In 2023 when I built my PC and ran a benchmark and it said I had a top 3% PC (now top 7%) I was PROPER chuffed. 3DMark is the ultimate pay-to-win and there I was with my lower middle-class-salary (and no kids). I have low double digits in gaming hours on the machine in the last two years and pretty much use it as an HTPC. I just loaded up the Witcher 3 Remastered and maybe I just don’t like gaming. I have a 5700X3D/9070XT as a backup and an 11600K/6900XT as a backup-backup. I had grand dreams of sim racing and local LLM and retro gaming and nah.

As a call center employee, the most inexplicably difficult part of my job is asking an older person to navigate to our website. When I give them the 9 letter address, it almost always results in a google search for them and the ordeal of having them try to pick out our website from the sponsored results brings joy to advertisers everywhere.

My youtube algorithm is filled with AI doom/truthsayers and it feels like everybody else is taking crazy pills. Ed Zitron is a bit theatric but there’s nothing factually wrong with his arguments. Eli the Computer guy explains it in plain language that would be easily refutable should a refutation exist. I’m not shorting anything but I’m certainly not going out of my way to add any funds with significant exposure to AI companies.

When I built my 5800X3D/7900XTX PC, my research told me I’d need a 5090-class GPU to make my 5800X3D a meaningful bottleneck. As the 7800X3D and 9800X3D were released I could not afford a GPU that would make me want/need to upgrade my CPU. I will not have the fastest PC for the next few years but I can’t imagine 5090-class GPU performance being available for less than US$1000 before DDR6 is mature.

Old.reddit still works fine on firefox on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 8+ but my PC, pixel fold, and every other device only lets me view the old style when browsing multiple subreddits. If I want to see an individual subreddit I append the address with a banned sub e.g. old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales+narcofootage.

A one-time tax of 5%. Any respectable billionaire is confident they can make that up in a year.