Looking on 3DMark for some Steel Nomad scores and happen to see @etaprime.bsky.social testing something. Small world.
Technical writer at Signal65, former tech journalist. Co-founder of Silicon Insights. Previously written for Tom's Hardware, Hot Hardware, XDA, NotebookCheck, Digital Trends, and The Register. Personal email: mc@matthewconnatser.net
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Looking on 3DMark for some Steel Nomad scores and happen to see @etaprime.bsky.social testing something. Small world.
SEN. CASSIDY (R) : “Do you agree Trump deserves the Nobel Prize for Operation Warp speed?” RFK JR.: “Absolutely.” SEN. CASSIDY: “But you just told Senator Bennet the COVID vaccine killed more people than COVID.” RFK JR.: “….”😬 🤷🏻♂️
You have to get rid of everything nice in life to be able to have financial security. But I actually want to enjoy living too. I have literally no friends who live on their own, they either live with family, roommates, or their SO. They shouldn't have to choose between comfort and living well.
For the first time in my life, I can't just pay off my credit card every month. I can pay my mortgage and the other necessities but have no money left over to fill up my savings or just spend on something frivolous. I've been poor before but it's never been this bad when I also have a FT job.
I make more money than I ever have in my life and it's barely enough. Me and my wife are going to need to crack six figures between us to actually be able to start seriously saving (I won't invest in this economy) and look at buying a house. It's a nightmare.
And throughout all the articles I grabbed for this exercise, disappointment was a common sentiment except for when August jobs added were ~200k or more. And yet adding 54k jobs is framed very similarly, even though that kind of performance would be more at home in a (post-)recession economy.
In case you're wondering if 54k jobs added in August is bad or up to par. 2024: +142k 2023: +177k 2022: +132k 2021: +374k 2020: +428k 2019: +195k 2018: +163k 2017: +237k 2016: +177k 2015: +190k 2014: +204k 2013: +176k 2012: +210k 2011: +91k 2010: -10k Worst numbers since 2010.
Economy: Mr. Stock Market, I don't feel so good... www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/a...
I love AMD but I haven't owned a discrete AMD GPU since like 2020, except for a brief moment where I had a 6800S-powered G14. It just hasn't been all that compelling in general.
yes i am sure
I avoid RAID issues by not backing stuff up and just having good vibes so I don't worry about data loss.
You'd think after two or three once-in-a-century global conflicts directly caused by general inequality that our betters would start to get a clue about what causes said global conflicts.
The judge said not getting the $20 billion annual fee from Google for default search engine on iPhone/Safari would result in "fewer products and less product innovation from Apple" because Apple would have less money. You literally can't make this stuff up.
Honestly sometimes you're not even paying a premium. Now, I think some of that is down to DIY parts being way more expensive than they should be, but hey, is what it is. My new $1600 laptop is about equivalent to a DIY PC for the same price... and it's portable. Not a bad place to be I guess.
Yea all the intricacies with OpenAI's structure is beyond me, I need a documentary all on that stuff and then I can get up to speed.
I learned this from the Kevan MacKay doc: youtu.be/I6xwMIUPHss?... Nortel kept doing all-stock acquisitions to boost its TSE share, so it's not 100% the same as what OpenAI is doing since there's no public stock. But the downside is the same, since stock is riskier than cash so there's a premium.
All-stock acquisitions are one of the things that took Nortel down, because they're way more expensive than using cash. It's a little bit concerning to say the least.
At this point I have to assume this was some kind of prank because the man looks totally fine. If people were accusing me of being dead I'd try not to be an hour late to a televised speech.
Also very lazy journalism where they're just showing the same crusty golf photo when in actuality there's like half a dozen high res pictures right on AP's website if you just search for it. I had to find it myself.
It's confusing to me because if something important had happened, it probably would have gotten leaked, and if nothing important has happened, then things would be normal. The reporting has not been good enough, I should not have to piece this stuff together from rumors and tweets.
To me it seems he's fine (apparently he's giving an address about the DoD today and he also golfed on Saturday) but his absence has been very strange. But I don't know if I would have noticed if nobody else pointed it out.
Always free? Unlikely.
His opinions keep getting worse and worse.
Tariffs are basically an enforced middleman. Obviously in any industry, pointless middlemen are annoying both to manufacturers and consumers.
Funny for Socrates to say that when he wasn't capable of shutting his fucking mouth.
We agree, @robhuebel — seems Dems should be talking about this: “State Dept denied Trump intervened on Alexandrovich’s behalf, but that appears implausible. Trump, Israel, pedophilia, corruption… a gift unicorn grazing in Dems’ backyard — And yet?” zeteo.com/p/why-arent-...
