that depends largely upon whether what a given end user wants to use character.ai for is copyrighted characters.

EDIT: I’d also add that copyrighting of characters and settings is something of a pet peeve of mine. Historically, many of our great works, like, say, the collection of literature dealing with Greek mythology or around Robin Hood or that sort of thing relied on many unaffiliated authors being able to write about the same set of characters and in the same settings.

But most copyright holders don’t permit that. H. P. Lovecraft was something of an exception, which is why you see so much Cthulhu stuff in random places.

I do think that if you’re Disney, you should have some route to make it clear that you are the original-rights-holder to, say, the Star Wars IP, so that someone else can’t pass off their work as canon as being endorsed by them. You should have some way to distinctly identify yourself, maybe via use of trademark. But I also have grave doubts that we would be unable to fund the creation of fictional works if characters and settings had a fair use exemption, so that a third party was guaranteed the ability to be able to create works in the same fictional universe.

Children and young people want spaces for social interaction without adult supervision. They will in any case find other places to interact, and companies will develop new services that do not formally fall under the category of “social media”. The alternatives are not necessarily better.

I mean, I’ve made the “there are fundamental enforceability issues” point myself, but I suppose that for some politicians, if there’s enough public demand for censorship, it’s easier to just engage in whatever theater is required to show that they’re being responsive to public concerns.

I remember when we discovered that militants in Afghanistan were monitoring Predator video feeds because apparently nobody had ever put in a requirement that the video stream be encrypted.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/769321/insurgents-intercept-video-feeds-from-u-s-drones-using-26-software-report-says.html

Militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have intercepted live video feeds from unmanned U.S. Predator drones using $26 off the shelf software made by a Russian company, says a report in the Wall Street Journal.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/camera-cars-detects-drinking

A team of Australian scientists have cooked up a new AI-driven camera system that can detect whether you are too drunk to drive a vehicle.

But the project isn’t quite ready for wide use with only 75 percent accuracy, according to the researchers out of Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who had presented this camera project at a computer vision conference earlier this year.

Should be interesting.

https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/womens-cigarettes/marlboro/

This is an example of one of the earlier Marlboro ads, which marketed Marlboro cigarettes as being “Mild as May” to attract a female audience. This advertisement takes the next step by actually illustrating a fashionable woman smoking elegantly. In large letters, this ad mentions that Marlboros have “Ivory Tips” to “protect the lips,” targeting women who are concerned with protecting their lipstick. The woman pictured wears very dark lipstick, but her absurdly large cigarette is clean from any lipstick stains. Marlboro, the brand associated today with the rugged manliness of the “Marlboro Man” cowboy of later decades, was actually introduced to the market in 1927 as a woman’s cigarette. It wasn’t until 1954, after the war, that Marlboro underwent a sex change to compete with the three other top cigarette manufacturers.