If you’re using other mods at the same time, I’d try doing the binary search thing — turn them off, see if the problem goes away, if so, turn half of them off, see if the problem goes away, then of the problematic half, try turning half of that off, etc.

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It sounds like Bethesda says that something similar can happen in their games if you have a 5.1 configuration with nothing hooked up to some of the speakers.

I vaguely recall some bug on very old versions of Proton, something with the sound subsystem, that caused speech to not show up in some Bethesda game, though I think it was a problem that showed up after a while, not always not present from the start of the game. Trying to deal with that was what initially got me to use Proton GE. I doubt that it’s what’s going on here, but you could try switching Proton versions.

I don’t have Fallout 4 installed at the moment, but Skyrim has separate volume sliders in the settings for voice and music, so I assume Fallout 4 does too. You might check that.

I personally would much rather have a PC, given a choice between having one or the other. When I have had both in the past, I have always wound up with a console that’s gathering dust.

However, that depends on what you’re doing with it and what you want. Consoles have their own strong points:

• Less setup/troubleshooting/maintenance.

• Because the platform is locked down, harder for other players to cheat in multiplayer competitive online games. The PC is open.

• Everyone has more-or-less the same hardware, which is typically desirable for 3D multiplayer competitive video games. No “get a more expensive and powerful video card to get a slight edge”.

• There is basically one standard controller, so games in the game library are more likely to support the features of your controller (assuming, of course, that you’re using a controller on the PC).

• Some platform-exclusive games (and obviously that cuts both ways, and the PC library is much larger, but if you very specially want some of the PS5 exclusives, you need a PS5 to do it).

IIRC from an article about low levels on the Rhine or somewhere a few years back, one issue that creates is that it reduces the theoughput possible for cargo shipping on the river.

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Sounds like it’s an issue on the Rhine this year too.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/shipping-problems-continue-rhine-water-level-falls-again-2026-07-27/

Shipping problems continue as Rhine water level falls again

Shallow water after this summer’s heatwave and scarce rainfall means cargo vessels are only able to sail partly loaded on the river, increasing costs for cargo owners. It ​also means loads must be spread among several vessels sailing part ​loaded, also increasing costs and creating an unwelcome extra expense for German ⁠industry currently showing signs of recovery.

Vessels are ​often able to sail only 15% to 20% full or less, but sailings are continuing, ‌a ⁠commodity trader said.

I suppose that if it’s enough of an issue and shows up frequently, it might be possible to dredge a channel.

They can’t make competitive dedicated memory in a near-term timeframe — the kind of timeframe that would matter, if they are to get something in during the shortage — and Cook has explicitly said that Apple will not try.

However, they do make their own CPUs, and they could maybe make a large-onboard-cache version, kind of akin to what AMD has been doing. That’d make the CPU more amenable to use of slower memory for most applications, which might open up more memory options.

I don’t know about a whole farm, but I suppose that the plant that I’d most personally be likely to grow would be some sort of hot peppers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Capsicum_cultivars

Not a lot of work, and nice fresh in small quantities — so having some growing there is nice. Plus, it’s something where a grocery store is only gonna have a limited selection of options relative to what’s out there.

Whether that’s a good choice is gonna depend on climate where one lives.

I also kind of like pineapple guavas. Those are hard to find in stores (unavailable in many places) as they don’t ship well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feijoa

If I didn’t personally have to take care of them, probably a variety of fruit trees, grapes, berries, maybe squash. Dad planted stuff around the back yard when I was a kid planned so that there was always something edible out there year-round. Grafted stuff on there too, so you had plumcots on one of the apricot trees, a peach tree that was half yellow and half white, a bunch of types of apples and plums (IIRC seven types on one tree) and so forth. It was neat from a consuming standpoint, but I wouldn’t personally want to deal with caring for each. If you enjoy the hobby, though…shrugs More fun than just having a ton of one thing. Not optimal from a cash crop standpoint, though.

EDIT: Oh, strawberries. Not that they’re hard to find, but store-bought strawberries are really watery, as they’re sold by weight or something like that. If you’ve ever had strawberries that aren’t as heavily watered, like, wild strawberries, it’s a neat experience. Much stronger flavor.

We can desalinate all the water we want in California — we already have a bunch of desalination facilities, and can build those out as far as need be — but desalinated water isn’t as cheap as already-fresh water. That’s mostly an annoyance for, say, residential use. But it’s harder to competitively do agriculture on desalinated water. Israel has done some limited agriculture on desalinated water, but farmers are not generally going to be okay with that as an option. Most agriculture uses a lot of water.

