A small window air conditioner is something like $200 here in the US.

hits Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Frigidaire-FHWC063TC1-Conditioner-Electronic-Controls/dp/B0CFYG2511

I mean, I’m not saying that a hotel room is unreasonable as a last minute thing — like, it’s a heatwave and I want to be in a cool environment within the hour — but in all seriousness, an air conditioner is gonna pay for itself pretty quickly if all you want is a cool room to sleep in and not the other things a hotel provides.

Looks dubiously at Indonesia.

Leo is a devout Christian who had become increasingly disillusioned with…the rise of the LGBTQ movement.

Although he is committed to staying in Russia out of a sense of “destiny”, he now says he misses the freedoms that have shaped the American personality.

“[In] Russia you don’t have these human rights values.”

I mean…

Israel’s the one party that wasn’t a variable on this. Iran decided to hit a cargo ship, and the US decided to hit Iran back.

Well…okay, maybe the cargo ship was Israeli, but I would assume not.

searches

It’s the Ever Lovely, Singapore-flagged and -owned.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-attacks-cargo-ship-testing-trumps-deal-to-reopen-strait-d3cf454c

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday,

https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/containers/and-may-she-be-ever-lovely

The Ever Lovely is owned by Evergreen Marine (Singapore) and will be deployed on the Far East – South America trade.

Political construction project: Russia deliberately lowered the official seismic hazard rating for the area to justify building the bridge on highly unstable soil with its own fault system.

That’s not necessarily a bad move, if you’re Russia and seeking to annex Crimea. That is, even if the bridge will ultimately go down, having the transport capacity may be critical in the short term. Right now, Ukraine has knocked out the ferries. If Russia didn’t have the Kerch Strait rail and road bridge — even a flawed, decaying bridge — it’d have a lot less access to Crimea.

Before the Trans-Siberian Railroad was complete in its present form, for a period of time, Imperial Russia built temporary tracks in winter over waterways. Impermanent, but if it was critical enough to get the transport that it provided now, being disposable was acceptable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circum–Baikal_railway

The Circum–Baikal railway (Russian: Кругобайка́льская желе́зная доро́га or Кругобайка́лка, abbreviated “КБЖД”) is a historical railway in the Irkutsk region of Russia. It runs along the Northern shore of the Southern extremity of Lake Baikal from the town of Slyudyanka to the Baikal settlement. Until the middle of the 20th century the Circum–Baikal railway was part of the main line of Trans–Siberian Railway; later on, however, a duplicate section of the railway was built.

With the purpose of establishing a through railway connection, before the Circum-Baikal was finished, it was decided to link the shores of the lake with a train ferry. Trains were carried on the special ice breaker-ferry SS Baikal which had three parallel tracks on its train deck. Another, smaller icebreaker-ferry, the “Angara”, was also built which carried passengers and goods, but not trains. In the cold winter of 1903/04 when the icebreakers were not strong enough to break the ice, a railway line was laid on the ice, and railway wagons were pulled by draft animals.

looks at all the people in the fountain and having its water sprayed at them

Man, I hope Paris puts a bunch of chlorine or similar in there.

“It’s shooting pure unadulterated propaganda into our veins,” says another government employee. “Maybe Fox’s editorial standards are too high.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose.

https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/06/trump-just-hit-a-crazy-approval-rating-in-startling-new-poll.html

President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest point during his two presidencies, according to a new poll.

A poll from the American Research Group, out Monday, found that approval for Trump stands at 30%, the lowest figure recorded across both of his terms. It is a 1 percentage point drop from May, when 31% of Americans were in support of the president’s performance.

I commented here quite some back that I did not expect that Valve would subsidize the console and that it would be for this reason, that subsidizing the console means a razor-and-blades business model, and a razor-and-blades model requires a closed system, where one has to purchase additional product specifically from the vendor of the initial product. They were making an open system, where this isn’t the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor-and-blades_model

The razor-and-blades business model[1] is a business model in which one article is sold at a low price or even given away in order to increase sales of a complementary good, such as consumable supplies. It is different from loss leader marketing and product sample marketing, which do not depend on complementary products or services. Common examples of the razor-and-blades model include inkjet printers whose ink cartridges are significantly marked up in price, coffee machines that use single-use coffee pods, electric toothbrushes, and video game consoles, which require additional purchases of accessories and software not included in the original package.[1]

