I know for sure Intel server CPUs (for example, Xeons) don’t have integrated graphics and somebody else mentioned that many Ryzen CPUs don’t either.

That said, I’m not sure if they need integrated graphics to have hardware decoding for certain video codecs (though it makes sense that those things come together). Personally when I was looking into buying a mini-PC to transform into a media server for my living room, I made sure to check in the CPU specs if it had both integrated graphics (as it’s connected to my TV) and hardware decoding for the most recent codecs (I ended up going for a mini-PC with an N100 processor, since it has all that plus its power consumption is pretty low with a TDP of 6W so I can leave it always on as it also doubles as homeserver).

I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 CPU and no dedicated GPU as media server and it uses very little CPU (less than 20%) whilst playing 1080p video even with a torrent server over a wireguard VPN running on the background.

You don’t really need much CPU or GPU for playing or streaming videos from compress video files as long as you have hardware decoding on either processing unit (just make sure it implements all the way up to the AV1 coded).

You only need lots of CPU or GPU power if the codec you’re decoding from or encoding to is not implemented in hardware since in that case it will use software decoding or encoding so it’s down to raw CPU or GPU power.

In fact if all you want is a media server that solution I have is probably one of the best ones, mainly because it uses very little power (tops at 25W, usually much less) and runs silent, which is why I can have it in my living room using it as a media player connected to my TV, and with a wireless remote people can’t really tell it’s a PC since it just looks and works like a store bought media player rather than one I put together myself.

However that option means buying new stuff, and I can see the value in using old hardware if you have it around, plus the old hardware will still likely be more powerful so you can also use it for more demanding stuff or just more stuff at the same time, which is why I didn’t suggest it and instead just suggested some tweaks to make that old hardware consume less and make less noise.

underclock and undervolt

If I’m not mistake only hobbyist level motherboards let you control the voltages and if one knows enough to get one of those they probably don’t need the advice I gave.

Also it’s hard to end up with a non-working or unstable configuration with underclocking, whilst it’s pretty easy to do so with undervoltage.

That said, for those who know what they’re doing, your suggestion definitely delivers lowers temperatures than underclocking alone though at the risk of a less stable system (which can be ameliorated with proper stress testing).

For anybody not doing generative AI with it and not running massive loads on it, if you’re going to use an old gaming PC as a home server, at least replace the graphics card with a cheap one with no fans or use the integrated graphics on your CPU (something I believe pretty much all consumer CPUs of the last two decades have) and underclock the CPU if you don’t need full processing power since even small reductions in clock speed can significantly reduce the maximum temperature.

Oh, yeah, the Goldbug-Prepper ideation of Gold as a way to preserve one’s wealth when society collapses is ridiculous: when things get that bad what matters are the basics like food and water, which for anything more than a few months means growing your own food as you’ll deplete whatever stores you have sooner or later. Then beyond that come all the things needed to (re)build a society and it’s going to be a bartering society, not a “tokens of value” one. Wealth held in some abstract token of “value” only becomes useful much later and it might not even be precious metals.

As I see it, Gold is just a decent insurance for a certain range of systemic risks - think of it as a basket of currencies but simpler and with lower correlation to main currencies. It will insulate you from things like a run of the Dollar (a possible thing when the USD stops being a Reserve currency) or governments continuous devaluating their currency as a way to make up for economic mismanagement (like in India), not from societal collapse.

Each “bit” in the architecture is mainly related to how many different memory positions you can address with a CPU opcode (i.e. an assembly command) that needs to access memory or with a CPU register that holds an memory address (so an 8 bit register can only address 256 memory positions, a 16 bit one 65,538 memory positions, a 32 bit one 4,294,967,296 memory positions and so on) - basically every additional bit in the register size of a CPU that addresses memory roughly doubles the memory that CPU can access and thus use (not considering hacks to go around those limits, such as the Spectrum 128K had).

Meanwhile Moore’s Law predicts that “the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years” which for integrated circuits roughly means that every two years the amount of memory that can be in the same integrated circuit area doubles.

So if Moore’s Law kept working, each architecture bit roughly gives you two more years until the availability of memory catches up- This means that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures per Moore’s Law gave us 64 years until we have to move to an architecture with more bits because memory available is so big that CPUs are unable to use so much memory.

