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.
I mean, there are a number of cases in mythologies where you can find common elements. I’d buy that in some cases, there might be common elements causing it, but I don’t think that it’d need to be a common hallucinogen.
Off-the-cuff, some examples:
“Hybrid” animals that are a conglomeration of different animals.
It’s not just EVs that are connected.
Society can’t have females stripping for males — which I’m assuming from the official’s phrasing does not constitute a “direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values” — if they’re not leaving the kitchen.
Speaking in an interview with News.ru, Ivanov declared: "The creators of GTA 6 deliberately go to include destructive and vulgar content in their product, completely unacceptable to the moral health of society.
“This includes the planned inclusion of scenes of male striptease in the game, which is a direct and cynical violation of basic moral norms and traditional spiritual values.”
So…is this because the state has an issue with homosexuality, or are, say, bachelorette parties off-limits too?
The issues run deeper, Kaas Elias explained, than just these most recent cuts. “Unfortunately, the federal government has taken a step backward when it comes to public transport,” he said. For example, the Deutschlandticket for regional public transport across the country has transformed from a €9 a month COVID-19 era mega-success to €63 a month as of January 2026.
If I remember correctly back when that was announced, and there was some discussion on Reddit about it, that was intended from the beginning to be a temporary program.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
The Deutschlandticket (Deutschlandticket, lit. ‘Germany ticket’), also known as the D-Ticket, is a monthly subscription for local and regional public transport valid throughout Germany. It was introduced in May 2023 by the Scholz cabinet as the successor to the temporary 9-Euro-Ticket offered in summer 2022.
WP says it was temporary too.
But will the proprietary license(s) update correctly?
shrugs
I couldn’t say. If licenses are tied to the computer, there are a number of ways that they could have done that.
Unless you’re sure that they are tied to the hardware, though, may not be an issue. Like, they may phone home to some authentication server and just check for concurrent copies running with the same key or whatever.
I don’t agree with the whole “I hate anyone wealthy” thing that some of the left-wing crowd here has, but at least I can see where people are coming from. But…the bar for having a safe deposit box is pretty low. Depends on the size of the box, but you’re talking maybe $50/year in the US? I mean, okay, sure, “wealthy” is something of an arbitrary line, but that’s a…pretty low wealth bar for hating people. I just grabbed a pizza last night, and it was something like $25.
I believe that “older” mods can remove other mods, same as on Reddit, though I’ve never tried. So mods that show up higher on the list of mods in the right-hand sidebar in the Lemmy Web UI for the community.
Or instance admins on the instance where the community lives. They probably won’t get involved unless the mod is violating the rules they’ve set for their instance. Your idea of what constitutes acceptable behavior for the mod and their idea may or may not be the same.
You’d have to talk to either those “more senior” mods or the instance admins and convince one of them that the mod shouldn’t be a mod for that community.
Only alternative is going and creating some alternative community elsewhere and drawing users away.
I’ve never used the software package in question.
If you already own the software, and if the hardware it uses to talk to the microcontroller is on a serial port or USB-attached serial port, then you can most-likely just run it under WINE. This isn’t a VM, but a Windows compatibility layer — you don’t need to run a copy of Windows in a VM and all that. It’d be my first shot. That way, you can just use it like any other Linux program, don’t need to blow extra memory or overhead on running Windows in a VM.
So, say the program in question has an installer, picbasic-installer.exe.
So you’re going to want to install WINE. I don’t use Arch, so I’ll leave that up to you, but I believe that the Arch package manager is pacman. They may have some graphical frontend that you prefer to use.
Then go ahead and, in a virtual terminal program, invoke picbasic-installer.exe — assuming that that’s what the installer is called — under WINE:
$ wine picbasic-installer.exe
That’ll run the installer.
Now, my guess is that that much won’t have problems. And that WINE will run the thing. And it’ll probably let you compile BASIC programs.
You can go ahead and fire up your PICBASIC PRO program. I don’t know how you launch Windows programs in your Arch environment. In general, WINE installers will drop a .desktop file under ~/.local/share/applications, and that can be started the way any other application can. I use a launcher program, tofi, to start programs like that under sway using tofi-drun, but you probably have a completely different environment set up. My guess is that your desktop environment on Arch probably has some kind of system menu of applications or something like that that will include WINE programs with a desktop file in it. Or maybe you have some program that shows a searchable list of programs and can launch from that. KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, etc will probably all have their own routes, but I don’t use those, so I can’t tell you what they do. I’ll leave that up to you.