Although the concept and the catchphrase “Give 'em the razor; sell 'em the blades” are widely credited to King Camp Gillette, the inventor of the double-edged safety razor, Gillette did not in fact follow this model, nor did it invent the razor-and-blades model, although it did pioneer the production and sale of disposable razor blades.[1][2]

In more recent times, video game consoles have often been sold at a loss while software and accessory sales are highly profitable to the console manufacturer. For this reason, console manufacturers aggressively pursue legal action against carriers of modchips and jailbreaks due to a belief that the resulting possibility of unauthorized or prohibited copying causes a loss in profits. Particularly in the sixth generation era and beyond, Sony and Microsoft, with their PlayStation 2 and Xbox, had high manufacturing costs. As such, the companies sold their consoles at a loss and aimed to make a profit from game sales.[9][10] Nintendo had a different strategy with its GameCube, which was considerably less expensive to produce than its rivals, so it retailed at break-even or higher prices.[11] In the following generation of consoles, both Sony and Microsoft have continued to sell their consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 respectively, at a loss, with the practice continuing with the concurrent eighth and ninth generations of console hardware.[12][13][14]

If you’re on Linux and aren’t particularly fussed about any issues stemming from power loss, you can probably run it under eatmydata and it’ll disable SQLite calls to fsync().

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

An experiment with bird houses for the great tit began in 2016. It has been observed that great tits like to eat the young, not yet hairy caterpillars in April.

https://eidclimate.org/europe-set-to-embrace-natural-gas-as-a-green-investment/

Europe Set to Embrace Natural Gas as a “Green Investment”

The European Union recently announced plans to label natural gas as a sustainable fuel in the continent’s energy mix as it seeks to both lower emissions while meeting consumer demands for power generation.

You never know. Could be natural gas fueling said private planes!

In a particularly horrific incident, a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Ternopil was approached on Telegram by Russian recruiters offering her money. After initial contact was established, and the schoolgirl refused to go along with the plan, Russian agents hacked her phone to force her cooperation, threatening to release intimate photographs of her onto the internet. She complied, assembled an improvised explosive device as instructed and attempted to leave it near a local police station, but was detained by Ukrainian security services.

I doubt that stuff like this is likely going to resolve Russia’s air defense issues.

These incidents have occurred all across Europe, according to a recent investigation by the Associated Press. The GRU was also behind an ambitious plot to place incendiary devices aboard several cargo planes en route to North America, one of which blew up on the tarmac at a DHL logistics hub in Leipzig, Germany, according to Western intelligence officials.

And this sort of stuff seems likely to be outright counterproductive.

He further claimed that Russian military units are advancing every day.

My suspicion is that Ukraine can afford to slowly yield farmland for longer than Russia can afford to give up energy infrastructure, at present rates.

Well…but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn’t asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker’s memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org’s Wayback Engine.

First of all, here’s a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it’s probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it’s come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that’s $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.

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

This is a bit older, from 2003, but it has an index of the degree to which a country is multicultural in ethnic, linguistic, and religious aspects.

Looking up a couple of countries and their relative rankings, out of 215:

Microsoft’s problem, I think, is in significant part that they are the big commercial player trying for a local AI play. Like, your local Windows machine does AI inference. In Anthropic’s business model, the inference is cloud-based.

Local is more hardware-intensive, because the capacity utilization of hardware is going to be lower for local AI. If you stick a piece of hardware in a datacenter and lots of people share it, you need less hardware, because when one person isn’t using that hardware, another can be. If you would use local AI hardware 1% of the time, then it costs only about one-hundredth the amount from a hardware standpoint to have people sharing parallel compute hardware in a datacenter as to do everything locally. So as long as hardware prices, like shortages of memory, are a constraining factor (or cooling, for that matter, or maybe power if you’re talking about laptops on battery, all of which have cloud-based approaches getting an advantage) Microsoft’s going to have a harder time of it than the cloud guys.

Microsoft (and local AI in general) does better if people really want low-latency or always-doing-work load, or reliably always-available services, or services where data privacy is critical. There, local AI has the advantage over cloud-based or at least erodes the cloud-based advantage. Right now, I think that that’s just not generally where the state of affairs is. Could change in the future, but I think that they’re just going to have a hard time of things in the near term. My guess is that Microsoft’s relative potential improves as memory prices come back down.

