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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4648 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can someone who understands computer explain how kiwifarms managed to come back with even its .net address intact?

I thought they'd had their domain registration stolen and were being null-routed by all the backbone ISPs, but I can access them reliably again. Is the owner just a wizard, or is there something to the old "the internet routes around censorship" line?

I've never seen a single organization hold up under the full weight of the blob before. It's honestly awe-inspiring to watch.

They got their registration registered with a reliable provider, and as for being null-routed it was either a rogue employee or more likely Null himself fucked up lol. You gotta remember, it's just one guy flying by the seat of his pants. Even this website has more cumulative competence I suspect (though idk, maybe Null also has a secret cabal of nerds advising him).

it was either a rogue employee or more likely Null himself fucked up lol.

According to Null, the problem resolved itself without his intervention somehow. Liz Fong Jones did take credit for somehow making a top level provider add an exception just for kf so make of that what you will.

Funny thing is: at least one Russian ISPs blocks kiwifarms too.

Might that just be general censorship with Russia being an authoritarian regime that’s increasingly keen on cutting itself off from the outside world?

It's not a random site site chess.com, blocking kiwifarms is antithetical with "keen on cutting itself off from the outside", it's a world practice

KF was blocked by Roskomnadzor (Russia's FCC equivalent) for hosting an meme of Santa saying "ho-ho-holocaust" in 2020.

Damn the new culture war thread has 500 comments in one day. Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.

I wouldn't say fears of death are unfounded, if anything they are the voice of the reasonable. New users stumbling their way into the motte sub not being a thing anymore is still THE major issue.

It fills me with great joy to see that the motte is doing well but as the cliche goes nothing good lasts forever. Until there is a substantial amount of evidence that the forum in its current state is sustainable, I'm going to reserve my celebrations.

I wouldn't say fears of death are unfounded

It absolutely was. Most of the activity always came from regulars churning out content. I'd bet The Motte could probably be active indefinitely even if you banned everyone but the top 100 users.

FWIW, across /r/slatestarcodex, /r/TheMotte, and /r/theschism

  1. The top 20 posters authored 14% of comments.

  2. The top 100 posters authored 35% of comments.

  3. The top 200 posters authored 48% of comments.

  4. The top 1000 posters authored 79% of comments.

  5. The top 2000 posters authored 89% of comments.

Source

Obviously this says nothing about the quality of the content.

Like it or not we are still part of a much looser marseyverse network. Even in the old world the /r/drama to /r/themotte pipeline was probably responsible for more user flow than anyone wants to admit. I don't have any of the data I'd need to prove it but there were a couple rdrama posts to some post here this week and I'd put money on that being responsible for the comment uptick.

Redscarepod's reddit I s on the crossroads where they must choose to accept the cappy's help or perish.

I feel like it'd be useful to have a "who's linking here" news section (pingbacks, blogs used to call them, right?). I like knowing where people are coming from if there are any weird shifts.

New redditors stumbling into the motte was by far the biggest problem with the old site, worse than anything the admins did. Every week was just a constant cycle of "'how dare you,' he explained" that got in the way of any discussion.

With the chaff came the wheat.

At-least there was a pipeline that didn't rely entirely on word of mouth or preexisting knowledge of the rationalist sphere.

Nonetheless I'm hopeful in that the forum started off with a good seed userbase and that so many people were willing to make the move with the subreddit.

Is it mostly people arguing with Points, or did I miss something?

Edit: yeah, a variety of spice

Is there any neuro/psychological significance to habitual and unaffected non-symmetrical facial expressions? I don't mean stroke symptoms, I mean things like smirks instead of smiles, single eyebrow raises, sneers, head tilts etc.

Asking because it occured to me that I find it an engaging and attractive characteristic while on the other hand finding symmetrical expressions more open and genuine, or at least less nuanced. Wondering if there's something like a left brain right brain factor or if it's just learned behaviour and unconscious imitation.

I'm not sure there are any examples of a non deliberate use of asymmetrical facial expression aside from tics. It always implies one is consciously putting on a face.

Why is this Sunday thread unusually active? 230 comments at the time of me posting this.

Also to admins, any statistics on how the forum is doing? Also noticed some new usernames I don't recognise from reddit. Any stats on new accounts?

Also it seems like there's just a lot of activity. New CW thread has 500 comments in one day that's pretty outsized.

Questions about building a PC, software development, and food all usually get a decent number of replies as most of the folks here have built a PC, many work in software development, and either can cook (in some cases I expect quite well) or have a strong opinion about why everyone should stop cooking and eat meal squares or whatever the most current version is. So there's a large number of replies to many of the questions (some of which generate chains of replies themselves).

We had each topic come up this week, which is good for the reply count of the small questions thread.

Why do we have "private profiles" here? It seems to serve no function other than to make it obnoxious to look up someone's comments. Given that everyone can see your comments anyway right there in the threads, it hardly does anything for privacy.

Why do we have "private profiles" here?

The answer to almost every question about how the site presently operates is "because that is the codebase Zorba inherited." A number of alterations have been made by Zorba and a small army of volunteers, and all of it is well over my head, but there is a long list of code requests in the repository, as I understand it.

Asked this last week, but where's a good place to park a few 100k right now? Treasuries? Treasury ETFs? I don't want to throw any more into the stock market right now, but obviously don't want to hold onto that much cash.

I've been buying 4-week T-bills for a few months and rolling them over. Nothing at all looks remotely attractive so safety is king.

Janet Yellen being the least ugly girl at the bar is a sad state of affairs, but that's the same thing I've been doing. Everyone was hyped for i-bills the other month, but the variable rate on those is going to drop like a rock.

