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jorvi

5,096 karma · joined February 24, 2017

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jorvi··on Sales of sub-€25,000 electric car models set to rise sevenfold
The Dolphin sells for about €6700-€8900 ($7500-$10.000) in China.

They see how the EU allows EU car companies to gouge their citizens and figured "eh, might as well join in on it. Pure profit."

jorvi··on An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows
The point is moreso that Chrome being a battery hog is a myth.

Safari is less private than Brave and does not have the breadth of extension that Chromium browsers (and Firefox) do. So again, the only reason to really choose Safari is if you're completely in the Apple ecosystem.

jorvi··on Apple Pass Designer
Siri will randomly refuse simple commands as "skip track" or "lower volume", or the classic "here are the results for 'set oven timer 35 minutes'.."

But it's not about that. They'll all improve, but since for the majority of people their entire life is in the Googlesphere, they will want to run Gemini. And the DMA will even let them on iPhones and iPads.

jorvi··on An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows
Chromium-based browsers actually have had better battery life than Safari for 2 years (!) now[0]. And perform better. Which is a real egg on Apple's face.

The only reason to use Safari is because you're knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, otherwise something like Chrome, Edge or Brave just makes more sense.

[0]https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...

jorvi··on Apple Pass Designer
Not sure where this comes from.

Google is going to win the consumer AI battle and Microsoft the B2B battle.

This is purely because model cost will trend to zero whilst capability will reach an equilibrium, meaning the only moat is user lock-in.

Android owns something like 60-80% of the global market, and most people using an iPhone actually use the Gsuite (Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, etc) from day to day. The EU (and after that probably India and Japan) are going to force Apple to open up iOS to accept other assistants.

jorvi··on ICC judge on what U.S. sanctions mean for her and global courts
This is why WERO and the digital Euro are so crucial. Once the EU has a separate financial backbone, they can tell the US to go pound sand.
jorvi··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
All the big techs have accelerated zilch in actual features released or user-facing bugs fixed. All that seems to have accelerated is cybersecurity offense and defense.

And these are supposedly the most brilliant corporations around, so other companies are seeing even less gain.

I stick with my theory that LLMs are GPU-like, not CPU-like. They will rarely solve a problem like an adept, but they can solve 1 000 000 million low-hanging fruit problems within a second in a way that there was just not enough eyeballs for before. They can also brute force problems.

jorvi··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
My dad recently needed to buy a new thermostat for his home with an air furnace (yes, he told the model) asking an AI which one to buy, and he got recommended one that only properly works with boilers. Then after that happened, the alternative he bought the AI never told them he needed to buy a gateway to connect to his furnace.

I think we are a long long looong way from AI designing 'terawatt fusion plants'.

jorvi··on KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal
I am telling you again and again that other distros already do this.... there is nothing special about being able to install Spotify from the get go in a unified installer together with packages, you can do the same on Gnome or KDE with their respective software center apps.

You're just overly enamored. Omarchy has nothing special behind it except the dude who made it.

jorvi··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
It isn't really, as long as you don't care about power consumption, physical constraints and money. Basically desktops <2025 (and hopefully >2027).

DDR is optimized for latency and stability at the cost of bandwidth whilst GDDR is optimized for bandwidth at the cost of latency and stability. GDDR is pushed so hard these days that a small percentage of errors is expected and corrected because this is still faster than running it slower but more accurate.

GDDR7 often has 10-20x the total bandwidth but 3x the latency of DDR5. Graphical workloads want as much bandwidth as possible but care relatively little for latency. Conversely, applications love low latency but don't really see any performance benefit from higher bandwidth.

So basicallyt you have workloads that are diametrically opposed and running unified memory forces you to compromise.

jorvi··on KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal
> Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful.

Both Gnome and KDE have done this for years..

> Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it?

Literally their own documentation says it only themes Chromium and you have to do Obsidian manually. That also points to another of its biggest criticisms: because its vibecoded (including the documentation), it is basically a house of cards.

> It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy

I mean, if you just care about riced setups there's stuff like this[0]. But both in Omarchy and that setup, the beauty is only skin deep. If you dip your toe even one bit out of the tested paths, you're gonna run into regular Linux ugliness. Its not something I mind (I run NixOS on my desktop and homelab server and clients), but Omarchy shouldn't be venerated as some new era of Linux desktop. Its not.

It wouldn't even be much of a problem only if Omarchy wasn't suddenly getting millions in funding. That money should go elsewhere.

[0]https://youtu.be/kYZ5mkGuQEg

jorvi··on KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal
The only "commercial app" it themes automatically is Chromium. Obsidian you have to manually theme, the rest is just DE stuff that other distros also automatically theme.

