Well, if you are hosting rips of your video collection or have surveillance footage, HDD is still attractive since those scenarios can push you relatively easily into the space where the cost difference matters and accessing that video for playback from HDD is pretty much just as good as from SSD practically speaking.

I have very little exposure to Salesforce, but from what I've seen I suspect most of their software 'work' is catering to companies that have ever so slightly bespoke details around largely the same general flows. So LLM can probably do a decent job of rearranging their stuff to deliver a seemingly 'bespoke' solution for a customer that is pretty much never anything truly 'new', but just a tailored mix of things everyone has already done. Companies think their processes are unique and innovative and a tailored experience feeds that ego, even though it's more mundane.

Contrast that with people are used to only creating new code when they have no other option. If existing code is close enough, it's used. In that scenario, LLM is of relatively smaller utility.

SSDs are currently around 8x more expensive per TB when you scale up in capacity. The gap closed quickly but it seems like it's settling into a plateau...

At low enough demand, you are on the floor where you might as well do SSD, and in many applications the SSD performance is worth it, but if you need capacity and not too picky about performance, then HDD still wins in cost effectiveness by a wide margin.

I will suggest you consider Proxmox as a home lab solution, unless of course you have a professional need to show VMware skills and don't have a suitable work side sandbox to muck around with.

My durable needs along virtualization are proxmox based, and my vmware infrastructure evaporates every 90 days as it's just to support the development of things with my vmware customers.

I can say first hand that while the basic rules of supply and demand are straightforward enough, there's generally debate around where that optimization point is between price and volume.

At at least one company where the prevailing opinion was more modest margin with high volume was the only way to go, the COVID got a lot of the detractors saying "told you so" when profits were just as healthy as ever and costs were lower because we did less. It only takes one player to go for the higher volume play to make the high-price play not work, but as he says, the chip supply chain is so consolidated, there might be less chance of a player going for high volume again.

Hopefully some player decides to go for the high volume play but it's just trickier and trickier the more consolidated an industry is.

The RAM prices are a relatively short term effect of lots of investment being thrown an an unprepared supply chain. This is not a durable 'end-user computing is from now on going to get more expensive', it's an anomaly of a trend of cheaper and cheaper bang for your buck. Crash or continue, either way the AI craze buildout will decrease (either they will have built out and settle into a milder 'refresh' cycle, or crash out and obviously not be buying).

Also good for replacing McKinsey: A magic 8-ball

Well, ESXi is a curious horse to hitch to, seeing how broadcom has messed with that platfrom...

He didn't say 'an open source Windows 7', he is asserting that wine brings the valuable bits of Windows userspace that he needs, that Windows 7 was plenty and Wine has at *least* caught up to that, as far as he can tell. Essentially that Wine has had 17 years to catch up to Windows 7, and Microsoft hasn't usefully innovated as a platform since then.

That said, it's a mixed bag, some better some worse. Wine actually has developed support for platform features newer than 7 including the big UI toolkit changes and, critically, DirectX 12. Of course they have gaps compared to even Windows 7.

ReactOS as you say is more an XP-alike and *way* behind. The thing is it's trying to be more a true full recreation of a Windows environment, when mostly people would be satisfied with application compatibility on an otherwise different OS, which is where wine shines.

Other than application compatibility, I can't see why anyone would *want* to run Windows. Since 64-bit RISC Windows couldn't run any existing windows applications *anyway*, I just don't see why people would want to.

Besides, once they get into a proper win32 implementation, that's too useful and risky to open source. The only thing giving Windows a tight grip on the market is the ability to confidently run both legacy and new applications.

I suppose given my tenure at large companies, I shouldn't have been too surprised, but still seeing blatantly obviously odd movies still phase me...

Heh, reminds me that in one scenario, my company had a pretty lackluster product, and my organization needed something better, so our team made something that actually did the job. The response was not 'wow, those guys had vision', it was 'need to shut this down because it's making the right stuff look worse'. But they could use the developers, because their mediocre product was obviously brilliant leadership vision undermined by mediocre programmers, now if we make these programmers implement *our* vision instead of their own, then it will be great (it was not).

The unfortunate part is that these studios weren't really doing the 'metaverse' thing, they were making games. The sort of thing that the platform actually is viable for.

The moment Oculus got acquired by Facebook, it's fate was sealed. If they had treated it as a "Mark wants a VR gaming thing because he's a geek, nothing to do with social networking", then maybe they could have had a more modest, but significant investment to keep on a path to serve the niche, but viable VR gaming market.

But they had a mandate to 'social' it up, and to social it up in a 'mass market' way. So we end up with design language largely copied from Nintendo Wii, so impossibly milquetoast so as to be bland to everyone. Environments even *more* mundane than PS Home.

Though probably the real nail in the coffin was the massive amounts of money thrown at trying to 'normie it up'. A vision of their platform being a way to experience music and sporting events and as a space for business events. The metaverse vision was pointless, but at least should have been an affordable waste of time, but the money spent on these real-world 'collaborations' was probably rather large and for no durable benefit.

From other sources I've been reading, it's extra strange...

So Meta has *several* VR game studios, and they seemed to close the ones that actually produced well regarded games, and kept open studios that have not had respectably successful titles. The only one they kept that makes some sense is the one behind Beat Saber.

Now if they closed *all* the studios, or sold/spun them off, ok. But the mix of what got closed and what was kept open so far seems weird....

I think it is, he says point blank he doesn't like that his perspective keeps getting yanked around without his control. The counter is 'oh but that seat isn't going to be the best'. So I'm suggesting a compromise, a selectable 'seat' for the basic immersive experience that will not cut unless you explicitly select to do so, and a separate 'screen' to provide those curated cuts that you propose are vital to getting to see the action as it moves beyond your ability to reasonably see, just like the 'jumbotron' shows stuff to the live audience.

Well, the 3D video thing makes sense...

With traditional approaches, well first you either halve the frame rate or resolution, depending on which technique is in use.

And even the highest end versions tended to have a bit of uncomfortable cross-talk where the wrong side would bleed through because the shutter glasses or the polarization wouldn't block *all* of the intended other one. With the VR headsets, you have actual dedicated pixels per eye, so no crosstalk.

Yeah, VR is a bit of a niche, but not under a quarter million globally. Biggest problem for VR is that Facebook bought up Oculus and tried to focus it on social networking type thinking which is just a horrible mismatch of market to product. It's a gaming platform and maybe a general personal entertainment device. To the extent you do have people doing social things, they don't want the milquetoast Wii-like cartoon avatars and corporate approved environments, they want to go wild with characters and environments.

Perhaps it's more not liking having the cut happen without having control. Or maybe the composition, like have a 180 feed and pop up key views on extra screens. Just like how sporting events have big screens for letting the audience get a focused view, but let the 'immersive' view remain while you may also use that focused view.

Biggest problem with even the 180 degree view is that the source resolution tends to be rather underwhelming, Even 4k becomes underwhelming when spread across 180 degrees. Properly executing this might need an stereoscopic 8k feed with auxillary feeds for the 'bonus' content like focused angles and such.