I don’t understand how “gamer style” is a thing.

Like, in general? Lots of non-functional molded plastic angular stuff with unnecessary holes, crevices, lights, and styling slapped on stuff. Let me do a quick search for “gamer mouse”.

searches

Yeah. That’s a nice example.

The ROG Phone itself isn’t a particularly over-the-top example of that, but I don’t really want the styling.

It isn’t a deal-breaker, just that I’d rather not have it; for me it was a negative.

If you’re old enough to remember Winamp skins from the early 2000s

I am, and I agree that many of those did have similar over-the-top styling…and I don’t want to buy physical hardware that looks like it.

I generally just want understated hardware without a lot of styling on it on all my computer hardware. I’m sure that there are people who do want something that looks more like the above, and that’s fine, but it’s not an aesthetic that I personally much like.

If I had to guess, part of the problem is probably “bigger” hardware moving into their space.

Like, phones have a lot of limitations for playing “heavyweight”, PC-style games:

• Small battery.

• Small screen.

• Limited ability to dissipate heat.

• Really limited space and the hardware tradeoffs that come with that.

• Touchscreen controls, even with accelerometer, aren’t ideal for a lot of games, especially PC or console ports.

For a lot of those, if you can manage to lug a laptop with you, you’re probably better off.

Then you have stuff like the Steam Deck and a bunch of similar larger-than-phone game-oriented platforms show up, and that eats even further into your market. Yeah, okay, a ROG Phone is smaller and lighter than a Steam Deck, but if you’re trying to deal with touchscreen controls by lugging along external control stuff, then you’re sacrificing some of that mobility:

https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/asus-rog-phone-9-pro-is-the-best-gaming-phone-and-its-here-in-the-us

I mean, I’m sure that there’s still a niche for heavyweight-game phone gaming, but it’s gonna have other parties eating away at the edges, narrowing it. You gotta want to play heavyweight games, not be willing to use larger-than-phone hardware, but spend a substantial amount of money on your phone (especially given the short EOL on the ROG phone) to have that ability. My guess is that some people who won’t use other hardware for gaming is because they have a phone and are price-sensitive enough to not want to get additional hardware platforms to just play games, so “users willing to spend a high premium on phone hardware to be able to game” may be a poor match to that market.

Well…darn. Aside from the “gamer” styling and their unusually short years-of-support policy, I was actually kind of interested in their ROG phones, as they have both a substantial amount of memory and large batteries, and had them on the “possibles” list for my next phone. I don’t care much about the gaming aspect, but there weren’t a lot of other options with the above characteristics.

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

Number of employees

• Decrease 94,000 (2024)

It doesn’t say what those employees worked on, but purely in terms of percentage of headcount, it’s not a massive cut.

What I’d be more concerned about is if it means that non-Chinese 5G is in trouble.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/human-resources/5g-freeze-hits-hard-ericsson-rocked-by-fresh-layoffs-as-sweden-s-telecom-giant-tightens-the-axe/ar-AA1UjGRp

Ericsson has announced that it will be laying off employees as part of a broader effort to improve its financial situation and boost efficiency. The company has been facing a tough telecom equipment market, with carriers spending less than expected on 5G technology. This shift in spending has impacted Ericsson’s revenue growth and profitability.

That does sound like it’s related to the 5G market, though that article doesn’t have particulars.

I remember that a few years back, the US had talked about buying Ericsson or Nokia if they weren’t getting adequate support because they did not want China to have control over the (security-sensitive) 5G infrastructure market.

5G infrastructure is one notable technology area where the US doesn’t have top-tier players, so it got really twitchy about the idea that China might take over the market. It’s also why the US was running around the world a few years back trying to get parties to buy Ericsson or Nokia product rather than Huawei.

If Ericsson is really in trouble on 5G infrastructure, I wonder if that might be reconsidered.

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It looks like I’m not the only one thinking about that.

https://www.ft.com/content/2834381f-7a21-4c51-b45f-b4b9dd38c818

But what eye-catching proposals has Trump yet to resurrect from his first stint in office? There is one in particular that strikes me as intriguing now as it was then: that the US should buy Nokia or Ericsson, or even both.

William Barr, attorney-general under Trump, suggested in 2020 that the US should actively consider taking a “controlling stake” in either or both of the Finnish and Swedish telecoms equipment makers “either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied companies”.

Like many Trump proposals, the idea was first met by gasps of disbelief. The US government doesn’t tend to buy foreign companies. But as is the case in some of the president’s outlandish schemes, there was a kind of rationale to the proposed purchase — and one that has not gone away in the meantime.

Telecoms equipment manufacturing is one of the very few areas of technology where the US is not just behind but not present at all. Reliable networks are vital for business and consumers alike, as well as becoming increasingly essential in warfare, as Ukraine is demonstrating with its drone warfare.

“They have not solved that issue in the US,” says Anna Wieslander, Northern Europe director at US think-tank the Atlantic Council.

