Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
Magewell Pro Capture card
I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.
All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.
But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.
There are three major DRAM chip manufacturers: Micron, in the US, and Samsung and SK Hynix, both in South Korea.
Micron has two new fabs coming online in Boise, Idaho. The earliest one is scheduled to start operation in the first half of 2027 (they recently announced that they’d moved that timeline up from the second half of 2027) though it’ll take time to ramp up; it will not be doing output at full capacity immediately when it first starts up.
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
They announced late last year that they were going to do a second Boise one as well for more capacity.
They also have New York fabs that they’re doing:
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
For the South Korean manufacturers:
Samsung
This year, Samsung is prioritizing the conversion of its lines to memory chips at its Pyeongtaek campus in Gyeonggi and the acceleration of new facility construction at the site.
At the P4 plant, the company is upgrading dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) production to its latest 1c process, which will be used for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced DRAM chips. Samsung aims to secure 1c capacity of more than 200,000 wafers per month by the end of the year through line conversion and additional equipment installation.
Construction of P5, which had previously been delayed during the semiconductor downturn, resumed this year with a timeline accelerated by roughly six months compared to earlier plans. The chipmaker is bringing in tens of thousands of new workers to construct the megafab, capable of producing HBM, DRAM, NAND flash and potentially foundry chips. Construction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, with equipment installation beginning shortly afterward and mass production targeted for the latter part of 2028.
Construction of the last Pyeongtaek facility, P6, is currently expected to start in the third quarter of 2028.
SK Hynix
SK hynix is currently concentrating short-term investment on expanding capacity at its M15X fab in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, while also upgrading older lines.
The company is adding 1b DRAM capacity at M15X, while accelerating 1c node conversions at its M14 and M16 fabs for production of HBM and server DRAM. After hitting a capacity of 10,000 wafers per month last year, it is expected to expand capacity by up to 70,000 wafers per month this year.
For a new greenfield project, SK hynix is advancing construction at the Yongin semiconductor cluster in Gyeonggi, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing projects globally. The cluster will ultimately host six Samsung fabs from Samsung and four SK hynix facilities, and the latter is moving ahead first.
Construction of the first fab, Y1, is expected to be completed in February of next year, earlier than previously planned. Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.
Y1 will be built in six cleanroom “phases,” a unit used in fab construction for the capacity expansion stage. Each phase adds more floor space and related equipment for wafer capacity expansion. The first three phases are expected to begin operation within the same year, providing a capacity of 150,000 wafers per month, with the remaining phases adding another 150,000 wafers per month once fully operational.
The second fab in the cluster, Y2, is expected to begin construction around the third quarter of 2028.
So, two points.
First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.
But, second…I think that some perspective is in order. Set new production aside. Let’s imagine a world where that didn’t happen. In fact, let’s imagine that not a single additional memory chip was going to be produced. Video games were around when I played games on an Atari 2600, to pick an early video game console. I had fun with it. It didn’t have the latest, real-time rendered photorealistic graphics. But…the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Bytes.
There are people building microcontrollers right now that have onboard memory, and those aren’t impacted by this. It’s just the high-density dedicated memory chips that go on DIMMs that are seeing all that demand.
According to Wikipedia, there were 30 million Atari 2600s made. The CPU I currently have in my desktop has a little over 145MB of onboard cache. Twenty-six of those CPUs, looking just at their onboard cache, no external memory from Micron/Samsung/SK Hynix, have more memory than all of the 30 million Atari 2600s ever manufactured, combined.
Like, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy using all this memory that we have had available in recent years. But…video games are here to stay and would be even if no dedicated memory chips were around.
As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.
Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You’re likely to get more for your money.
If you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don’t have prices driven by memory price.
They’re building out. The first ones are going to be mid-late 2027, but those aren’t expected to be at full production until about 2028.
searches
Hmm. Micron says that they’re aiming to move up their first fab becoming active to the first half of 2027, now:
https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article314253330.html
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says the company is pushing up its timelines for opening its first semiconductor fabrication plant, or fab, into the first half of 2027, instead of the second half. His announcement in a Dec. 17 earnings call came months after the chipmaker unveiled plans to start construction on a second fab in 2026, eyeing a 2028 ribbon-cutting.
They also have a second fab in Boise, Idaho, and some in New York that theylre building.
Both Samsung and SK Hynix have fabs in South Korea that they’re building.
Yeah, but he’s got a point. The GOG new game library is much smaller than on Steam.