What you’re likely to run into problems with is that if the PICBASIC PRO program wants to talk to that microcontroller programmer via a serial port (which on Windows would probably be COM0 or COM1 or whatever), it’s going to need to talk to /dev/ttyS0 or /dev/ttyS1 or whatever on Linux, or if it’s a USB-attached, /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, etc. Ordinary users probably don’t have permission to write directly to them, by default.
There are a couple ways to grant permission, but one of the most-straightforward ways is to add your user to a group that has permission.
The basic Unix file permission system has each file — including device files, like /dev/ttyS0 — owned by one user and one group.
On my Debian trixie system:
$ ls -l /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Jan 15 20:46 /dev/ttyS0
$
So that serial port device file is owned by the user root, which has read and write privileges (the first “rw”) and the group dialout, which has read and write privileges (the second “rw”). Any user that belongs to that group will be able to write to the serial ports.
On my system, my user doesn’t belong to the “dialout” group:
$ groups
tal cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev users render netdev bluetooth lpadmin scanner docker libvirt ollama systemd-journal
$
So I’m going to want to add my user to that group:
$ sudo usermod -aG dialout tal
$
Group permissions get assigned to processes when you log in (that is, usermod just sets what groups the process started when you log in as has, and then all its child processes). Technically, you don’t have to log out to do this — you could run sg dialout at this point, and then from that shell, run wine and see if it works — but I’d probably log out and then back in again, to keep things simplest. After you do that, you should see that you’re in the “dialout” group:
$ groups
night_petal <list of groups> dialout
$
After that, you should be able to use the program and write code to the microcontroller.
Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up.
Eh…I don’t know if you’d call it “really serious hardware”, but when I picked up my 128GB Framework Desktop, it was $2k (without storage), and that box is often described as being aimed at the hobbyist AI market. That’s pricier than most video cards, but an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU was north of $1k, an NVidia RTX 4090 was about $2k, and it looks like the NVidia RTX 5090 is presently something over $3k (and rising) on EBay, well over MSRP. None of those GPUs are dedicated hardware aimed at doing AI compute, just high-end cards aimed at playing games that people have used to do AI stuff on.
I think that the largest LLM I’ve run on the Framework Desktop was a 106 billion parameter GLM model at Q4_K_M quantization. It was certainly usable, and I wasn’t trying to squeeze as large a model as possible on the thing. I’m sure that one could run substantially-larger models.
EDIT: Also, some of the newer LLMs are MoE-based, and for those, it’s not necessarily unreasonable to offload expert layers to main memory. If a particular expert isn’t being used, it doesn’t need to live in VRAM. That relaxes some of the hardware requirements, from needing a ton of VRAM to just needing a fair bit of VRAM plus a ton of main memory.
That’s why they have the “Copilot PC” hardware requirement, because they’re using an NPU on the local machine.
searches
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/npu-devices/
Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 hardware powered by a high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation—that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, substantially outdoes what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.
But it is doing local computation.
Ah, good investigation. I looked on their website and couldn’t find anything (though that might have said something…companies that do domestic manufacturing tend to trumpet the fact).
I’m kind of more-sympathetic to Microsoft than to some of the other companies involved.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the Windows platform that they control to do local LLM use. I’m not at all sure that there’s actually enough memory out there to do that, or that it’s cost-effective to put a ton of memory and compute capacity in everyone’s home rather than time-sharing hardware in datacenters. Nor am I sold that laptops — which many “Copilot PCs” are — are a fantastic place to be doing a lot of heavyweight parallel compute.
But…from a privacy standpoint, I kind of would like local LLMs to be at least available, even if they aren’t as affordable as cloud-based stuff. And at least Microsoft is at least supporting that route. A lot of companies are going to be oriented towards just doing AI stuff in the cloud.
You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.
I mean…normally, yes, but because the situation has been changing so radically in such a short period of time, it probably is possible to get some bonkers deals in various niches, because the market hasn’t stabilized yet.