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Someone ran the numbers to see roughly what it would cost if we did only desalinated water for everyone in the US.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation

Producing enough drinking water for someone — assuming 3 litres per day — costs just $2.30 for the entire year. That’s less than the cost of a single bottle of water in many countries.

We actually use way more water than we do for drinking — we’re pretty prolific with water to do things like lawns.

If the average person in the United States uses 310 litres of water per day for domestic uses, it would cost them $0.42 per day. Or $154 per year.

We’d probably want to conserve more nationally in such a scenario (Californians use less than the national average). But even with no conservation, it’s very much doable.

It’s a cost that we’d rather not pay if we don’t have to, as a society, but we certainly are able to do so for residential needs.

But if there isn’t enough freshwater to do agriculture, then who gets the freshwater determines which farmers go out of business (or at least have to shift to something else) and which get to keep operating.

That’s a good sign that they’re going to sell enough product that it won’t be a flop. I was pretty pessimistic on their chances of being able to introduce new hardware successfully during the RAM shortage, but perhaps I will be wrong!

That’s pre-atomic-weapons-testing steel right there.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/close_enough_for_government_work

Adjective

close enough for government work (not comparable)

1. (US, idiomatic, humorous, derogatory) Adequate; acceptable as government work, imperfect but not worth the time nor effort of improving.

Synonyms: good enough for government work

You have very probably seen its logo on various websites that are using it, showing up before the content does:

She went for him in late 1993:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993. He was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.

Fedora won’t have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Fedora Linux[10] is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project.

It looks like there were Linux distributions at the time, but they were very early:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

Early distributions included:

• Torvalds’ “Boot-Root” images, from v0.95a onwards “Root” was maintained by Jim Winstead Jr., the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started (0.10: 4 November 1991)[12][13][14][15]

• MCC Interim Linux (3 March 1992)[16]

• TAMU Linux, based on MCC with simpler installation and X11 (14 July 1992)[17]

• Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which included the X Window System and was the most comprehensive distribution for a short time (15 August 1992)[18]

• H.J. Lu’s “bootable rootdisks” (23 September 1992),[19][20] and “Linux Base System” (5 October 1992)[21][22]

• Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution (alpha: 8 December 1992)

• The two oldest, still active distribution projects started in 1993. The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new SLS-based distribution, Slackware, was released by Patrick Volkerding.[23] Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian in August 1993, with first public BETA released in January 1994 and first stable version in June 1996.[24][25]

I think that there are two possible takeaways from this:

• Not clear what distro was used — if any — but if it was, it won’t have been a presently existing one. It’s possible that he was just rolling his own setup, not using a distro at all.

• Linus’s date with Tove derived from an email exchange. What ninja chicks look for in a guy is possibly an email client, not a Linux distribution at all. It sounds like Linus was probably using Pine at the time (though someone could go dig up mail headers from old emails to check).

He’s also married.

Ah, fair enough — didn’t know what the prize was.

On further thought, one edge use case that might make sense — suppose you’re a multiplayer online gamer who is only interested in getting an edge in multiplayer online games and don’t really care at all about what a game looks like. OLED displays can offer considerably higher reasonable framerates than past monitors, maybe 500 Hz or more. You might be able to crank the texture settings in a number of games all the way down, just look at a blurry mess, and use an OLED display and have a video card that can, as long as it isn’t crashing into memory limitations, render high framerates.

There are also a handful of games that don’t use textures on polygons, sort of the Avara or Star Fox style. Most of those are older and target systems before hardware acceleration, but I can think of a few newer ones. I personally like Carrier Command 2*, and that has almost-entirely untextured polygons, and where it does use textures, they’re low resolution. I don’t know what the VRAM requirements are for the geometry, but the listed system requirements on Steam are for 1GB VRAM cards. I don’t think that any of those are actually games where framerate matters much, but if you wanted to render those at very high resolution or on multiple monitors or something (if the game can support that?), it might make sense.

I mean, this is really just a mental exercise — I don’t think that the OEM in question is really trying to develop a system that’s actually well-suited to any entry-level-gaming users. But if you were looking for very specialized gaming niches, you could maybe find something that the system could actually serve well at.

I’m not sure that this is a good idea. Futures markets on things like assassinations have always run the risk of incentivizing people to do things that they shouldn’t, and this is similar.

Ukraine probably has a military plan in place to hit specific targets. You want people to target the targets judged to be optimal. If someone in the Ukrainian military can make money by making such a bet and then targeting the target that they have bet on, there is now an incentive separating their interests from that of the state.

