> [...] [I]n the long run, choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills.

Probably the pull quote of the (short) thing for me. It lines up exactly with my personal experience, and is probably one of the biggest overall dangers of this technology aside from mass unemployment and making my RAM cost too much.

I'm very glad that Pope Leo continues to speak about AI in such clear ways. It's obvious he and/or the Curia really get it and the costs and dangers it has.

I agree with the Pope's message, but I wonder if religious leaders worry/are motivated to speak by the fact that that AI might "steal" their audience.

I wonder what e.g. the Ayatollah of Iran would say about the use of AI. Is there an AyatollahGPT?

"if religious leaders worry/are motivated to speak by the fact ..."

Yes, IMO. But the topic is, or almost is, too complicated for the general public.

I just (right now) explained the document to a cathechist and her mind went to how video games harm the youth, which is tangential. I then explained "do not renounce to your ability to think" applied to feeds and fake news, which caused confusion; discussion is required for that. Again, this is a devote interested in education, I can _fear_ imagine how it would go with most people.

> one of the biggest overall dangers of this technology aside from mass unemployment and making my RAM cost too much.

That's a beauty.

I also game on Ubuntu and snaps have never been in my way. I actually like them and wish more non-game software was distributed this way, but Canonical has a brown thumb when it comes to growing their weird little side projects.

I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.

I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.

I think the very first code I wrote was in QBasic, but the first _real_ code I wrote was in Visual Basic 6. I drew a row of dice and then a bunch of buttons and wrote a Yahtzee game (single player). It took me weeks and it was mostly a giant nested if statement.

Good times.

Same order for me. Also DOS batch files if they count.

Me too. QBasic and DOS batch files were the gateway drug.

Merry Christmas to you, too, and to all that read this.

A relevant verse about a sometimes stressful day:

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.

- Matthew 6:34

What a lovely hit of nostalgia on this cold winter morning. Thanks for sharing this, and thanks to the people who made it. Cruising through Besaid Village and Ironforge brought back some strong memories. I could hear the music in my head even though the room was silent.

Wow, I did not expect to feel the things I did flying through Ironforge.

So, you say that AI has made you "ridiculously faster", but then admit you've always been terrible at estimating how long something would take?

I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories.

All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.

Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.

Hopefully this blows over in a few years and you’re right and I’m just catastrophizing.

One way or another. Either the AI stuff cools off, or the RAM people spin up more fabs.

Well there's like 4 RAM manufacturers, so probably they will spin up new fabs but continue to collude to keep prices high.

They were previously colluding into the most profitable production volume. If demand stays high, the most profitable volume increases.

That means that yes, it will probably by more expensive than before this raise, but no, not nearly as much as today.

They already said they aren't going to increase supply, most likely because they think the AI bubble will pop and they'd be stuck holding the bag.

Businesses occasionally change their mind in response to market conditions.

Yh, my moderately capable machine is from 8 years ago and had already waited for an upgrade. Was going to be this Black Friday. Crabcakes.

There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses

I can afford it. Other people cannot, and the hobby is driven by a market existing for games. If newer people don’t enter the hobby as others die out, it fades away.

The silver lining could be that game developers spend more time on actual gameplay, and less time on chasing graphical fidelity.

Silksong is playable on an 8 year old Nintendo Switch.

Yeah. Thanks for trying to keep me positive.

Hopefully this all calms down eventually. But it's hard not to feel like shit in this situation.

I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.

The prices are wild tho.

I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL

It’s frustrating that it’s been one thing after the other, seemingly aimed directly at the thing I enjoy most.

> In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.

This is like saying "Spotify's subscriber count grew by 800% over the last 10 years. Music is doing better than ever!"

If the complaint was about access to music, then yes, that would valid. Which seemed to be the complaint implied regarding RAM as it related to PC gaming.

> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.

What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?

What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.

Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.

They didn't mess up Valve yet :)

Try buying GTA San Andreas on Steam - if you didn't buy it before some cutoff date a few years ago, all you can get is the shit AI textures "remaster".

Steam is a powerful force, and I applaud them for staying private and not IPO'ing - but their founders won't be around forever (hell Gabe, please transfer Steam into some sort of public-good trust or whatever, or have provisions in your will making it impossible for whomever inherits the company to enshittify), and sadly even they can't beat down on the studios too hard lest they end up like Netflix.

It's not exactly Valve's fault what Rockstar has decided to do with sales of their games.

secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.

And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.

>Is there religious DRAM?

RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C

If only this were the case.