Nokia and Ericsson have an effective duopoly in much of the western world thanks to American pressure on allies not to use Huawei, their main rival, which has close ties to the Chinese state. But they have struggled to draw as much benefit out of that as many might have expected, with both experiencing disappointing profitability in recent years.

What is more, Ericsson and Nokia have failed to garner full-blooded support from the EU — all the more strange for being perhaps the one sector where Europe has technology dominance.

Like, I’d think that one of several things probably needs to happen:

• Nokia dominates. I don’t think that the US cares that much about consolidation in the market.

• The US creates some kind of domestic competitor. Maybe Cisco or someone moves into the market (I understand that they do sell some 5G infrastructure, but not on the level that Ericsson and Nokia and Huawei do).

• The US buys one of Ericsson or Nokia and provides support.

• The US decides that it isn’t worried about 5G from a security standpoint (e.g. say that we decide that the real future is in some other system).

American importers and consumers bear nearly the entire cost. Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers.

Yes.

The 2025 US tariffs are an own goal

No, not from the standpoint of the administration.

They want to shift taxes from the wealthy to the poor. That’s what a fair bit of the administration’s policy has been focused on. Tariffs are more-or-less functionally a consumption tax, which is regressive, hits the poor more-heavily than the wealthy.

But Trump said that foreign exporters will pay the tax!

Sure. Shifting taxes from the wealthy to the poor is probably not going to sell politically very well.

If Trump and company announced a national sales tax, which would also be regressive, they’d probably be in hot water politically. Instead, he’s announcing a tax where it’s less-clear who is paying, since it just generates higher prices that aren’t clearly linked to the government, and then insisting that the public isn’t being taxed.

I’m using Debian trixie on two systems with (newer) AMD hardware:

ROCm 7.0.1.70001-42~24.04 on an RX 7900 XTX

ROCm 7.0.2.70002-56~24.04 on an AMD AI Max 395+.

No problem. It was an interesting question that made me curious too.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30869297/difference-between-memfree-and-memavailable

Rik van Riel’s comments when adding MemAvailable to /proc/meminfo:

/proc/meminfo: MemAvailable: provide estimated available memory

Many load balancing and workload placing programs check /proc/meminfo to estimate how much free memory is available. They generally do this by adding up “free” and “cached”, which was fine ten years ago, but is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong today.

It is wrong because Cached includes memory that is not freeable as page cache, for example shared memory segments, tmpfs, and ramfs, and it does not include reclaimable slab memory, which can take up a large fraction of system memory on mostly idle systems with lots of files.

Currently, the amount of memory that is available for a new workload, without pushing the system into swap, can be estimated from MemFree, Active(file), Inactive(file), and SReclaimable, as well as the “low” watermarks from /proc/zoneinfo.

However, this may change in the future, and user space really should not be expected to know kernel internals to come up with an estimate for the amount of free memory.

It is more convenient to provide such an estimate in /proc/meminfo. If things change in the future, we only have to change it in one place.

Looking at the htop source:

https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/blob/main/MemoryMeter.c

   /* we actually want to show "used + shared + compressed" */
   double used = this->values[MEMORY_METER_USED];
   if (isPositive(this->values[MEMORY_METER_SHARED]))
      used += this->values[MEMORY_METER_SHARED];
   if (isPositive(this->values[MEMORY_METER_COMPRESSED]))
      used += this->values[MEMORY_METER_COMPRESSED];

   written = Meter_humanUnit(buffer, used, size);

It’s adding used, shared, and compressed memory, to get the amount actually tied up, but disregarding cached memory, which, based on the above comment, is problematic, since some of that may not actually be available for use.

top, on the other hand, is using the kernel’s MemAvailable directly.

https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/blob/master/src/free.c

	printf(" %11s", scale_size(MEMINFO_GET(mem_info, MEMINFO_MEM_AVAILABLE, ul_int), args.exponent, flags & FREE_SI, flags & FREE_HUMANREADABLE));

In short: You probably want to trust /proc/meminfo’s MemAvailable, (which is what top will show), and htop is probably giving a misleadingly-low number.

If oomkiller starts killing processes, then you’re running out of memory.

Well, you could want to not dig into swap.

While I agree with the general sentiment, he was already in office for four during his first term, and we are at the end of the first year of his second term. So 5 out of 8 years down.

There might be some way to make use of it.

Linux apparently can use VRAM as a swap target:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap_on_video_RAM

So you could probably take an Nvidia H200 (141 GB memory) and set it as a high-priority swap partition, say.

Normally, a typical desktop is liable to have problems powering an H200 (600W max TDP), but that’s with all the parallel compute hardware active, and I assume that if all you’re doing is moving stuff in and out of memory, it won’t use much power, same as a typical gaming-oriented GPU.

That being said, it sounds like the route on the Arch Wiki above is using vramfs, which is a FUSE filesystem, which means that it’s running in userspace rather than kernelspace, which probably means that it will have more overhead than is really necessary.