Additionally, depending upon whether the betting information is made public (and whether that information, even if not made public, is properly secured), if someone bets using insider information, it may leak target information ahead of time, which may be detrimental to the Ukrainian state. Russia will have nation-state intelligence agency levels of capability in going after things in the war like strategic air targets.

“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure," Altman said, adding that things have gone in this direction.

He explained that people now have more time for leisure and a higher quality of life than in previous points in history.

"But somehow we never get the promise of the 4-hour workweek on a mass scale in society. And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman said.

OpenAI CEO added that people’s expectations always go up, and they want more.

“We think of new things to do, to create for each other, to want for ourselves. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” he said.

Altman then spoke about the competition that drives the economy and people’s desire to be useful to others and to create.

Altman’s predictions are in stark contrast to the vision of Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the company behind the chatbot Grok.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Musk envisioned a future in which jobs are optional, and money doesn’t matter, but he didn’t provide much detail on the transition to this level of abundance.

Yeah, I think that Altman is probably closer to being right than Musk is, at least for some time to come. If you’re talking about the kind of systems that OpenAI and xAI are working on, then certainly.

A lot of people — on the Threadiverse I see plenty posting — are really worried about permanent expanding structural unemployment. Something like “there will be no jobs” or something like that. And, okay, it’s not immediately obvious why that wouldn’t happen. And there have been some very prestigious people who have predicted otherwise.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.” It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week. David Kestenbaum with our PLANET MONEY team tried to sort out where Keynes went wrong.

To date, what has consistently always happened over time is that as our productive capacity increases, someone finds some way to create a higher standard of living using that productive capacity. That higher standard of living has always been more-appealing than the leisure time. If we wanted the standard of living that was present in 1900, say, we could work a lot less and just accept that standard of living. What happened instead of increasing leisure was increasing standard of living. Larger houses, air conditioning, cars, video games, elaborate movies, out-of-season fruits and vegetables, all that.

It’s possible that that phenomenon will end, but I’d bet against it in the near term. We’re really good at finding new things that people would like.

Now, I do expect that there will come a point where you can produce an AGI that is truly superhuman in the sense that it’s more-capable in every significant way than a human. I do not think that that is going to happen in a year or ten years, but it might not be that far down the road. And then, unless you see demand specifically for something made by humans — think of the way that there is demand for, say, expensive handmade fountain pens, something like Veblen goods — we’re going to have to rejigger things for a post-scarcity society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2]

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.[3] Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]

But I would be pretty confident that ChatGPT isn’t getting humanity to a post-scarcity society in the near future.

And I think that there are a whole host of other things that would change in human society in such an environment that I’m not sure that structural unemployment would be the first thing I’d think about. Like…what does the military balance of power look like in a world where an individual can hypothetically manufacture robots that manufacture factories that manufacture military drones, say? I mean, it’s a awfully different world in a lot of ways.

Not quite answering your question if what you want — understandably — is it gone now, but “time”. If you’re in your teens, to some extent, it’s a phase in life. Lot of people get it around then, and it tends to go away on its own later in life.

I had some when I was a teen. Went away.

I have never actually played Minecraft itself, just open-source clones like Luanti, but I could very easily believe that those have extremely low VRAM requirements, even if the engine isn’t optimized. Most VRAM goes to storing textures, and Minecraft normally has few textures and very low-resolution textures.

Thing is, I also would guess that unless the engine is really inefficient, that GPU isn’t really buying much, either. Like, you have lot of crunching power and bandwidth, sure, but you probably don’t have many visible triangles either.

Maybe some modded Minecraft?

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https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/31es0c/cpu_bottleneck/

It’s not abnormal for shaders in minecraft to more than half your FPS.

If that’s true, if people have done some really crazy shader mods or someone’s using ReShade or similar, maybe they could be soaking up that GPU compute power. Though…I have no idea what kind of system this guy is talking about. He could be talking about a cell phone or something too…

Things that I think would help:

• Lower barriers to entry, especially for non-technical users. One reason that Reddit was relatively successful was because they didn’t even require an email address to create an account (dunno about now, but they did so in the past). I remember reading some Web UI design article once stating that a website has on the order of a few seconds to basically sell a user on viewing it, because there’s so much useless garbage out there, so people filter by basically immediately dropping anything that doesn’t immediately appear to be useful.

  A new user on the Threadiverse is immediately faced with understanding a lot of technical architecture: “what home instance do I want?” Just answering that question requires understanding something about how the system works. Yeah, if you’re a sysadmin who is familiar with how Usenet or other federated systems work, this is just an “ohhh” moment conceptually, though you still might need to learn a bunch of details.