Like, a month and a half back, in early December, when prices had only been going up like crazy for a little while, I was posting some tiny retailers that still had RAM in stock at pre-price-increase rates that I could find on Google Shopping. IIRC the University of Virginia bookstore was one, as they didn’t check that purchasers were actually students. I warned that they’d probably be cleaned out as soon as scalpers got to them, and that if someone wanted memory, they should probably get it ASAP. Some days prior to that, there was a small PC parts store in Hawaii that had some (though that was out of stock by the next time I was looking and mentioned the bookstore).
That’s not to disagree with the point that @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world is making, that this was awfully sketchy as a source, or your point that scavenging components off even a non-scam piece of secondhand non-functional hardware is risky. But in times of rapid change, it’s not impossible to find deals. In fact, it’s various parties doing so that cause prices to stabilize — anyone selling memory for way below market price is going to have scalpers grab it.
Yeah, I’ve never used one myself — please don’t take it as an endorsement on that front. I was just trying to think of a Western keyboard company.
I also subscribe to !ErgoMechKeyboards@lemmy.world, and OP could try them.
I thought that Matias was western. Looking them up, it looks like they’re in Canada. It looks like they sell both keyboards and keyswitches, though I’m not certain that they manufacture everything locally or whether they brand it and have manufacturing done in China or somewhere like that.
I think that Cherry just sold off their German production facilities or something. I vaguely recall posting something along those lines when it came up in the news. Cheaper Chinese competitors kind of killed them off.
searches
https://blackout-news.de/en/news/end-of-cherry-production-in-germany/
End of Cherry production in Germany
December 6, 2025
Cherry, the internationally renowned peripherals manufacturer from Auerbach in the Upper Palatinate region of Germany, is ceasing its German production after 60 years. Cherry became particularly famous for its iconic keyboards, which are expected to continue being manufactured in the Far East. Production in Germany, however, is no longer profitable, according to management.
Even though six decades of purely German production is a long time, Cherry is now, historically speaking, returning to its roots. These roots lay in the USA for the later German icon, as its Anglo-Saxon name suggests. Walter Cherry founded the company in 1953 in Highland Park, Illinois, and established the German production line in 1963. With the peripherals produced here, the company achieved a spectacular international breakthrough in 1983. That year, it launched the MX Switches, which have since defined the global standard for mechanical keyboards.
However, a Cherry patent expired in 2014, protecting the company’s MX design. Since then, Chinese companies have flooded the market with equivalent but cheaper alternatives. Manufacturers like Kailh, Gateron, and Outemu now offer switches with innovative technologies such as the Hall effect, some of which even come pre-lubricated. The Hall effect is a magnetic actuation mechanism for variable actuation points. Far Eastern manufacturers have now mastered this technology better than Cherry.
Completely relocating production to China will undoubtedly reduce costs and perhaps even bring Chinese expertise into the company. Industry leaders like Razer and Logitech took this path years ago.
I’m not really a hardware person, but purely in terms of logic gates, making a memory circuit isn’t going to be hard. I mean, a lot of chips contain internal memory. I’m sure that anyone that can fabricate a chip can fabricate someone’s memory design that contains some amount of memory.
For PC use, there’s also going to be some interface hardware. Dunno how much sophistication is present there.
I’m assuming that the catch is that it’s not trivial to go out and make something competitive with what the PC memory manufacturers are making in price, density, and speed. Like, I don’t think that if you want to get a microcontroller with 32 kB of onboard memory, that it’s going to be a problem. But that doesn’t really replace the kind of stuff that these guys are making.
EDIT: The other big thing to keep in mind is that this is a short-term problem, even if it’s a big problem. I mean, the problem isn’t the supply of memory over the long term. The problem is the supply of memory over the next couple of years. You can’t just build a factory and hire a workforce and get production going the moment that someone decides that they want several times more memory than the world has been producing to date.
So what’s interesting is really going to be solutions that can produce memory in the near term. Like, I have no doubt that given years of time, someone could set up a new memory manufacturer and facilities. But to get (scaled-up) production in a year, say? Fewer options there.
One more thought — I don’t think that, even if someone is willing to do so as a stopgap until memory production ramps up adequately, that it’s possible to run Windows 11 on a DDR3-based system. DDR4 came out 12 years ago.
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On top of that, it’s also disposable median income, so accounts for taxes and such, which could also be a factor between high and low tax states.