I think that running local LLMs would be great. But the simple fact is that for most users, it’s just too costly to make sense for a lot of applications with current memory prices.

I got a Framework Desktop, 128GB, specifically to do local generative AI stuff, in 2025. At the time, the system was $2,500, which is already going to be pricey for a number of people for a single-purpose computer. In the months since that shipped, the price on the exact same hardware configuration has gone up to over $6,500. That’s just not a price that a lot of people are going to be willing to pay for a PC. If component supply rises and prices drop back down, then I think that the calculus changes for local AI.

AI companies are acquiring more memory than the entire rest of the world uses. If we want to do the same thing that we could do in the cloud locally and have capacity utilization of 1% on that hardware, then we need a hundred times as much memory as we do with a cloud-based compute approach. That’s…a kind of staggering number.

EDIT: Oh, one major exception that could favor local compute, if R&D produces some major improvements in this direction. Right now, the way most models work, we have a very-expensive-to-generate model that’s static, unchanging. This model does not change as one does inference on it. This makes it fairly efficient for a single compute node in an AI datacenter somewhere to have this one model loaded onto it, and then be used by many users who are all wanting to use the same model.

However, if the same model isn’t being used by many users, then the (expensive) cost of loading a new model onto memory attached to parallel compute hardware for each prompt has to be paid.

If someone comes up with major improvements that can be derived from mutating a model, from updating it as it is used — and I would say with some confidence that human-level AI will require some mechanism giving it more ability to learn after the initial training phase is complete than is presently the case for LLMs as used in 2026 — this is something that may greatly shift the balance in favor of local AI. It’s something that we, as humans, do.

If I were Microsoft, I might seriously look into advanced AI R&D, where models are updated during use. It’s not just that it’s an area with potential, but that it’s an area that might advantage Microsoft’s strengths (control of the local computer, doing local compute) relative to other major AI companies. It only takes one major breakthrough that makes everyone very badly want to have an constantly-updated model to drastically alter the economics of AI compute.

Though…if that happens, as I point out above, that’ll likely set off an even greater RAM crisis than happened with cloud AI compute…

In fact, IIRC from an article I was reading a while back, the very first industrial robot was used on an American auto assembly line.

searches

Yes, Unimate, and it was even on a GM line, same as here.

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

Unimate was the first industrial robot,[1] which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.

Devol, together with Joseph Engelberger, his business associate, started the world’s first robot manufacturing company, Unimation.[7] Devol’s background wasn’t in academia, but in engineering and mechanics, and previously worked on optical sound recording for film and high-speed printing using magnetic sensing and recording. Engelberger’s ultimate goal was to create mechanical workers to replace humans in factories.[8]

The machine weighed 4000 pounds[9] and undertook the job of transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies, a dangerous task for workers, who might be poisoned by toxic fumes or lose a limb if they were not careful.[4]

I feel like killing a rat is probably therapeutic for a therapy ferret. I mean, that’s kind of what ferrets are into. Probably more than being handled by the planet’s superpredator, at any rate.

That does sound like something that Trump would say.

Just expend some more compute time on doing compression and we’ll get those filesize numbers to a workable level.

$ stat -c %s enhance.png 
276773
$ convert enhance.png enhance.avif
$ identify enhance.avif
enhance.avif AVIF 1164x558 1164x558+0+0 8-bit sRGB 14391B 0.000u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance.avif
14391
$

zoom and enhance

$ identify enhance2x.avif
enhance2x.avif AVIF 2328x1120 2328x1120+0+0 8-bit sRGB 32448B 0.010u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance2x.avif 
32448
$

zoom and enhance

$ identify enhance4x.avif 
enhance4x.avif AVIF 4656x2232 4656x2232+0+0 8-bit sRGB 50758B 0.000u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance4x.avif
50758
$

Okay, that last one took 17 minutes to upscale on my GPU, so I’m not going further. But I’m using SD Ultimate Upscale, which is tile-based, so in theory that could be farmed out over a collection of GPUs and parallelized. Just need more compute hardware.

But as to filesize, that’s under 50kiB.