  I remember reading some articles about how a lot of mobile OS-only users entering college didn’t really understand the concept of a file or where data was stored. This was kind of shocking to their professors, who were familiar with personal computers, and where this is a basic concept.

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  https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1ftvyrb/do_many_students_nowadays_really_not_understand/

  Here are some examples of professors discussing it (the topic originally being brought up by someone who was apparently teaching a class in GNU R, so probably a data science or visualization thing).

  If that level of “where does data live” is alien and confusing to a lot of people, imagine how much more the concept of a federated system of instances is.

  I value the ability to choose different instances, different frontends, different clients, different server implementations. But…maybe throwing all of those options in a typical user’s face immediately when they start using the things can be a bit overwhelming. Not saying don’t have those options, but maybe people should be kinda directed towards a sane default at the get-go.

• The mechanism for remote communities to become visible to a home instance (needing someone to initially search for them) and for posts and comment in such a community to start becoming visible (at least one user subscribing to them) is not described in the Lemmy UI, is non-obvious, and impacts users.

• The syntax to link to communities in an home-instance-agnostic way is kinda complicated as well, requires people to understand something about federation to understand what it does and why you’d do it.

• Still no home-instance-agnostic way to link to posts or comments.

• A better initial set of content of interest and not having content that is objectionable to people. If you’re a random person from the US and you wind up on, I dunno, lemmygrad.ml as your first impression of the Threadiverse, I expect that you’re probably inclined to just walk away. Whatever is on someone’s first view of the thing should be content that is something that more-or-less is something that (a) makes them want to view more and (b) not to walk away. I remember saying once that pretty much nobody objects to, say, cooking; that makes a good default.

• Discoverability of communities is still not great. Lemmyverse.net is a valuable resource, but either users need to be directed there from clients and Web UIs or some sort of vaguely-comparable functionality needs to be built into Threadiverse systems.

• Network effect still favors Reddit. I don’t have a fantastic solution for this. In general, network effect massively favors social media incumbents — and I’m sure that that is why you have investors willing to sink a lot of money into getting first mover advantage in that area. That said, MySpace and Digg did ultimately become displaced by younger competitors.

• Making benefits to a given user clearer. If I’m angry about Reddit third-party client access, say, I have a clear reason to use another system. Maybe I’m an open-source developer and I’m familiar with the IRC or Usenet or mail server or XMPP ecosystems, and so “ah, it’s like that, and we can have competing server implementations” just clicks. But if I’m Joe User who gets on the thing to talk smack about an opposing basketball team, maybe Joe doesn’t immediately care about that or have any of that context. What’s his reason to use the Threadiverse over Reddit? Are those benefits immediately clear to him?

I doubt it, in the general sense of “tire punctures generally happen because people are doing this”. That being said, I do remember reading about a scam occurring in…I think it was Mexico…where something akin to this was documented and occurring, where one would drop caltrops directly in front of a targeted vehicle and have a “helpful” accomplice directing the motorist to an overpriced tire seller.

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Colombia.

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/27/nx-s1-5477426/flat-tire-scam-colombia-bogota

Aboard motorcycles, these vandals spread sharp objects on busy streets to damage car tires. Then, they offer to lead marooned motorists to nearby mechanics who are suspected of being in on the scam, allegedly making more holes in the tires and then overcharging for repairs.

These flimflam men are known as pinchallantas, Spanish for “tire-puncturers.”

“They did it to me,” says Óscar Villanueva a Bogotá architect. “A guy on a motorcycle came up to me and said: ‘Your tire is low on air. You need to get it patched.’ But he was the one who made the holes.”

Pinchallantas have perfected the practice. Videos on social media show them weaving through traffic on motorcycles with sharp objects attached to their ankles that they release by stomping the pavement in front of cars.

An embedded nail usually creates a slow leak in a tire that may take hours to go flat. So, they often litter the roads with sharp, tube-shaped pieces of metal that cause tires to deflate immediately.

Bogotá lawyer Felipe Gallo says that because frazzled motorists are usually anxious for a quick fix so they can get back on the road, they are easily suckered into overpaying.

“When they fix the tire, they make more holes and then they say to you: ‘Hey, you have four holes,’” says Gallo, who paid about $150 for a recent repair job. “For that price, I could have bought new tires.” Police officers temporarily shut down a tire repair shop in Bogotá, Colombia on Tuesday. Tires fill the shelves behind them.

Pinchallantas have plagued Bogotá for years. But recently there has been a surge of citizen complaints about the practice, often numbering more than 100 per month. Reports about pinchallantas have become a staple of TV newscasts, which also warn motorists about trouble spots in Bogotá.