duffyjp

In 2024 I bought a used (2021 era) Dell for $400 to use as my home server. Just the ram that it came with now routinely goes for $600 or more. I'd sell it, but then I wouldn't have a server...

I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.

You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...

I'm setting up a Frankenstein system at the moment. It's a Chinese DDR3 X99 motherboard with a 12 core Xeon v3, 32gb 1866MT/s ram, and a 1080 Ti.

I'm shoehorning it back in the Optiplex that donated the ram, so it's not ready to go at the moment, but when I had it running on top of the motherboard box as a test I ran the (9B?) gemma4:e4b-it-q4_K_M since it can fit entirely in the 11gb vram. It flew, more than 50tk/s. A model that small isn't useful for coding, but there could be uses. I'd love to figure out a Wake-on-Use and use it as my personal ChatGPT. I'm not sure how that would work... Maybe proxy the LLM thru a Pi with a script to Wake-on-LAN the PC? It'll be a fun weekend project someday.

My always-on LLM is the dense Gemma4:31b that's not quite half in GPU on a 12gb 2060. It's really slow, but the quality is great and my use case is an automated queue so I'm not sitting there watching the output. I have another 2060 but unfortunately the PC won't POST with both installed for some reason.

I won't speak for cafkafk, but I have two E5 (v3/v4) systems one on DDR4 and one on DDR3. This generation of CPU all support DDR4, but a few skus do support DDR3 also. ChatGPT told me they were niche products to meet specific customer needs.

I just picked up the DDR3 board, an Aliexpress "XD3" so I could reuse some DDR3 ram on a better CPU. Quad channel 1866MT/s is not bad!

I still don't think I understand it. I saw those nvfp4 models up by chance yesterday and tried them on my Linux PC with a 5060TI 16gb. Ollama refused to pull them saying they were macOS only.

I assumed it was a meta-data bug and posted an issue, but apparently nvfp4 doesn't necessarily mean nvidia-fp4.

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/15149

I'd really like to be a drop in that bucket, but as an nvidia owner it's rough. You take a sizable performance hit and general stability is awful. In Linux I can't turn off my monitor on nvidia, or there's a ~80% chance I'll never get it to come back on. If it does, I don't have sound 100% of the time. It's ridiculous.

My next GPU will be a Radeon, but they don't have anything to offer that can beat my 4080 from 2022...

I don't know if it's me, but right now nvidia on Linux is the least stable it's ever been. I have two desktops, one dedicated Linux box and one I dual boot. On the Linux only one I bought a dirt cheap ($30) Radeon Pro WX 3200 so my system won't crash constantly. I still have the nvidia card for CUDA stuff. It's working great for what I do.

I have a second used Radeon on the way for the other system. It's insane, but this is the only solution. If my monitor turns off or I switch inputs, I can't get it back when connected to the nvidia cards. I've done every troubleshooting step I can find, it's just a broken ecosystem.

My Moto Edge 2024 has "Ready For" which is basically this still today. I plug in the USB-C cable normally connected to my work MacBook and I instantly get a full desktop experience; mouse, keyboard and sound included.

It's how I play Minecraft with my kids when they get the itch. Sometimes if I know I'm only gonna be zoning out on Youtube at night I'll use to to save a few watts too.

It can do 1440p at 120hz, all on a really affordable phone. It's nice.

I would also love to hear any success stories here. I converted my wife's Macbook over to Linux Mint somewhat recently and the best I could do was setup a shortcut to the Web version of her iCloud.

Thanks, yep I do have zram installed, but I'm working with mostly incompressible AI models so it really didn't help. I set it to cap at 8GB so random stuff can take advantage and I guess it helps a tiny bit, but not much.

I have a free m.2 slot and may get a cheap optane drive and use that as SWAP. I've read they're not as fast as marketed for this, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about about wearing out my SSD.

Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.

I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(

Nothing. This summer I set up a dual 16GB GPU / 64GB RAM system and nothing I could run was even remotely close. Big models that didn't fit on 32gb VRAM had marginally better results but were at least of magnitude slower than what you'd pay for and still much worse in quality.

