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.

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 mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.

I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).

That’s the other galling side of this. It’s just so fucking dumb even as a way to “do” capitalism. Yes, theoretically one of the options in the face of tariffs is that an exporter can choose to eat the cost and both the importer and its country “win,” but that presupposes a market with few buyers and exporters with big enough profit margins that they can eat the cost. In reality of course, the exporter will instantly seek out other customers and if none can be found, they might eat some of the costs, but also pivoting their production to (previously) less profitable goods now makes much more sense because of the artificial barrier, and in the extreme case simply shutting down and liquidating assets is better than losing money on every sale. Then of course there are retaliatory tariffs, which work much better than the initial ones because they are targeted and leave the remainder of the global market available to country levying them.

Damning with faint praise, but you’re not wrong. No billionaire getting stuck-in like Musk is doing it to make the world a better place for anyone else, and no one except autocrats and accelerationist wackos should be pleased with how things have changed in the last 6 months.

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?

I have no hope for USA anymore. It’s gone steadily from bad to worse, and it seems like Americans never learn, ans especially like the Democrats never learn. Because they’ve done absolutely NOTHING to strengthen checks and balances or to strengthen democracy in USA.

This is a fair criticism, and is looking like a much bigger mistake than it seemed initially, and I think it’s telling the one single thing Obama spent the political capital on to get properly enshrined into statue is the one bit of his legacy that Trump is having the hardest time undoing. Constitutionally, we have fucked ourselves by thinking we could run the largest economy in the world on the legal equivalent of a “plan of a plan,” worshipping said high-level outline like it was holy writ, and then making surprise-pikachu face when a bad actor who’s not concerned about long-term stability starts shoving dynamite into its many cracks (pardon the mixed metaphor).

I hope you’re wrong, but I am not confident enough that you are to argue the point.

Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.

Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

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

I mean at this point, Trump’s preferred end state is basically China except stupid and unpredictable.

They see such an obvious opportunity for increasing their soft power that they’re saying things here that might actually slow down a move towards a world where taking Taiwan by force is acceptable.