He seems pretty normal to me personally.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubble here but Trump is definitely alive. AP snapped a good amount of high quality pictures of him today. newsroom.ap.org/editorial-ph...
Yea I'm sure he's alive despite the rumors, but don't underestimate how resilient some old people can be. He could easily live another ten, maybe even 20 years under the right circumstances. I'd only get concerned for him if something specific happens.
You're missing Steel Nomad, smh my head.
Oh shit, dual slot?!
I think Arrow Lake-H has been surprisingly good, just switched to a laptop with the 285H and the performance and efficiency is good. But on the desktop it has been very disappointing and I wouldn't recommend most people to buy a 200S chip for a multitude of reasons.
When they start cutting rates to juice the economy, the inflation will likely be worse than anything we saw under Biden, and he got inflation real bad.
LinkedIn: "Steady prices firm rate-cut view" Also LinkedIn: "The U.S. Personal Consumption Expenditures price index rose an annual 2.6%, the same as in June" You know, if your annualized inflation was 100% month-after-month, I wouldn't call that steady. 2.6% is pretty horrendous with these rates.
Wilson's VP literally didn't even say anything after his stroke took him out of action. Today's VP is openly talking about the President's hypothetical death for literally no reason. What the fuck?
we had a good run folks
A Caesar is born.
I was literally thinking yesterday about the regime buying 10% of Intel with Intel's own money, how that kind of relationship with capitalism is pretty close to how Nazi Germany treated its domestic corporations. It's a weird, neo-feudal sort of arrangement.
I have to say, while I love PGA sockets like AM4, I was never a huge fan of having to do the whole twisting maneuver to make sure the CPU didn't get ripped out. RIP.
I will never vote Republican in my entire life.
Telecoms bubble mentioned! It's been my frame of reference for generative AI ever since Kevan MacKay made his Nortel documentary, and it really makes it clear that even if a technology (like the internet) is super useful, doesn't mean it can't be in a bubble. Thank you for mentioning it.
Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...
voting for trump got you... - higher prices on many/most goods - big manufacturing job losses - feds deploying military into the streets - the state "taking stakes in" the means of production - natl policy carveouts for gov's allies what would the 2010 tea party say?
Makes up for how things were a decade ago I guess.
You could have gone for a domination victory instead.
Sweet, stagflation!
Yea that's not a valid excuse to avoid basic civility and those people are 100% certified assholes.
So this post made me reread the list because I had only skimmed it earlier today and I missed alot on it! Food/housing insecurity, deadnaming, and privilege are indispensable when talking about inequality. Side note, I don't think saying homeless makes anyone an asshole if that's what you mean.
Maybe, it is a 285H and a 5050 which are quite new. Unfortunately I already nuked my other SSD and put stuff on it so I'm gonna stick to my plan to wait and see in a couple months or so where things stand. I might end up using Bazzite if the desktop experience is fine enough.
Can it run Paper Mario?
It's giving Emperor Trump I think.
I really thought Powell would stick to his guns and not let inflation kill us more than it already is. This is gonna be even worse than Biden.
In a bold change from senate norms, Chancellor Palpatine has declared himself "Galactic Emperor"
Well running Linux Mint on my 285H/5050 laptop was a pretty big disappointment, though I probably shouldn't have been surprised since Intel + Nvidia + new laptop generally results in very poor Linux support. My 7940HS laptop was amazing with it but oh well.
This laptop doesn't come with a 2230 standoff for me to install my MP600 Core Mini 2TB. No problem, I can make my own!
Trump's wealth has DOUBLED since he's become President. AND the taxpayers pick up the cost of his luxury lifestyle. And you're paying more for everything. Not because of natural economic factors, but because he's INTENTIONALLY driving prices up for you.
I tried my best as a journalist to provide good commentary whenever possible but there was always a minimum level of stuff you couldn't say even if it was true.
Chris Murphy is my guy.
Interesting figure from Atlanta Fed's GDPNow: "third-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from 1.1 percent to -5.9 percent." It didn't really impact the overall GDP prediction but it's a terrible miss, and I have to wonder if it's not a sign of wider issues.
This actually makes me think, how are LLM's going to handle differentiating between products with the same name? We already have a ton of that happening across vendors or even with the same brand, like how there's a Ryzen 7 5700 and an RX 5700. This seems like a problem.
Google AI says this as the first result is literally Notebookcheck's page for the 840M, a very real GPU.
He really puts in the work, I'd love to be him but I have no idea how he does it.
I'm literally downgrading my office setup to an RTX 5050 laptop from the 4090, I'm not even sure if I will mind the difference very much and I am very much in that 1% of people.