I hope that Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung don’t hit any hiccups with their memory chip production buildouts.
I’d just stick screens on one’s windows and maybe use DEET if you’re really at the height of mosquito season in a bad area.
Like, this has a DSLR camera, a GPU constantly churning away, a laser…
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/01/ibm-introduces-new-rainbow-logo-support-lgbtq-community/
IBM introduces new rainbow logo in support of the LGBTQ community
January 9, 2017, 5:00 pm EST
Vanish has -l.
A group of eight men in their early 20s were enjoying a lunchtime beer in a dizzyingly hot, artificially turfed square outside the shopping centre. “We can’t afford AC yet,” one said, “that’s why we work in finance, so one day we can afford it!” Most of them had invested in a Dyson fan, which retail for between £300 and £600.
If the concern is a few really hot days, just doing one room should be viable. A small window unit should be pretty inexpensive.
checks
At Home Depot here in the US, a small window A/C unit is maybe $170.
I mean, sure. You can do a split mini to avoid blocking a window (or having to remove and remount the window unit every summer) and reduce noise, or do a major renovation and put in ducted central A/C. You can definitely spend considerably more than the bare minimum. But the bar to getting a air conditioned room in the house should really not be very high. And a premium fan of the sort that they’re buying isn’t comparable to central A/C either.
They’re charging for premium features, not for basic access to the service.
I am hoping that you put your config in a git repository so that you can revert it.
All of the letter openers I’ve used have been relatively blunt.
Personally, the idea of “extending the life” by installing Linux is foreign to me because I immediately put Linux on any hardware I get anyway.
Well, that’s still sort of extending it past 0, so…
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen something like that occur, but can you hit DEL at boot, go into the “boot options” or similar in the BIOS and try manually selecting the USB flash drive as your boot device?
Can you try a different USB flash drive, on the assumption that it’s something about the device?
Huh. I had no idea that one would use an impact driver on Torx screws.
I kind of mentally associate Torx with (delicate) personal electronics and associate impact drivers with big, heavy pieces of hardware with rusty bolts.
But Lisp is case-insensitive
looks bemused
I don’t do that much Lisp, mostly use it for emacs, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not.
opens emacs
(setq foo 1)
(print foo)
1
OK. So far so good.
(setq foo 1)
(print FOO)
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable FOO)
(print FOO)
(progn (print FOO))
eval((progn (print FOO)) t)
elisp--eval-last-sexp(nil)
#f(compiled-function () #<bytecode 0xf6febdfec01a>)()
eval-last-sexp(nil)
funcall-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil)
command-execute(eval-last-sexp)
Elisp sure doesn’t look to be case-insensitive. Maybe he meant some specific variant? Common Lisp?
$ sudo apt install sbcl
Apparently sbcl’s REPL doesn’t support readline.
$ sudo apt install rlwrap
$ rlwrap sbcl
Huh. Looks like with readline, I also get cursor flashing to do paren matching, kinda like emacs can do. I had no idea that readline could do that. Apparently Common Lisp doesn’t do setq either.
more experimentation
* (let ((foo 1)) (print FOO))
1
1
Huh. So, yeah, I guess that Common Lisp is case-insensitive. That is a bit wild. I guess I do remember vaguely seeing old Lisp stuff with keywords in all-caps.
Is Scheme?
$ sudo apt install guile-3.0
Apparently the guile REPL doesn’t support readline either. God.
$ rlwrap guile
And it looks like “print” is “display” in Scheme-land.
scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display foo))
1
Okay, so that’s the syntax. Case-insensitive?
scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display FOO))
;;; <stdin>:2:24: warning: possibly unbound variable `FOO'
ice-9/boot-9.scm:1676:22: In procedure raise-exception:
Unbound variable: FOO
Nope.
I kinda feel like there are Lisps that the author could have used if they wanted Lisp and case-sensitivity, if that was the major irritation.
/https%3A%2F%2Ftf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffiler_public%2Ff6%2F75%2Ff6756cba-f37a-4bf0-8e46-3b14dddf98ed%2Frs22733_dsc00732_lpr.jpg)
I mean, the real sin here is from the Bluetooth SIG. If you make a radio protocol that broadcasts a unique identifier, it’s going to be abused sooner or later.
Google and Apple already know where Bluetooth devices have traveled if an iOS or Android phone using Location Services has come near them at any point.
Other people, like these ALPR guys, can probably harvest a little more data from users of Bluetooth devices, but they aren’t going to be the most meaningful harvester, as they have far fewer collection points.