efaardvark

Regarding the ridiculous prices of both flash and DDR memory lately I think (hope?) that the situation will improve in the next couple years. Unless you've been living under a rock you'll know that the cause of the nosebleed pricing is due to datacenter buildout for the AI crowd. There have already been quite a few datacenters built and operating. (Actually less than you might think given the media hype, but that's another topic.) A huge number are still in the planning stages. Before a datacenter can go online the parts must obviously be bought and installed. Lately, for NIMBY and other reasons the parts get purchased but then stored in a warehouse while the process of finding and purchasing land, going through the legal / permitting process, actually doing the construction, and contracting for long-term supply of water and electricity completes. So basically there's a lot of processors, power supplies, network switches, and other bits of kit that have been bought but that are currently just sitting in warehouses. And yes, this includes memory chips and SSDs. Now, if you do a bit of research into how many datacenters are already in the planning or building stages and add up all the power, water, land and other resources that will be necessary for them to actually be completed and powered up you get, literally, more than can possibly be supplied. For instance, just to power them all would take terawatts of electrical power. A typical commercial nuclear reactor puts out around 1 Gigawatt of power. A single terawatt is 1,000 Gigawatts. Clearly not all of these datacenters can possibly be supplied with even just the necessary electrical power. There would have to be literally over a thousand new nuclear reactors built to supply them with power. It takes decades to build a single nuclear power plant. A coal-fired plant can produce anywhere from several hundred megawatts to a gigawatt of power. The Hoover dam can supply 2 Gigawatts of hydro power if filled to capacity. The world's largest hydro power plant, the Three Gorges dam in china can "only" produce around 23GW of power. The world would need over 40 new Three Gorges hydro power plants to power the number of datacenters currently being planned. Speaking of which, water (for cooling all that electronic gear) is another resource that simply can not be supplied at the required levels to all those datacenters. So I think that in just a couple / few years the AI crowd will realize that their current plans are doomed to failure. Already several states have put moratoriums on building new datacenters. Land will not be available to build all of them on. Power will not be available to power them all. Water will not be available to cool them all. And the electronics in the warehouses will be old and obsolete. Even the bits that have managed to get installed in completed datacenters will be old and in need of upgrading to remain competitive. I predict that a lot of memory will be dumped on the market, much of it unused and at fire-sale prices by companies either going bankrupt or by ones trying to upgrade their inventory of gear that they hope to someday install in their datacenter(s). One can hope anyway.

This weekend we did a bit more work on the new town near the stronghold. My SIL did a bunch of detail work on the walls and I did some landscaping to create several levels of terraces where we can put some crops and some housing and shops for villagers. I also added a tower that will eventually be a landing pad for happy ghasts. The tower is about as high as it's going to get but I have to decide on the details of the pad at the top. Having a place to hitch ghasts will help with transportation and exploration. The terrain around the town is quite hilly, with steep drops to rivers that divide up the landscape. Travel by boat is fairly quick, but of course limited to the deep, Drowned-infested rivers, which in MC are notoriously sketchy as transportation. Traveling any distance on foot or horseback is made impractical by the high mountains a steep drops to the rivers. We haven't opened the End gate yet in this SMP game and we don't have elytra or shulkers yet so having a ghast or two available to travel by air will be a welcome addition, especially given the ghast's cargo-carrying ability.

90% of all launches in KSP ended this way.

Opposites Attract

This weekend we were building up another town in minecraft. This one is closer to fresh chunks so we can get to some of the newer content easier. (We don't typically edit our world to reset chunks, we just move the 'frontier' into new chunks.) The new place is not linked to the Nether network yet but it is also very close to one of the strongholds so there's easy access to the End. Eventually the lowest level by the water will be a dock / warehouse area, maybe with some villager smiths, while the upper levels will be terraced and have some housing for both players and merchant villagers. The top level near the church will have some farms/farmers and a cleric or two. I'll probably bring in a happy ghast at some point as well because most of the terrain is flat(ish), forested mountain tops with steep drops to the water making land or water travel problematic. While digging to find the End gate we found out that the mountain that the stronghold is in is basically a giant hollow dripstone cave, so we built a path through it. Nearby below we found a bunch of skulk, and after searching around in that for a bit we even found an ancient city. This is all using the new vulkan API btw, with Sodium and some performance mods, plus Sulkan as the shader. (Full mod list in the spoiler for anyone interested.)

If there's anything or anyone left. This is literally killing the home PC market. GPUs have been ridiculously expensive for years now. Old gfx cards are being re-released at prices HIGHER than they were when they were first released half a decade ago and considered cutting-edge. DDR5 motherboards are only slightly ridiculous in terms of price, but nobody can afford to put modern RAM or hard drives in them. Even the hard-core enthusiasts are buying older motherboards made for DDR4 memory and switching back to SATA spinny-discs for their hard drives. Batshit crazy stuff going on.

Those several years were a bit of a renaissance or golden era. The content producers were talented and had good stories, but the big Sonys and Disneys hadn't yet taken over and dumbed down most of the content to push it into the mainstream.

Welcome! I come from a time before PCs, cellphones, or the Internet. Been coding since before the 486 was invented. My tastes are .. eclectic. Mostly into science fiction but I'll watch or read (almost) anything for the entertainment of it. Fan of Ghost in the Shell. Books are mostly hard science such as from Niven, Clarke, or Heinlein. Music is largely prog metal with a theme, such as Threshold's "March of Progress", Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle Earth", or Ayreon's "Universal Migrator" albums. Games are mostly about crafting & building. Minecraft is a staple. Kerbal Space Program is my all-time favorite. Rockets and space exploration pays the bills. Don't be afraid to say "hi" if you see me around.

Checked out the first 3 ep of ブチ切れ令嬢は報復を誓いました。～魔導書の力で祖国を叩き潰します～ aka :A Livid Lady's Guide to Getting Even: How I Crushed My Homeland with My Mighty Grimoires. I seriously hope the long names fad isn't coming back. That said, and in spite of it, I think I might return to this one at season's end.

Mmmm.. pancakes for dinner!

Thought I'd do the 3-ep run on The Exiled Heavy Knight. Probably won't come back to it. The animation is not my style and the story definitely leaves something to be desired. I'm more into SF anyway.

I'd have taken the job offer sooner. It was a bump in pay and benefits but the job is also a lot more demanding. I'm already 62 (in Sept) and at the time I thought I was going to retire in a couple years so I felt I didn't need the stress. As it turns out, with the economy looking like it's going for a replay of the stagflation of the 70s and 80s I'll probably be working until I drop. There's not much I can do about the lunatics running things but I could have been better prepared financially. I eventually took the job anyway when I saw how things were playing out but an extra 6 years at the new employer would mean I'd now be past 5 years with only a few years left until 10, with a commensurate bump in benefits including an extra week of vaykay per year and already-vested 401k savings that I could be cashing out and rotating into investments better able to deal with a decade or two of double-digit inflation than the options the current plan provides.