Imagine justifying the intentional starving of an entire group of people (maybe you could call it a hunger plan or something) by pointing out that some starving children were sick beforehand. I'm sorry, am I supposed to think starving sick children is okay or something? What?
Their email address has very different energy.
Easily the most concerning thing about CoreWeave is that it uses its GPUs for collateral to obtain even more loans. So if CoreWeave defaults, that causes direct operational damage and could spiral out of control very quickly.
God I hope this is another TACO moment.
There is no scenario today in which Putin doesn't become stronger and America becomes weaker. It's a premade disaster. 1/ But it could be worse than just a bad photo op. Here's how:
Ironically we know "persons" must include non-citizens because slave states wanted slaves counted in order to give them more representation in the House. But now the very same people find counting non-citizens to be inconvenient.
So that's like 10-15% yearly inflation. I don't even think under Biden it got that bad.
No.
If Democrats fight to protect our democracy and protect people's health care this fall during the budget negotiations with Republicans, Americans will be on our side. The country doesn't want a dictatorship and they don't want 40% insurance premium increases.
So I'm just now getting around to watching the GPT-5 launch video and Sam Altman is talking about all this stuff it can do... except these are all things GPT-4 era models could do too? I'm very confused as to what's new other than the whole priority access and model routing thing.
The journalists who were there are well within their rights to report on this. They simply choose not to. "On background" and "off the record" are not legal rights.
Fuck it should I just trade my desktop for a Ryzen AI Max laptop?
Does this say anything about the overall market for AI?
Intel dominates in LLM performance. Some other vendors are even trying to use NPU+GPU at the same time to catch up, and they can't Llama2-7b Llama3.1-7b Phi 3.5 Mini-3.8b Phi 4 Reasoning-14b Lunar Lake sweeps TTFT & token rate vs. SDXE and Strix Point. www.linkedin.com/pulse/mlperf...
I've actually been wanting to get a Strix Halo laptop to replace my desktop and laptop but so far they've been too expensive for my blood. But even at $1500 I would consider AIM's laptop to be a steal, and although it sounds too good to be true, they do already have a functional review unit.
Of course, ~$400 of that is from RAM, so going from the 385 to 395 was $100 for Framework. That means a $1000 laptop with the 395 is well within the realm of possibility if AIM is okay with thinner margins, and they could even offer a barebones model that comes with no storage or Windows key.
We can get a sense of how expensive the 395 is from Framework's desktop pricing. The 395 plus 128GB is $2000, the 395 with 64GB is $1600, so that implies they're charging $400 to add 64GB. The midrange 385 with 32GB is $1100, so minus that from the $1600 build and you get a $500 difference.
So I'm very intrigued by this Strix Halo laptop from this completely unknown company called AIM, apparently it'll come out at $1000, but no word on if this $1000 model is gonna have the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or a lower-end SKU. I do think it's possible though. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAqw...
I mean I guess it's better for them than not being able to sell them at all?
Oh I use that too, just forgot.
What's your sauce recipe? I use San Marzano tomatoes, fresh basil (if I have it), and a random mix of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder until it tastes right.
NVMe's been around for like a decade, they started with PCIe 3.0 for 5th Gen Intel I think.
Holy shit you waited this long for an NMVe drive? You've been on SATA the whole time?
It's a massive repertoire of history that just doesn't exist anymore. Wow.
Huh, didn't expect this crossover.
I got my offer like a month ago, what are they even doing?
You better hope people are willing to pay for the ability to remove objects from photos I guess.
He’s never gon’ be President now.
When I wrote my paper about datacenter power sources, I got the impression that we're gonna be using alot of gas just because it's easier. Assuming the AI industry grows out the way it wants to, anyways. I'm worried what'll happen if the AI gravy train stops at this point.
This is actually a really great metaphor. Using AI might become a daily thing for people but to do really low stakes, easy stuff conveniently. But I'm not sure if being able to photoshop a cat out of your photo is enough to prop up a multi-trillion dollar industry.
I'll admit it took me until the third paragraph to realize the joke www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-t...
And this is an average that includes pollsters that are living in some alternate universe where Trump is just kind of divisive and not deeply unpopular.
It's kind of a double edged sword, it does make access to democracy easier but I'd be worried about security and especially the effect on detached and low info voters, who normally don't show up unless it's for people like Donald Trump.
"Improved ray tracing" next you're gonna tell me the Pope is Catholic.
I think price fluctuations on NAND might be a part of it, they took a big dip after COVID and started climbing in 2023. Not sure where they are right now but I assume they kept going up and might be at an all time high.