Yeah, looking forward to the day when SoCs fully replace discrete GPUs for all the reasons you stated, and also when there are better options than Apple devices in that space. Pretty sure there have never been many render farms built from Apple hardware, though, and Mac Pros have never been the most cost effective option for applications requiring a lot of compute. MacBooks and phones, on the other hand, are more of a sweet spot, and the M chips have done wonders there to your point.

It’s a SoC and is certainly more power efficient, can fit into smaller form factors, etc. It’s definitely progress in the right direction, but is still to expensive to be a practical alternative to higher-end GPUs. What am I missing?

According to this Blender benchmark, a M3 Ultra with 80 cores is similar to a 4070 Ti. Too bad a machine with a M3 Ultra with 80 cores will cost several grand while a 4070 Ti can be had for a grand. I appreciate that a SoC can use RAM instead of the scam that is VRAM, but Apple needs to do something about that price, or otherwise, might as well get a 5090.

Blender 🥰

Nvidia announced that it would invest $100 billion into OpenAI, OpenAI announced that it would pay $300 billion to Oracle for computing power, and Oracle announced it would buy $40 billion worth of chips from Nvidia.

I can’t help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing." “That’s not true”, responded the second economist. “We increased the GDP by $200!”

Except the way it actually works is Larry, Jensen, and Sam keep the money while the rest of us eat shit.

I shall try that. 🤔

Given how few upvotes this has, it seems people in this thread don’t like Microsoft’s policy, but also have a moral objection to running a script to get the extended updates free.

I just set a static IP in Windows, then block that IP from the internet in my OpenWRT firewall.

Correct, nothing to hide because nobody gets their games from the high seas.

Setting up full-disk encryption on a Steam Deck with an on-screen keyboard should definitely be an option during SteamOS installation, but it’s a pain as it stands. It’s my only Linux device not using LUKS.

Seems a lot of distros put it under an advanced section in the installer, but I think the “advanced” option should be not enabling full-disk encryption, meaning you know what you’re doing and have assessed the risk.

I use k3s with Calico so I can have k8s network policies for each service I’m running.

NVIDIA definitely dominates for specialized workloads. Look at these Blender rendering benchmarks and notice AMD doesn’t appear until page 3. Wish there were an alternative to NVIDIA Optix that were as fast for path tracing, but there unfortunately is not. Buy an AMD card if you’re just gaming, but you’re unfortunately stuck with NVIDIA if you want to do path traced rendering cost effectively:

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.5.0

Edit:

Here’s hoping AMD makes it to the first page with next generation hardware like Radiance Cores:

https://wccftech.com/amd-unveils-radiance-cores-neural-arrays-universal-compression-next-gen-rdna-gpu-architecture/

Yeah, I’m used to GPT and Claude for code, so Duck.ai just pales in comparison, as much as I appreciate that it might be more private.

Edit:

Actually, seems you can get access to more advanced models if you give them $10 / month.

In my experience, Duck.ai is practically useless, but their AI Search Assist is pretty spot on a fair amount of the time.

I mainly use DDG search as an incrementally better option than Google. Other options mentioned in this thread are probably better still, but DDG is definitely still a better option than Google that doesn’t require signing up with a credit card or self-hosting something, as imperfect as it may be.

I use Restic and also use Backrest to have a UI to browse my repos. I would use Backrest for everything, but I’d rather have my backup config completely source controlled.

Plot twist: they’re the same.

I have @home and @ subvolumes, with Timeshift taking automated weekly snapshots of @ with all of the system directories, but don’t I bother with @home since that gets backed up in other ways.

I recently setup Mint with btrfs Timeshift, and grub-btrfs to make it more like OpenSUSE. It’s more work to do that with Mint, but I’ve tried customizing other distros to make them more like Mint and have come to the conclusion I just like Mint.