Were we are now, 64 bits is enough to address 8 Exabytes of memory.

That said, extrapolating from the current trend in growth of memory in PCs, we will reach the point when we will start hitting the constraints of that in … NEVER - thanks to the AI bubble the newer PCs are coming out with the same or less memory than the previous generation, so the trend of available memory is not upwards but downwards.

Check it with a 1y or 5y window.

Both Silver and Gold climbed massively in the last 3 years (though they’ve been steadily climbing since around 2020) and hit a huge peak early this year and then came back down. Now they’re both sitting at roughly were they were at the start of the year.

IMHO PMs are not really great speculative investments since they’re not all that volatile (though early this year volatility was unusually high) and they’re more mid and long term wealth holding mechanism in the face of Economic problems that hit major currencies making the value of those currencies (and hence all assets denominated in them) go down. It helps that actual physical metals (especially for Gold) are not managed by Governments or Central Banks - you cannot create new Gold beyond the roughly 2% mined per year hence there is no such thing as Gold interest rates so states can’t just make more of it or tweak its long-term returns - hence it cannot be mismanaged, unlike government issued currencies.

In a long-term perspective it’s not as much that you make money from PMs as it is that everybody else around you is getting poorer because their incomes, savings and assets are in a currency which is losing purchasing power, whilst you managed to retain the purchasing power of your savings.

From my own experience in the 2008 Crash, expect PMs to first go down as Markets plummet and traders are forced to sell in more stable and liquid assets (such as Gold) to cover margin calls in other areas, and then turn and start climbing fast as the crash hits the broader economy and hence the value of the main currencies (this time around, especially the USD) starts falling meaning that PM prices in those currencies go up.

Also keep in mind that Silver is very exposed to the status of the broader Economy since it’s mainly used as an industrial metal, so if the Economy slows down, fewer products containing it are made hence demand for it goes down - Gold tends to be more insulated from the broader Economy than Silver.

That is a good point.

It really depends if he’s trying to control the narrative (in which case he will want to control the bots) or to just keep people engaged with his products (in which case he doesn’t care).

Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.

It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.

Well, you see, a lot of people have been convinced that Denialism or at best Non-Mainstreamism (a word I just made up) is the same as Skepticism and think they’re the latter when they’re mainly one or both of the former, not understanding that you have to actually think hard to be a Skeptic (as it’s mostly about logically and analytically testing what you are told before accepting it or rejecting it, and it’s definitely not just rejecting everything), not just engage in the low-cognitive near-brainless activities of criticizing everything and/or choose a side whose words one unthinkingly trusts that somehow is supposedly non-mainstream (hence “it’s not the same” as most people when they choose a side whose words they unthinkingly trust).

In a way it’s funny how human stupidity and the far too common lack of self-awareness and introspection have been weaponized in not just one but actually several ways to the point that even people who think themselves as “rebellious” are being led by the nose just like most of the rest.

It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.

I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.

It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.

Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.

Oh, some (very few, IMHO) people will definitely call others “Russian Troll” or equivalent if they point out that Russian interference has far less power than the very much local ultra-rich, politicians and News-media owners when it comes to the current state of most Western nations and that it’s more likely that loudly raging about “foreign interference” is a political propaganda tool of mainstream politicians - a scapegoat for the consequences of the pillaging of the West by ultra-wealthy Westerns (paralleling how “immigrants” are similarly used as scapegoats by other mainstream politicians - they’re both very much “blame foreigners”) that said politicians very much supported and still support.

Also, don’t get me started on how the interference of other nations is much larger and more open - for example both main parties in the US and UK openly have groups amongst their “parliamentarians” who are “Friends of Israel”.

Russia almost certainly interfered or tried to, because it makes sense for them to do so and it’s very much how they’ve always operated, it’s just that it stretches belief to blame them for most of what’s going on, especially in light of the explosion in inequality, crash in social mobility, collapse in job security (mostly in Europe, the US was always so) and so on in the last couple of decades of Neoliberal political dominance that are for more likely to explain growing discontent and the News-media owned by billionaires very openly pushing far-right ideations 24/7.

