This was why MMO experience was sought out.

—The Far Side, October 15, 1990

Hmm.

A lot of these are going to be just request-driven. That is, they aren’t really doing anything while idling. Thus, they don’t really need to be actually running.

If the idle memory usage is an actual concern — and honestly, the OS is probably just gonna page things out if the software is truly idle and it needs the memory for something else and it has paging space…I kind of assume that someone has built some sort of system that works like inetd, which avoided leaving non-containerized servers running. You register a port, and then inetd listens on it. When someone connects, it starts up the daemon in question (say, Apache or whatever). Just need to start a container on demand here. Maybe close it down after a long-enough period of inactivity.

EDIT:

https://old.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/72sdyf/startrun_a_container_when_incoming_traffic/

Start/run a container when incoming traffic detected

Sounds like you’re looking for inetd.

A more modern version of this is systemd socket activation.

Podman supports socket activation since version 3.4.0 (released Sep 2021).

how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.

Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you’re not getting the largest drives possible.

That’s maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it’s significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.

It appears that most people don’t care about spending $100 on a video game.

I’m fine with spending $100 on a video game. I mean, said video game needs to provide reasonable value, but the amount of time I play a game varies way more than game price, is the dominant factor.

I didn’t really like what I played of GTA 5 and probably won’t play this one, but for the right game, sure. If I could get a game I like similar to Oxygen Not Included, which I’ve played for many, many hours, I’d do $100 happily.

pre-orders

Now that I will agree with being a problem.

Maybe it’s for older cards?

Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s.

—Catch-22, Copyright 1961

Driving a black car in Australia seems like a recipe for hot interiors, any safety issues aside.

They’re like birds, right? Don’t they have a cloaca instead?

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Apparently yes, though this author couldn’t resist “butthole”…

https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html

1st preserved dinosaur butthole is ‘perfect’ and ‘unique,’ paleontologist says

This was a multipurpose hole.

The first dinosaur butthole ever discovered is shedding light where the sun don’t shine. The discovery reveals how dinosaurs used this multipurpose opening — scientifically known as a cloacal vent — for pooping, peeing, breeding and egg laying.

I can’t tell you how to do it under Wayland off the cuff, but you can map a controller’s analog stick to act like a mouse. It’s a little clumsy, but that’ll let you use any mouse-oriented DE.

Some gamepads, like the PS5’s controller and I assume the Steam Controller, have touchpads built into the controller that work as pointing devices.

If you don’t specifically want only a gamepad, I’d probably use a trackball or touchpad and maybe keyboard, as a trackball can be used from a couch, lile a gamepad.

In the global financial crisis, in at least California, which is a non-recourse mortgage state — that is, if someone defaults on a mortgage, the lender can only go after the property — a number of people discovered that if they refinanced, the new mortgage was recourse, and a lender could go after other assets and wages to cover the default. For people who bought into the top of a bubble, then walked away from the house after prices dropped and they were underwater, had negative equity, this was a major issue.

Those rules were later changed, but I would be careful to understand the implications of refinancing a mortgage in your particular jurisdiction, as they may be non-obvious and substantial.

On one hand, I think that it’s fair to point out, and an interesting point.

But…on the other hand, I also think that generally when people say “we did X”, they’re often including people who aren’t their direct ancestors. And the degree to which they do that is context-dependent. Though they probably aren’t going back anything like 20 million years, either, in any kind of common context.

What’s our closest living relative?

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Looks like chimpanzees and bonobos, and our last common ancestor was maybe 5–13 million years back.

I guess we would include 'em in “we” if someone was saying “we left the oceans”. But they aren’t gonna make the in-group for “we won that sports game last night”.

There are a number of games — particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm — that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

I’d assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it’s got a strategy more sophisticated than just “load resource first time it’s requested”. But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

Bethesda uses the term “cell”. I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

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It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is “sublevel”, for the units loaded.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.

But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.

There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.

He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.

There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.

But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.

So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.

That comment is quoting text from an article.

I have not seen that particular cartoon.

However, a common criticism is that there are only a handful of Garfield cartoon “templates” with some bits swapped out, and I have seen plenty of Garfield cartoons in approximately this format: three panels, Garfield is bored, John is emotional, Garfield is bored.

goes back to look at the first year of Garfield

Okay, apparently it predates Garfield, as there was a predecessor strip, Jon:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Jon,_1976_comic_strips

Jon comic #7, February 19, 1976:

EDIT: Jon #1 looked familiar. It looks like a lot of the first year of Garfield was recycled Jon cartoons too. For example, here’s Jon #1:

And here’s Garfield #1:

So, from past reading, I believe that a lot of jobs in brick-and-mortar banks — which have historically had a major brick-and-mortar presence — have been on a long decline. That’s a phenomenon that well predates popular LLM use, brought about by Internet, ATMs, and similar, which tended to displace brick-and-mortar stuff.

I physically went by my local bank the other month (for the first time in a long time) and while the building was still there, it was like a tomb. All of the service desks that had once held tellers were empty. There was one person in an office handling the few people coming by in person.

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https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/money-mentor/the-rise-of-online-banking-in-the-us

Every year, more and more Americans are going online to do their banking.

According to Pew Research Center, 46 percent of adults in the United States banked online in 2010. That number grew to 51 percent in 2013, and in 2015, a full 81 percent of adults who manage their household’s finances banked online.

https://www.branchspot.com/bank-branches-closed/

U.S. banks have been closing branches for years — thinning out “banking deserts” where the nearest branch is now miles away. Branchspot tracks 939 closed or relocated branches nationwide, sourced from the FDIC.

You could get a Thermos and brew up a bunch yourself, just take a chilled drink with you.

Gives you a wider selection and doesn’t take long for the Thermos to pay itself back.

I don’t usually take iced tea, but I have been known to take a Thermos of ice water.

I agree that “open source” is often incorrectly used to refer to open-weight models, things that are more analogous to closed-source software where you get the binaries.

That being said, the article does correctly use “open weights”. The submitted title here lacks it, but the current title of the article does appear to have it, so either the article author updated the title or the submitter truncated it.

Most people wouldn’t use their phones for console games if they could, because it’s a different form, with a device that has a different purpose. The way most people play mobile games & console games are very different: sporadic short sessions during the day is different from a 2-3 hour gaming session.

I mean, he’s talking about at the game dev level, so if he’s thinking of mobile, which he did not explicitly say, I assume that he’s not talking about “run existing non-mobile-platform game on server, play on mobile”, but rather “develop new game that runs on server and displays on mobile”. It could reasonably be structured toward bursty mobile play. Just provides more compute power than exists on a phone. The phone basically is doing the equivalent of streaming YouTube and passing inputs up, in such a scenario.

The article author, on the other hand, is clearly thinking about PCs, given that they’re talking about GPU prices.