There's just nothing about Omarchy that makes it special or "good taste", in the sense that something like Regolith[0] is special. Or NixOS or uBlue.

I'll say again, Omarchy only got attention because of its creator, and now it is draining away funding from other Linux DE stuff. Bad taste.

[0]https://regolith-desktop.com/

jorvi··on KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal
I wouldn't exactly call Omarchy "good taste". Not that it's terrible, but pretty much the only reason it caught attention is because of the creator.
jorvi··on Astra for Law
Yup, this.

It is actually one of my test cases for LLMs: take the weekly discount PDFs of all the big supermarkets and process each of them, creating a nice table per supermarkt, converting discounts like 1+1 and only listing discounts that are interesting value. I then share that with a bunch of people.

All models fail this, even the really expensive ones. Even with harness, examples and proper insistent instruction, they'll mix up items and their related discount, which category the item should be in, which page they are on, skipping over items etc.

As said above, you can OCR it, but at that point you're not processing a PDF, you're processing an image.

And yes, I know the underlying raw PDF data is messy, but that's why it's such a good test.

jorvi··on Astra for Law
LLMs are still absolutely horrid at analyzing PDFs so the results they are getting must be chock full of errors..
jorvi··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Yup. Oh no, my meat isn't pumped full of hormones and vacuums aren't allowed to be hearing-damagingly loud. The horror..

Also re: OP, yes if you want to sell stuff in the EU, you will need to adhere to the same rules as EU companies.

jorvi··on Will there be a 7G?
5G mm is vaporware. Virtually no one uses it (especially globally) and it is expected to be stripped out within a generation or two.
jorvi··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
Yes, the whole post just screams / drips of extreme privilege.
jorvi··on The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Haha yeah, I do realize that "hidden gems" are effectively arbitrage, where you are underpaying relative to the actual (market) value of the item.
jorvi··on The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
This always makes me ambivalent about enthusiast blog posts. Like on the one hand, cool that the knowledge gets spread. On the other hand, whenever one gets popular, another hidden gem skyrockets in price or becomes semi-permanently low in stock.
jorvi··on Fastpotify
Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.

This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.

Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.

jorvi··on Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10
This stuff should only be legal if companies are forced to return you the full purchase price of the game.
jorvi··on Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
Netherlands is also in a much worse position due to being downstream of literally everyone.

It's going to be a huge future fight in the EU because all countries upstream will want to retain 'all' the water and the remaining low flow will still have all those countries their industries dumping toxic waste, meaning the ratio of water-waste will get ridiculous.

jorvi··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
You do realize you can do the exact same thing on macOS? Just alias sudo to whatever you want. BSD I assume you can do the same with doas.

No desktop system is safe from your attack, unless you take specific precautions like chattr on the file or chmodding your home directory, but that can lead to weird breakage.

jorvi··on Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux
… WhatsApp is the main messenger globally and it is the 'odd' people that use iMessage (and Signal, Telegram, etc.)
jorvi··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president? And when Jack Ma got mouthy, Xi locked him in a basement for 3 months and then kept him in exile for another 5 years.

So much for the all-powerful cabal.

jorvi··on France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
Only some places. Netherlands is €45-60 for 1 gbps (we don't make 4x-6x the money Spaniards do), unless you live in an area that actually sees multi-line competition.

We do have an interesting sidegrade: 5G Klik & Klaar from Odido (formerly T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom) for €26. If you point it the right way out your window, you can get 700-1000 mbps down and 150 (capped) mbps up. Ping is around 35ms. Horrid modem firmware though, you get ping spikes up to 400-850ms (!!) under load due to bufferbloat, but you can of course solve that with your own router and SQM :+)

jorvi··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
I don't really understand this dooming. All market forecasters, memory bulk purchasers and the memory producers themselves have stated multiple times, unequivocally that the shortage will get worse in 2027 and then as new fabs come online the shortage will taper off as 2028 progresses.

We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved fab capacity.

The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the RAM OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel pricing possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy

jorvi··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
> And PPWR comes a short month after another Amazon-friendly legislation: The €3 per item-kind customs duty for items shipped from outside EU.

If you dig a little deeper you will see that this legislation was sponsored, championed and lobbied by the largest pan-EU retail organization. How convenient. Just like Chinese EVs, can't let EU customers have access to the best goods for the lowest prices. Better to have lazy greedy EU businesses gouge them :)

jorvi··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
Less optimized, but for the same or less money you get 4-12GB more. Apple can't optimize away that gap.

Androids launched ≥2026 got a serious haircut in either memory or other features though. We'll see in 2028.

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