I gave one of the GPUs to my kid to play games on.

I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather.

Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since.

If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.

Absolutely.

I've declined the refresh I've overdue for. My 2021 model MBP has 32gb and a 1TB SSD. They're currently giving out the base model Air: 16gb and 256gb. No thanks.

We used to get whatever was most appropriate for our role, now we get whatever is cheapest.

Everybody says this is because OpenAI bought up 40% of the world's supply of DRAM. Certainly that has hugely tilted the supply and demand teeter-totter, but to me this just feels like another "because we can" by the market.

When beef is expensive, you buy chicken. There's no alternative to RAM. If you need it, you've gotta pony up.

I browsed thru my comment history to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Just over a year ago I had priced out a used Xeon and 256GB kit on eBay for my old X99 board (DDR4) for under $300.

I did not pull the trigger. I did thankfully get it up to 64gb for ~ $50.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41100502

I threw together a utility for this with just the half character in 2018, I don't even remember why.

https://rubygems.org/gems/barf

The name does imply the image quality, fyi.

My solution is also multithreaded, in Ruby. :D

We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.

They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—

I looked at sold listings on eBay recently, very little was actually going for the crazy market rate. Plenty had sold at the old prices from sellers who hadn't gotten the memo though.

I have some ram I could live without if it's worth its weight in gold, but if you're going to get ripped off I think people want to avoid the used market and its extra risk.

I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...

I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.

The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.

Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

Very recently I setup a mergerfs mount for this. It’s very crude for my use case but works perfectly and I could use the existing volume as is.

I got partway thru setting up a script to copy recently accessed files from the HDD to the read-prioritized SSD.

My LLMs load up way faster, and I still have a source of truth volume in the huge HDD. It’s not something I’d use professionally though, way too janky.

I’ve had a bunch of Moto G phones, I love them. This round I decided to try their upper midrange Edge line.

I found a deal on a Moto Edge 2024 and it’s fantastic. It’s so light and compact vs the Moto G Power, and still can go two full days no problem. The camera is excellent as well, which was my only real gripe with the G phones.

It can plug into my USB-C monitor and act like a Chromebook (more or less). I play Minecraft with my kids this way.

I don't have the floppy anymore, but I do have the old system I used to run it on. QNX even supported my network card out of the box, the demo blew my mind.

Was this really 25 years ago???

Everybody is talking about Chrome, but I tell ya what I have that disabled on my Android in favor of Firefox. Firefox on mobile with full-fat uBlock Origin is the closest thing to parity with desktop web access you can get.

I don't just block ads, I block elements on sites I don't care about with :has-text RegEx rules. You can't do that on Chrome even on desktop anymore.

I'm this close to swapping to the Android as my primary device-- it's iMessage that has me chained. It's just too dang nice to respond to chats from my Mac during work so I don't need to pick up my phone.

Everything else is better on the Android. Don't get me started about the iOS keyboard or Siri.

Image Composite Editor. It's a panorama maker from Microsoft Research. I'm a hobbyist photographer and nothing I've tried can come close.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/image-compo...

Have you given Libre Office a try? I use their spreadsheet all the time. You can paste in data and actually get it into cells the way you want. Excel is terrible at this.

Development Comparison: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi...

I have a Sony DSC-TX100V that does GPS tagging. When I first got it in 2011 or so it was vastly superior in every way to phone cameras. Most of the photos and videos of my first kid were taken with this camera. I liked it so much that when it broke I bought another one.

I just checked eBay and they're going for 2x what I paid for my replacement a few years ago. I bet a seller would take a more modest Best Offer though, there are a ton of listings.

I wonder if the phoenix.new website was built with phoenix.new...

This site can’t be reached

The connection was reset.

Hippie Christmas at UW Madison. I used to snag all kinds of stuff as a student.

https://uwalumni.com/news/hippie-christmas/

On Mac I disable icons from appearing on the Desktop and instead add one of those fan-out folder links to my taskbar, sorted newest first. I just checked and I have 547 Screenshots dating back to around this time last year. Maybe it's time for a purge. :)

# Disable icons on Desktop

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false