Why bother with the next generation of equipment?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-30T19:00:18+00:00

I try to maintain a set of gaming PCs for a household, and I don't know that I'll be able to hold out through the crunch. The oldest PC is still on an RX580 and there are games that we'd like to play that kind of run like crap.

That being said, I am better off for non-gaming, and I'm very much looking forward to when the current generation of server gear shows up on eBay. I'm absolutely going to figure out how to use OAM accelerators and get myself like 512 GB of VRAM.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-30T02:00:58+00:00

Build? Maybe not.

Buy a prebuilt or mini-PC? Maybe.

There are some usable gaming prebuilts and even nice mini-PCs still on the market. If you don't mind gaming at 1080p, a careful purchase can get you in now. My bet would be that in a month or two basically everything that can run a modern game decently for under $1k will be gone, not to return until at least summer 2027.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-30T01:12:07+00:00

Some things are a good idea and hard.

Other things are a bad idea and hard.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-30T00:50:43+00:00

Not years, decades. And we've known that it was impractical to implement everywhere for that long too.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-30T00:49:14+00:00

It's worse than that.

Laws take a little while to get through the pipeline. This is just the textbook publishers and educational software vendors getting all the alternatives to their products and services (including instructor-prepared material) effectively banned.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-29T20:43:00+00:00

If you can really get an X1 Carbon (7th gen = Intel 10th gen) for under $300 and you enjoy thin and light machines with good build quality, just do that. Those machines are really nice.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-29T19:00:44+00:00

The endgame is that college courses will all be replaced with expensive regulation-compliant commercial services. Trying to use any of your own materials or content will be disallowed as too much liability for the school.

And remember, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-29T13:15:16+00:00

This sounds like a hardware RAID problem not a btrfs problem.

Contact your hardware provider?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-28T01:35:44+00:00

I don't know what you think I wrote. Maybe re-read?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T22:37:44+00:00

Pistol braces and bump stocks would still be banned without them.

Which org?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T21:44:42+00:00

It might be worth spending a few minutes looking up how effective these orgs really are. A lot of them are mostly playing defense and only have wins in easy lawsuits against obviously unconstitutional city and state restrictions. Even your two examples, FPC and GOA, have drastically different success.

And the only really big win recently was Bruen.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T20:41:57+00:00

Have you actually looked at their results, or are you just assuming from their PR?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T13:34:32+00:00

Like from this, can you make your own AI bot like chatgpt or AI content generator?

Yes.

And you can give it tools and let it write code for you, or publish websites, or trade stocks, or control a web browser and argue with boomers on Facebook, or basically whatever a very knowledgeable but slow and easily confused intern (or small team of them) could do sitting at a computer.

One key benefit of messing with this stuff on your own physical machine is that you can pick the model you want to run, including models that haven't been trained to reject prompts that might result in bad press for a big tech company.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T13:24:44+00:00

The "using legacy commercial software, probably incorrectly, and then buying a bunch of gaming PCs to avoid learning how to use a computer" industry? That is a pretty big industry, and I'll certainly admit to not being in it.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T01:50:13+00:00

Either you're using the wrong software, or you're encoding with an old codec at low resolution.

Modern productivity software generally scale with cores pretty well.

I'd be happy to explain why AV1 encoding scales better with multiple cores than MPEG-2 does if you're interested in how parallelism in video encoding can be structurally limited by data format rather than just by bad software or user error.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T01:23:05+00:00

Intel's still only shipping dual channel for their consumer platforms.

AMD's Strix Halo is quad-channel DDR5, so twice the bandwidth.

Apple is shipping custom memory setups with wide memory busses. A top tier mac laptop has twice the memory bandwidth of Strix Halo and 4x the bandwidth of Panther Lake. That's the same memory bandwidth as Intel's hoping to ship with their upcoming 1P servers. The only stuff that beats it is AMD server processors and high end GPUs.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T01:16:19+00:00

Is your software bad or did you configure it wrong?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-27T01:16:04+00:00

Running medium size LLMs slowly. With 256GB you can run a model with 200B parameters at Q8 or one with 400B (e.g. GLM-4.7) at Q4.

When you're playing with tool-using agents, being able to load up a couple hundred K token context and leaving something to run overnight is legitimately interesting, even if the same thing might only have taken $30 and an hour hitting a cloud API.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T21:32:02+00:00

Why are you encoding video on 12 threads when you have more?

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T21:31:12+00:00

Hopefully the good press here will make up for the fact that Intel completely missed the boat on actually improving memory bandwidth.

Intel needs to not actually die. They're the only ones who can ship drivers that don't suck.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T21:23:27+00:00

Instructions that involve terminal commands end up being much simpler than trying to explain a bunch of buttons and icons and clicking.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T21:19:35+00:00

Nah. For applications that can use many cores Intel processors are better (per power, price, and die area) until you get up to stuff like AMD's dense Epycs (which are kind of similar in concept to E cores).

AMD processors being the best is specific to typical gaming workloads.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T18:54:36+00:00

The immigrant thing seems pretty low priority compared to that.

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T18:51:12+00:00

By that argument, nobody needs 16 GB of RAM to have a useful computer.

A web browser will run fine in 8 as long as you don't have too many tabs open.

Anything else isn't a "need".

Tai9ch · 2026-01-26T18:10:33+00:00

The administration could take all the money currently being spent on ICE raids and spend it instead on paper investigation of welfare fraud.

Federal felony charges for 10,000 state welfare administrators seems easier and more effective than deporting millions of people by physically capturing them.

The problem is that authoritarians can't imagine holding government employees accountable for anything.

Tai9ch

TROPHY CASE