I used various Raspberry Pi's over the past decade, starting with the Pi B+, then Pi 3 B , then Pi 4.

The Raspberry Pi's have support in mainline distros (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu), so that is why their support is good, compared to the more powerful SBC's that have 'one hit wonder' Linux releases (Odroid, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, ...etc), then no support after that.

Although, something similar happened to me on the Pi 3 B: I am stuck with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and can't upgrade to 24.04 LTS or later, because they stopped support for 32bit ARM.

And the Pi suffer in other ways:

Power consumption used to be the Pi's forte, but now when you buy a mini PC, say with an Intel N100, you get low power consumption, and the difference between that and Pi's is negligible. For example, the N100 TDP is 6W, and the i5-1135G7 is 15W. Both are found in mini PCs these days, as well as other Intel and AMD CPUs.

6W means if you run it 24/7 at 25% utilization, and electricity cost is $0.25/kWh (Ontario's summer rate), your consumption is a whopping $3.28 PER YEAR.

Then there is hardware support. When you buy a mini PC, you get things included, such as a case, a fan (for some models that require it), upgradeable RAM, SATA connectors, an M.2 slot, and so on. Some of that is available on Raspberry Pis, but usually as a HAT or kit, for extra dollars ...

The experience with a mini PC is just as seemless as a laptop or a desktop: there is no difference at all in installation, upgrades, ...etc.

I was on Kubuntu for many years as my sole desktop.
Then I ran into trouble upgrading (though I always stuck with LTS releases, never in between ones).

I switched to Xubuntu (XFCE), and never looked back.
There are sure some areas with more functionality in KDE, but I don't miss them at all.
XFCE stays out of the way, and allows you to focus on the applications.

The corresponding author is Subir Sarkar.

He is a professor at Oxford who has done some interesting work about the expansion of the universe is NOT accelerating.

Instead, he is saying that there is a dipole effect because earth, and the galaxy cluster that we are in, are all moving in space, and that gives the effect of accelerating expansion!

He provides compelling evidence (for a non-specialist at least) for what he says and also casts doubts on the evidence for acceleration by analyzing their data (supernovae as standard candles, and their red shift), since a dipole effect is observed on that.

If his hypothesis is confirmed by other research and observations, then the 2011 Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter and Adam Reiss maybe for nothing ...

Watch his lecture on Beyond The Cosmological Standard Model.

This latest paper is yet another analysis towards that.

Let us see which hypothesis is supported by the evidence, current and future ...

I use Firefox + uBlock Origin , on Linux as well as Android.
No ads in YouTube at all ...

And there is a bonus: videos continue to play, even when the tab isn't the on that has focus. Handy for listening to music, while reading.

Drupal's code used to be self hosted by the Drupal Association using plain Git and some custom code wrappers.

But that changed a couple of years ago, where Drupal is now self hosted on an instance running Gitlab.

You can even see the Gitlab logo on the code's page.

How does 40 NVMEs fit in one PCIe bus?
Or are they connected over another interface thar is slower, then into PCIe.
Can someone knowledgeable answer this?

AI-Native you say?
Oh, I see ... you mean hype-compliant.

Also reminiscent of blockchain hype ...

Remember when a tea company added blockchain to its name and its stock soared 200%?

Later, they were investigated and charged by the SEC.

This is definitely a sign of the current bubble (LLMs).

And some of us do remember ...

For example when a tea company added blockchain to its name and its stock soared 200%?

Later, it was investigated and charged by the SEC.

Just like Pets.com in the dotcom era.

2. Those who don't give a damn about ethics at all and make no bones about it.
...
People who don't give a damn aren't really a problem either, since in a world populated by mostly good people, they'll ultimately be shamed and marginalized or end up in jail.

Or, they get elected president, twice ... destroy the economy, country's reputation, and start a war they can't end.

Totally agree with you ...

But it is not only libraries, there are other factors at play, me thinks ...

Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.
It is not taught, nor do first jobs they get care about those aspects.
For example, don't get me started on the infinity scroll which eats up RAM like crazy, rather than a pager of Next/Previous page.

There are also the layers involved, specially with web development.
It used to be HTML only, then CSS was added, then Javascript was added for certain smarts.
Then whole frameworks were invented and used for JS.

Anyway, there is no easy way out of this.
Maybe RAM shortage will compel developers to use RAM sparingly?
Nah, that is a pipe dream ... unfortunately.

But how much of that is paying for the case and power supply?

Didn't get what you meant there.

NUCs usually come with a case and a power supply.

I bought one a couple of months and it came with those, as well as RAM.
It didn't have any storage though, because it was from a corporation, and didn't want to risk selling SSDs with data on them.

Raspberry Pi's are the right fit in specific cases.
For example, you need to interface the GPIO pins to some devices.

But there are issues with it in other cases.
For example, the cost rises as you include accessories, such as a case, fan, various hats, and so on.

If you just need a low(er) power x86 platform to run a stock Linux distro, then plain mini PCs or older models of Intel/ASUS NUCs will fit the bill nicely.

You can get a 2018 NUC for ~ $100 or so.

They already come with M.2 slots, and some have SATA connectors.
They have SODIMM slots so you can upgrade RAM later if you want.

Running Xubuntu or Ubuntu Server is a breeze.

Some background from personal use of Astral's products ...

Astral makes a tool called uv, for Python.

It offers one solution to an important problem in the Python ecosystem.
Certain projects require certain versions of Python.
You may end up with two projects that you need on the same machine, but with different Python versions.

For example, you want to run Home Assistant and AppDaemon.
Using uv, you can have two separate virtual environments (venv) each with its own version of Python.

It is also lightning speed for pip.

So it replaces venv and pip in one go.

Home Assistant recently dropped regular user support for it being run from PIP or uv, so I moved to Home Assistant under docker.
But for developers, doing a git clone, then using uv is still very helpful.

In the eighties, fourth generation languages or 4GLs were going to spell the end of programming. Business people would design and implement the systems.

Well, that was the theory, or scaremongering, anyway.

Add to that the hyperbole around some technologies that were pushed to end users, rather than a developer tool.

Examples:

- COBOL was supposed to be a language for managers so they don't have to ask a programmer to write a report for them.

- SQL was supposed to be the same, managers can query databases directly without the need for a programmer

- As you stated: 4GL was supposed to relieve programmers of the tedious work of coding

None of that came true, ...