I honestly forget who at this point, but I think a few people still believe that I met my wife during a brief educational stay in her home state, when in fact it was online and years later.

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

From Springfield.

Doesn’t really matter, as long as you add the sugar while the liquid is hot enough to go into supersaturated solution.

Then chill and add ice.

Goddammit all y’all GPU people are right. 😂

The 580 is definitely the current bottleneck on Starfield, and likely on any other remotely intensive games. I am going to return the old-stock 2600 as soon as it arrives and instead use an eBay 3600 I got for slightly cheaper, and I’m going to stalk 6600 class GPUs until I find a good deal. I’ve had the mobo and 2400G for 5 and half years, and the HTPC case it’s in for something like 18. The poor thing has had a couple of extra fans bolted on and almost 40 holes drilled into it to increase airflow. It has a FIREWIRE port (disconnected), a floppy bay (with 3D printed insert to mount USB3 ports) and two optical bays (one of them still filled). And I still think it looks better than the RGB monstrosities that seem to be in vogue, LOL.

Okay, so I actually bumped up the Amazon 2600 to an eBay 3600, and yeah, I think the GPU camp was right. Starfield is pegging my GPU but not stressing the CPU, and Minecraft bedrock pushes harder on the CPU but doesn’t quite max it. I think a used RX 6600 will finish out my budget and be about what I want from this platform, which I’ve had for 5+ years.

Yes, but what about Italian Bobby?

I literally have no idea.

Eh, you may be right, but I’m starting with the stuff that will also involve a clean install and maybe seeing how everything comes together. With the 30 or 40 bucks residual value of the 8GB 580, a used RX6600 should still be in the budget, which TBH is a bit artificial, but also based on the priority I place on my “gaming rig.”

The 2600 is not much better on single threads, but has more cache and more cores, and is on the W11 list; I guess I could return it, but I’m probably topping out at the 5500. RAM for this build is cheaper than cheap right now and I do want to play with VMs a little. Storage should help with some things but is also for my own sanity.

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

I’ll use them till they don’t serve my needs and then move on.

This. Certain regional and hobby communities need a critical mass that doesn’t exist on Lemmy, and frankly it’s mostly the popular subreddits that are really bad over there anyway. I have reduced my engagement to posting about Mechanical Keyboards and otherwise lurking, I use an app that survived the APIpocalypse because the blind community (of which I am not a member) uses it, and I keep my adblocker and RES on. They’re probably still extracting some value from me, but so are several other companies that are probably even worse.

Lemmy is the community I choose to engage with most directly, and I will shed no tears over the end of Reddit when it comes, but for now I’ve found the middle ground that works for me.

Boxer shorts, specifically stretchy cotton knit ones that fully enclose the elastic waistband. I do have a couple of pairs of synthetic boxer briefs for the increasing rare occasions where I am running around enough that I might get chafed, but I think of them as sporting equipment or almost a medical garment.

Decided to get 16GB more RAM, a Ryzen 5 2600, and a Gen 3 Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD. About $145 all-in. If there are still issues, then a GPU in the ~$150 used range is really the last upgrade for me on this platform, I think.

I have a license for Alibre Design. I have heard it works okay in a VM, but also that Linux is not at all their priority. I also have a very clunky, weird German program that I still kind of like for 2D work.

The current spinny disk in this PC runs my linux install and has a bunch of random stuff.

Yeah, for the first several years of this motherboard and CPU, I ran it with the integrated graphics. Vega APUs were the new budget gaming hotness for a little while. :-) God, I’m old.

I’ll keep an eye out for good deals, and see what I can put together. Sounds like this is at least a non-crazy budget for what I’m after. Thanks!

Off the top of your head (because otherwise I’m happy to do my own research) would the Ryzen 5 5500 be worth the small premium over a 4500?

I’m leaning towards keeping the GPU, at least for now, but looks like I could get the SSD for ~$50, some well-matched RAM for around $25 (I guess this will help with a VM quite a bit?), and maybe a Ryzen 5 4500 for around $65. Given the limited and “squishy” info I’ve provided, does that sound halfway reasonable to start, and then see if the 580 still feels like a bottleneck?

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.