Will these even be useful on the second hand market, or are these chips gonna be on specialized PCBs for these machines?

If I understand aright, it’s going to be HBM, so it won’t be in DIMM form. Like, can’t just go stick it in a PC.

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From my /etc/resolv.conf on Debian trixie, which isn’t using openresolv:

# Third party programs should typically not access this file directly, but only
# through the symlink at /etc/resolv.conf. To manage man:resolv.conf(5) in a
# different way, replace this symlink by a static file or a different symlink.

I mean, if you want to just write a static resolv.conf, I don’t think that you normally need to have it flagged immutable. You just put the text file you want in place of the symlink.

Also, when you talk about fsck, what could be good options for this to check the drive?

I’ve never used proxmox, so I can’t advise how to do so via the UI it provides. As a general Linux approach, though, if you’re copying from a source Linux filesystem, it should be possible to unmount it — or boot from a live boot Linux CD, if that filesystem is required to run the system — and then just run fsck /dev/sda1 or whatever the filesystem device is.

I’d suspect that too. Try just reading from the source drive or just writing to the destination drive and see which causes the problems. Could also be a corrupt filesystem; probably not a bad idea to try to fsck it.

IME, on a failing disk, you can get I/O blocking as the system retries, but it usually won’t freeze the system unless your swap partition/file is on that drive. Then, as soon as the kernel goes to pull something from swap on the failing drive, everything blocks. If you have a way to view the kernel log (e.g. you’re looking at a Linux console or have serial access or something else that keeps working), you’ll probably see kernel log messages. Might try swapoff -a before doing the rsync to disable swap.

At first I was under suspicion was temperature.

I’ve never had it happen, but it is possible for heat to cause issues for hard drives; I’m assuming that OP is checking CPU temperature. If you’ve ever copied the contents of a full disk, the case will tend to get pretty toasty. I don’t know if the firmware will slow down operation to keep temperature sane — all the rotational drives I’ve used in the past have had temperature sensors, so I’d think that it would. Could try aiming a fan at the things. I doubt that that’s it, though.

GPU prices are coming to earth

https://lemmy.today/post/42588975

Nvidia reportedly no longer supplying VRAM to its GPU board partners in response to memory crunch — rumor claims vendors will only get the die, forced to source memory on their own

If that’s true, I doubt that they’re going to be coming to earth for long.

Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage

If consumers aren’t going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.

I remember when it wasn’t uncommon to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately upgrade its memory with third party DIMMs to avoid paying the PC manufacturer’s premium on memory. Seeing that price relationship becoming inverted is a little bonkers. Though IIRC Framework’s memory-on-prebuilt-systems didn’t have much of a premium.

I also wonder if it will push the market further towards systems with soldered memory or on-core memory.

You can have applications where wall clock tine time is not all that critical but large model size is valuable, or where a model is very sparse, so does little computation relative to the size of the model, but for the major applications, like today’s generative AI chatbots, I think that that’s correct.

Last I looked, a few days ago on Google Shopping, you could still find some retailers that had stock of DDR5 (I was looking at 2x16GB, and you may want more than that) and hadn’t jacked their prices up, but if you’re going to buy, I would not wait longer, because if they haven’t been cleaned out by now, I expect that they will be soon.

Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.

Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.

Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

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

The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.

Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.

TECO’s kinda-sorta emacs’s parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi’s parent.

I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.

It’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.

Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.

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

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name “compcache” (“compressed cache”). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]

Open-source RAM is better.

Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.

been the case for decades

One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you’re using the vlf package or similar.

TECO and ed might not. Dunno.

Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900.

If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven’t jacked up prices yet.

https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28

My first hit for “2x16gb 32gb ddr5” sorted by price is this:

https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram

Kingston Fury DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL40 RAM KF556C40BBK2-32

$100.00

They say that they have two in stock.

These guys are next lowest:

https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm

Price: $103.06

IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).