I’m surprised you feel you need that much. Personally, I’m tinkering on a 7900XTX, with 24Gb of VRAM. I can’t run the massive new models, like the latest Deepseek Flash at 400+ Gb, but neither can 192Gb. Means my context isn’t unlimited, but I’m able to run even big local models like Qwen3.8 at Q4_K_M with a context of 64K, which is enough when paired with a front end like Hermes that can run compaction and invoke subagents. Honestly, I’d describe 24Gb as a sweet spot for local AI usage, 32Gb sounds like comfortable headroom for a larger context window, or even multiple heads.

To be fair, I guess it is unified memory, and it doesn’t sound like you’re running it on a dedicated machine, so maybe the other stuff you’re running is pushing past 8Gb and giving you less space for AI than me. But 128Gb still sounds like wild excess to me, well into the diminishing returns of slightly more accurate rounding and needlessly large context.

I appreciate that pushback (/s), although honestly if you (like myself) find AI-tells like that cringe, you’re almost certainly not the type of person using it addictively.

There’s a pretty strong body of research that lots of people are subconsciously picking up language patterns from AI, such as the increased prevalence of words like “delve”. It’s the basic social mirroring we do to pick up language from anyone we talk to, only weirdly twisted because the thing so many people are talking to isn’t human.

“I appreciate that pushback” isn’t a commonly complained enough tell that people would be intentionally avoiding it, I find it pretty believable that a heavy AI user would unironically use it in a Q&A.

Honestly it sounds like, which I think might be worse, that he’s been using it so much that he’s picked up its mannerisms of speech. From his own description of the confrontations his wife and family had with him, it sounds like he’s been talking to it a lot on his own time.

Gotta agree, it’s a testament to how addicting that type of validation is that he’s finding it addictive as “a source of dopamine”. He’s always struck me as pretty level headed in my (admittedly limited) watching of him, and he’s clearly a smart guy. Reminds me of how nobody is totally immune to forces like advertising and predatory stuff like gambling.

Advertisers want eyeballs, and this means less of them. Reminds me of Reddit moving to a log-in only model.

Not sure if you’re being rhetorical, but I’ll answer anyways. The reason Reddit wants you to log in is to better track you, no duh. The reason that makes them more money is because better data means better ad targeting, and better ad targeting can be translated to results like a better click through rate. When a platform has that, they can incentivize more advertisers to spend more money on their platform.

That way, each time they sell an ad, that ad can be more expensive. It’s undeniable that demanding logins will be bad for the number of ads they sell, but if they can sell higher quality ads, they’ll make more money at the end of the day.

This whole thing is the core driver behind privacy being eroded at scale, because ad targeting has proven effective, and so advertisers want to advertise on the platform with the best targeting. So everyone wants to spy on their users the best and build the best targeting.

It is the world’s first open 3T-class model

Good lord that’s a lot of VRAM. Hopefully soon there’s another phase of finding good ways to distill this recent progress into smaller models I can actually run locally.

I’ll give my own nerdy answer, besides the “good for amateurs” one.

Personally, I’m pretty techy, but I use my PC primarily as a living room gaming PC. As such, keeping it working is paramount, although I can’t resist tinkering with it anyway. I was afraid an immutable OS would limit my tinker projects, but I’ve found it to be a total non-issue. Even for complex tasks like self-hosting AI to play around with, podman has served admirably. Honestly, it gives me confidence to try more ballsy things than I would otherwise, rather than limiting me.

Additionally, I like the feeling that my core system is essentially unbreakable. Even if I ran sudo rm -rf, I don’t even have the ability to truly pooch things. Similar deal for any virus or hacker that might access my hardware, you can’t hide weird behaviour deep in my system, it’s immutable. I’ve also crashed my computer a few times by blowing through my VRAM budget while tinkering with self-hosting AI, and such crashes don’t scare me, I’ve got easy rollbacks if I crashed my PC while it was doing something delicate.

I’m even running the testing branch right now (I want earlier access to the latest Mesa, as it has bugfixes for the DOOM DLC), and I don’t have to fear anything from an unstable branch. If it breaks, I can trivially rollback and switch branches to the latest stable in a few minutes, with immense confidence.

I love the assurance it gives, and the only thing it’s ever blocked me from doing was installing my VPN client, but an OpenVPN config has done that job just fine. I’d consider switching to CachyOS, but the main reason I haven’t is that I’d miss the comfort of my OS being immutable.

Good to know! That’ll extend my copium another 24 hours nicely, if need be. If it doesn’t come out then, I’ll really be back to having no idea when it might drop.

Honestly, I might be huffing hopium, but I’m holding out some hope for Monday. There’s been a lot of movement for weeks now, shipments to warehouses, drivers being marked as released in SteamDB, games getting marked as Steam Frame Compatible, stuff like this.

Honestly, I expected it to become available right after the Steam Machine reservation process finished, but that was interrupted by the Summer Sale, which wrapped up on Thursday. They say never to release anything on a Friday, so… I’m hoping they’re just waiting until Monday to announce the price and open reservations.

Really well put. In general, I find it frustrating how many people use the word “acccessibility” as a means to argue no games like Dark Souls (intentionally having only 1 difficulty for a single intended experience) should ever exist. But to me that’s conflating disability-accessibility with a more literal “accessible to more people” type of accessibility. I’d argue “approachable” would be a better word for the latter.

People with motor skill issues or whatever else beat Dark Souls all the time. Heck, fully abled people are intentionally giving themselves equivalent experiences by beating it with dance pads and guitar or drum controllers or whatever else all the time. So the difficulty isn’t an accessibility issue, the game is actually pretty slow paced (you can make a decent argument that more recent From Soft titles speed things up to an unreasonable degree for some motor disabilities, but I’m talking about the OG here).

What I hear instead, most of the time, is some version of “I’m a dad, I don’t have hours to throw at a boss every night”. And my instinctive response, most of the time is simply… I just don’t think you like this game? Getting your ass beat and needing hours and dozens of deaths to learn a boss or beat an area is the intended experience, and you’re having it, whether you put those hours in 1 or 12 at a time. If you don’t enjoy that, that’s just fine, there are millions of great games that don’t force you into such a punishing experience. It’s a little bit like complaining a puzzle game has too many puzzles in the way of the platforming.

Anyway, my point being, I think centering the From Software “accessibility” conversation around difficulty options, something the devs have determined is a pillar of the game’s design that they won’t change, prevents us from having a proper conversation about accessibility, in terms of actual disability accessibility. I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example. None of the Souls games even have so much as a colourblind mode, and we should be putting pressure on From Soft to add something as trivial as that as the franchise explodes in popularity, but “dark souls accessibility” is an entirely unrelated conversation instead, which kinda drowns out any other.