palordrolap

This is just arguing about whether the surname goes before or after the given name.

If you think int x makes the most sense, you might be Chinese. Or Hungarian. Or English speaking if you grew up with characters like Fireman Sam or Postman Pat… erm…

On the bare metal? Ew. At least use a VM.

Fave: I don’t really do favourites, but I tend to reach for nano because it’s usually installed and I prefer it to the vi family.

First: The 8-bit Commodore screen editor was hard to beat for its time, so let’s go with that, even though I probably used the BBC Micro arrow / copy system before that.

Future: Heck if I know. I installed micro but haven’t touched it yet. Maybe one day I’ll get around to that. Or an IDE. So probably nano.

Honourable mention: An editor I worked on for a project once. There’s something to be said for editing an editor’s source code inside itself.

Loathed: ed / edlin

Current: Let’s go with nano again, but I do lot more typing on command lines and in browser text boxes, like this one.

Longest: If pico counts as proto-nano, then definitely nano. Been using that since the '90s.

Sooo, hyperbole aside, I did a quick search on the site of the retailer I last obtained parts through, right before the prices exploded, and their cheapest 1x64GB RAM DDR5 stick is about £2320.

(Big assumption here that the motherboard only has four RAM slots. If you’re going to cram 192GB onto it, you’re going to need at least a couple of those, and preferably three, not 2x64+2x32, hence not looking at smaller capacity sticks.)

As I write, eBay has one seller with a single 1x64GB DDR5 at a quarter of that, which makes me think they must be going by pre-explosion pricing, but it also has something at well over £10k, four times the other way (and more), so at least logarithmically, the stand-alone retailer is right in the middle.

That means that this server is probably going to be well in excess of £10k when they finally ship it with full spec. If they’re offering a warranty or support contract, probably around £20k. (Or £30k if they do the trick of simply changing the currency sign on a US dollar amount).

Here I was expecting a graphics demo to blow our collective minds but instead I got a story about a local LLM for cheap. It is <current year>. I should have known better.

Were I the author / tech cobbler here, I’d be concerned that too much time with an LLM, local or otherwise, might erode or dull my apparently fairly sharp reasoning and tech skills. (Clarification: Not my sharpness, theirs. I’m a potato.)

Other thoughts: For a minute I thought this whole thing was a tribute to, or a troll in the manner of, that one Redditor that always spun their stories around to being about their dad beating them with jumper cables.

Also, my old PC developed an issue like the warm reboot problem, except with the network interface. I couldn’t just restart, I had to power off and back on. I never did bother to find out whether it was early signs of hardware failure or whether it was an old hardware / newer kernel mismatch.