I got an “open box” OG Pixel Fold for $350 last November. Everything else new or refurb in the price range was just another rectangular slab. I like the squarish aspect ratio for chess and reading but 16:9 video comes with black bars coving 1/3 of the screen. I dislike the taller foldables that came after and I assume it’ll be much more than 2 years before the new passport shaped foldables are available as refurbs for less than $500 so if/when this one conks out I’ll be back to using a slab phone as a hotspot for an ipad mini.

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.

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.