In bigger countries foreigners generally don’t have the kind of influence that locals do, especially the wealthy and well-connected ones.

As I see it, there are definitely multiple manipulation machines in operation out there nowadays and multiple muppets whose brains are only big enough for simple explanations and who have have fallen for the slop some of them feed and will gladly spout their simplemindedness here.

That said a person who writes “The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility” (amongst other such “jewels”) like the previous poster did clearly doesn’t fall into the “critical thinker” category.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same”

I’m think just Tech here, or maybe more specifically digital technology - the period till 2000 was mainly driven by techies, after than it was mainly driven by grifters, generally with backgrounds like Finance or Marketing, not Technology.

Many people seem to still have the idea that Techies lead Tech Startups, but that hasn’t been true for at least 2 decades.

Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.

I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.

Where’s the part about making an account to “share your score with your friends”.

Also missed the “Achievements”: the very first click should’ve triggered at least “Started your first sweep”, “Just got lucky: your blind click wasn’t a mine!”, “Cleared more than 10 blocks on 1 click” and “Cleared more than 20 blocks on 1 click”.

Also didn’t saw any “sweep store” selling things like “Safe-click: is this click hits a mine it transforms into a flag instead of exploding”.

I think this is more if Minesweeper was an AAA game 10 years ago.

The massive financial crash that will wipeout those assholes might the only real “win” the rest of us get.

Of course, judging by the last one in 2008 (which, IMHO, I suspect will turn out to be smaller than the AI one), governments the world over will try to save the assholes and make the rest of us pay for it with Austerity - if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through a couple of major crashes (in the very industries most hard hit) and several minor ones is that when those in power see that they can rescue the wealthy whilst making the rest pay with no consequences for themselves, they’ll do it again and again in ever more extreme ways, until things at a societal level rather than just crack, actually blow up.

We shall see - there is really no way the rest of us can stop the desperate feeding frenzy amongst the increasingly panicked elites and their politician minions before the whole thing crashes from the systemic accumulation of inbalances, so no matter what we (the common folk) do, we’re going to get a massive AI crash - probably as big as the Net Crash and the 2008 Crash together - the more the feeding freenzy lasts (and governments as usual are activelly trying to delay the day of reckoning, hence making the feeding frenzy last longer and hit deeper) and the more of the broader Economy the sharks can reach, the worse it will be.

I’m still perfectly fine in my 6+ years old Gaming PC with 16GB.

But then again I switched from Windows to Linux about 2 years ago.

Since the time I started using PCs (over 3 decades ago), I went down the route of squeezing as much as I could from my desktop PCs by upgrading the hardware piece by piece rather than periodically buying a new one - to the point that I think I’ve done maybe just 3 full replacements in those 3 decades - the upgrades most of the time being memory, graphics cards and storage upgrades as those tend to be the best bang for the buck, though a few times all the way to replacing the motherboard (which sometimes forces things like memory upgrades and once even a computer box and power source upgrade, in the transition to ATX physical format).

All this to say that in the last few years since Windows has become so bloated and inneficient, Linux’s capabilities to run Windows software have become so good and the prices of the usually best value hardware upgrades (memory, graphics cards) have become so high that, in my (I believe informed) view, the best performance upgrade for one’s PC right now for most people is literally to replace Windows with Linux.

This isn’t fanboyism speaking - I’ve been using Linux for fun since the early 90s when I would install Slackware from floppy disks, professionally for a large part of my career (which was developing software for the server side, were Linux became dominant in the 00s) and only switched my Gaming PC to it 2 years ago because I before I didn’t feel it wasn’t at all hassle free to game in Linux and I didn’t want to come how to unwind from spending all day programming and doing bug-fixing just to be stuck at diagnosing problems running some game or other in Linux - this is genuinelly my analysis based on my experience of improving my PC almost always by targetted upgrading piece by piece to improve performance rather than regularly buying new machines.

In fact, I’ve done this upgrade not just for myself but also for a family member whose Windows 8 (!) PC had become incompatible with pretty much everything the used - put Linux in, put up the desktop shortcuts for them to get to what they use (browser, e-mail), configure the thing to auto-update and it’s problem solved.

What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).

Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.

I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.

So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.

PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.