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ThePrimeagen gloated about buying Micron stock when he learned that AI is very memory hungry, I didn’t really have my finger on the pulse to that degree.

As someone that appreciates digital sovereignty, moving back to thin clients is something I fear. We can play around in the FOSS inflatable pool, but unless we manage to open source fabbing our own silicon, it’s nothing more than LARP-ing as tech autarkists.

I own a Framework laptop, which is predicated on the idea of upgradability and repairabilty, but even they’ve stopped selling separate DDR5 modules

Also, Luke from LTT on RAM pricing:

1. DDR5 was mostly built with corporate clients in mind
2. A lot of manufacturers see the “bag” from selling to enterprise
3. Intel, Nvidia, etc. rerouting their capacity for enterprise instead of the consumer market
4. “Why deal with us annoying lowly people that don’t have money, when you can deal with the hyperscaler bros that have all of the money”

Get ready to bow down and sing praises to CXMT and YMTC (both Chinese manufacturers), cause they’re probably the only salvation you have for your homelab.

My second day without AI, it took me 4 hours to write a simple Express API

Most software engineering involves plumbing together the same 4 SaaS tools that corporate approved and negotiated contracts with. Most software engineers are mercenaries, typing away for cash. Most of the frustration software engineers face in the industry comes from the deadly impression that they’re actually artists.

Good balance between hype and doom in this article responding a NYT’s op-ed calling AI ‘mid’.

A piece stuck out to me is how the author describes AI changing the constraint landscape, especially around how we interact with information:

Transformer-based AI has fundamentally changed how we interact with information […]. Being able to skip, summarize and compare content - we’re no longer bound to consume information in the packages it was created.

I found myself throwing Varoufakis’ content into Claude to try to spit out points that I could use to argue against people on Mastodon. I’m unsure if I learned something from what Varoufakis was trying to say, or I was just molding his content and tone to the argument I wanted to make. I fear it was actually the latter.

I find a lot of links, many of them end up in Linkhut, which is quite nice for social sharing, but I’d like to surface them here too.

Mike Carney leading with Thucydides’ quote on “strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”. Thucydides does not offer the line, “The strong do what they can,” as a neutral analysis of how international affairs operate. He offers it as an expression of the reckless arrogance that brought about the destruction of the Athenian Empire.

Impressive seeing western world leaders challenging the “international rules-based order”, and embracing quite Third Worldist talking points related to “middle powers uniting”.