EDIT: I think that a lot will come down to where research goes. If it turns out that someone figures out that changing the hardware (having a lot more memory, adding new operations, whatever) dramatically improves performance for AI stuff, I suspect that current hardware might get dumped sooner rather than later as datacenters shift to new hardware. Lot of unknowns there that nobody will really have the answers to yet.

EDIT2: Apparently someone made a kernel-based implementation for Nvidia cards to use the stuff directly as CPU-addressable memory, not swap.

https://github.com/magneato/pseudoscopic

In holography, a pseudoscopic image reverses depth—what was near becomes far, what was far becomes near. This driver performs the same reversal in compute architecture: GPU memory, designed to serve massively parallel workloads, now serves the CPU as directly-addressable system RAM.

Why? Because sometimes you have 16GB of HBM2 sitting idle while your neural network inference is memory-bound on the CPU side. Because sometimes constraints breed elegance. Because we can.

Pseudoscopic exposes NVIDIA Tesla/Datacenter GPU VRAM as CPU-addressable memory through Linux’s Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) subsystem. Not swap. Not a block device. Actual memory with struct page backing, transparent page migration, and full kernel integration.

I’d guess that that’ll probably perform substantially better.

It looks like they presently only target older cards, though.

This world is getting dumber and dumber.

Ehhh…I dunno.

Go back 20 years and we had similar articles, just about the Web, because it was new to a lot of people then.

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https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/internet-killed-my-daughter/28397087.html

Internet killed my daughter

https://archive.ph/pJ8Dw

Were Simon and Natasha victims of the web?

https://archive.ph/i9syP

Predators tell children how to kill themselves

And before that, I remember video games.

It happens periodically — something new shows up, and then you’ll have people concerned about any potential harm associated with it.

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

A moral panic, also called a social panic, is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is “the process of arousing social concern over an issue”,[4] usually elicited by moral entrepreneurs and sensational mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.[5]

Stanley Cohen, who developed the term, states that moral panic happens when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”.[6] While the issues identified may be real, the claims “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm”.[7] Moral panics are now studied in sociology and criminology, media studies, and cultural studies.[2][8] It is often academically considered irrational (see Cohen’s model of moral panic, below).

Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory pedophiles[9][10][11] and belief in ritual abuse of women and children by Satanic cults.[12] Some moral panics can become embedded in standard political discourse,[2] which include concepts such as the Red Scare[13] and terrorism.[14]

Media technologies

Main article: Media panic

The advent of any new medium of communication produces anxieties among those who deem themselves as protectors of childhood and culture. Their fears are often based on a lack of knowledge as to the actual capacities or usage of the medium. Moralizing organizations, such as those motivated by religion, commonly advocate censorship, while parents remain concerned.[8][40][41]

According to media studies professor Kirsten Drotner:[42]

[E]very time a new mass medium has entered the social scene, it has spurred public debates on social and cultural norms, debates that serve to reflect, negotiate and possibly revise these very norms.… In some cases, debate of a new medium brings about – indeed changes into – heated, emotional reactions … what may be defined as a media panic.

Recent manifestations of this kind of development include cyberbullying and sexting.[8]

I’m not sure that we’re doing better than people in the past did on this sort of thing, but I’m not sure that we’re doing worse, either.

Is there really a technology difference between Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11 ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a song written by American musician Billy Joel.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
🎵 It was always burning since the world’s been turning 🎵
🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
🎵 No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it 🎵

Actually, whether or not it’s permitted is, surprisingly, an undecided point in case law.

The case law here is Goldwater v. Carter, but the Supreme Court ruled on a technicality rather than the major question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_v._Carter

Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People’s Republic of China.

EDIT: I’ve brought it up before because a somewhat-analogous issue was also surprisingly undecided in UK case law, and there was a major legal tussle in the UK over it, whether or not the Prime Minister had the power to withdraw the UK from the EU without going to Parliament.

When I search Google for “steampunk”, I get 50.5 million results. “Cyberpunk” gives 148 million results, so about three times.

On Reddit, /r/steampunk has had 104 posts in the past two months. /r/cyberpunk has had 533. About five times there.

So if you figure that that’s proportional, maybe there’s on the order of 3-5 times as much interest in cyberpunk as steampunk. But, yeah, it seems like there’d likely be enough people out there.

That is kinda odd, now that I think about it.

I’m subscribed to a couple genre communities that I’d think would be much more niche, like !cassettefuturism@lemmy.world and !weirdwest@lemmy.zip.

EDIT: !cybermoe@ani.social does mention being open to steampunk content, but that’s specific to images of girls.

There’s !victorian_era@lemmy.world and !victoriana@lemmy.world, but those aren’t for fictional worlds.

Might be interesting to infer optimal dimensions. Glancing at the source, looks like that doesn’t presently happen.

!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.

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chuckles