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 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.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

LOL @ the notion of Matthias not including a motor in a home-built tool.

If it is what I think it is (thanks for the link, @AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world), Matthias had some opinions.

Can you build a wooden Jointmaker pro?

People keep emailing me about building a “jointmaker pro” (Google it). But that would be silly to reproduce. The jointmaker pro could be improved on considerably by replacing the straight saw blade with a continuous rotating one. And then motorize that saw blade. But … An improved “jointmaker pro” has been available for decades, and at a fraction of the cost. It’s called a table saw. The “jointmaker” is a pet peeve of mine. “pro” is a misnomer. It’s a tool for hobbyists with too much time and money. You won’t see any professionals using it. The one thing I admire about the jointmaker pro is how well it’s presented. Very slick. I admire the guy’s marketing skills.

I can’t think of what else it would be. It seems to be a precision piece of kit, but Christ on a cracker that’s a lot for a glorified jig that can only work with stock that could be handled as hand-work by most whose preferences lie in that direction.

PDM is the current buzzword for lower-end CAD. Alibre just added it. OnShape tries to embody it. Solidworks hobbyist options only continue to exist in order to market it. Even the Ondsel startup that hired some FreeCAD devs built their (failed) business model around bolting PDM on.

This looks like it’s taking a more traditional “cloud storage” model and replacing it with something more PDM-like so they can sell to low-end corporate users, and the hobbyists just get rolled in because ain’t nobody maintaining something just for the freeloaders, who can be forced to get used to it anyway and might push for it if they ever get work in the field, simply because they know it.

My guess is it’s not inherently worse than what it’s replacing, but it’s likely complicated and kinda clunky for a random person designing gears and project enclosures.

While the progress towards making printers user friendly is impressive, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company whose mandate and path was clearer than Bambu’s.

From the beginning, they’ve hemmed and hawed about contributing their source code changes required by the licenses of software they’re using, and they have built in the infrastructure that would allow them to “flip switches” to lock users out of functionality when they decide it’s a plausible market strategy (e.g. default cloud connections, tightly integrated website/repository, and RFID “identification” readers with non-generic codes), all while taking VC, charging a premium, and presenting a customer-facing image that emphasizes their similarity to vendors in more mature and locked-down segments. They’re not a walled garden right now, but many those foundations look really solid, LOL.

I’m not immune to taking the path of least resistance. I have an iPhone, my Xitter account is the only one I’ve actually deactivated, and I use a couple of Windows-only commercial software packages, but I do flatter myself to think I’m clear-eyed about what I’m giving up. Bambu has always been “Enshittification-ready.”