I'm just wondering if bond prices will bounce when the dip comes.

Guys, what's even going on with the economy? I'm simultaneously flooded with interest rate / stock price doomerism, and complaints about there not being enough qualified workforce, or even shortages of students who would want to get qualified.

It could be journos writing nonsense, but I'm getting the feeling of the system being torn apart...

Yeah, I have no idea at this point. There's been so much cash dropping out of the sky that there's no connection to reality any more. I can't tell if we're in for a depression or yet another redistribution-fueled bubble.

Real estate?

Not as liquid but it's still possible to use as collateral for a loan.

And can rent it out in the meantime. Although check the property tax rates in the region in question.

If I had that much cash lying about, I would 100% buy some property and rent it out to trusted family or friends at slightly below the market rate, to avoid the general hassles that come with tenants or short-term rentals.

You can be reasonably sure this investment will never plunge to zero.

Assuming a few is >300k USD? Create a local machine shop, employ one industry veteran guy who is semi-retired for 400-750 hours/yr to train some goofballs who seem interested in making exact complicated parts for extreme tolerance demanding airplane parts or medical machinery.

I know the investing guide to that: "how do you make a little money in small scale machining? Start with a lot of money"

What's your investment horizon? You trying to see if stocks will drop another 10% before going all in?

I assume you're looking for more than the ~3.5% savings. Suppose you could try some bond ETFs, if you think the Fed is going to ease up. Risk might be lower if you wait till the next FOMC in three weeks.

There is always the YOLO route. Go all in on TSLA or ETH and you either double that by EOY or lose half. Isn't SBF a vocal fan of that St Petersburg Paradox or whatever approach? ;)

Sure, but if you lose it, then dozens of mottizens will have to tell you how EA is problematic.

Do we still have a meta thread for suggestions? The way notifications work is very inconvenient, since you have to manually look through all the threads in your notification tab to figure out what's new.

Also, do mods see who submitted a report?

Seconded. If only there were a way to search for the blue highlight in browser.

Aren't new replies highlighted in pale blue for you?

Ok, so they are highlighted in light grey, but there's still no way to find them except by scrolling down, which is very annoying if you have multiple threads or different comment chains.

They are, but that still isn't very convenient for notifications. For example: I make a comment, I get 7 replies, see the notification for all of them, then way later someone else replies. That new reply, though highlighted in blue, will still be way down below all the ones that came before it. Not really the best way to present them.

I would say that notifications should put the newest replies to your comment up top, or better still, only show you the new replies. Highlighting blue doesn't really solve the issue with notifications, unfortunately.

I don't know if it works for notifications (Edit: it does), but if you go to your profile settings and add the following custom CSS rule, you can ctrl+f for new comments:


.unread::before {

	content: "new";

}

Just like the old slatestarcodex comment section.

Edit: those are supposed to be tildes around "new", but the markdown code block is rendering it as a strikethrough on my machine, no matter whether I use 4-space or triple-backtick format. escaped inline backtick

Not that I've noticed. I'm using dark mode, maybe that's why? If there is a highlight it's not obvious enough for me to have noticed it.

Also, if you navigate away and come back won't they no longer be highlighted? Reddit had an option to see all replies in reverse chronological order, which was often helpful.

this is the case for me and I appreciate it but I had a reddit addon that let me pick something like "6 hours" and would highlight any comment within that period, which is good for certain browsing strategies.

Like I mentioned in another comment, I'm playing historian. In my research I saw some articles mentioning a court case that I'd love to look into. I have the approximate date, the court it has been brought to, the names of (some of) the defendants, and I can take a good stab at the name of the plaintiff. Basic google-fu has failed me so far. Are historical (well sort of, we're talking about the 70's) court documents public in the US? If so how would I go about getting them (I don't care if it involves fees)?

Have you tried PACER?

Thanks! It's a state court case, but this might be useful in the future.

Judicial records are open to public scrutiny unless the parties can convince the judge to "seal" those records (barring some exceptions that vary by state—juvenile prosecutions, names of children involved in divorce proceedings, name-change requests, names of rape victims, etc.). I assume you can just submit a records request to the court, possibly under the state's FOIA equivalent.

Thanks! I'll try that.

Downthread I asked about upgrading PCs; I hope to get some advice now on upgrading cars.

Well, very specifically just one component--push start.

I have a 5 year old compact SUV. No complaints whatsoever, especially since I don't drive much. But the one feature I wish it had is keyless/push start. The nonretractable key takes up more space in my pocket. More inconveniently, I can't just lazily leave it in my pocket and have the car's door auto unlock when I'm nearby, and then push a button to start without having to take the key out of my pocket, insert into ignition, etc.

I know, first world problems. In my defense, like 90% of the culture war thread is first world problems.

I did a bit of light googling, and it looks like there are after market kits you can buy and self install. Best Buy had a promo just a couple of days ago selling a Compustar 2-war remote start for $140. But the YouTube video I saw was extremely intimidating. Forget about swapping out CPUs, this looked 10x more complicated!

So I'm definitely going to a shop for this. My questions for the DIY community are:

  1. I don't need remote start. I just want push start & keyless entry. Any suggestions on reputable brand or model of the kit I should look into?

  2. Is this after market modification even recommended? Since it deals with unlocking and ignition, I feel it carries much more risks than changing the audio system or something. It'd suck if a faulty product or installation caused the car to crash (which I assume is extremely unlikely but not impossible...?), or more likely, maybe cause me to be completely locked out in the dark and cold one day, or the latest Kia boys to buy some USB stick to take all Compustar-modified cars to joyrides. I guess I'm asking if this after-market tech is mature enough to be trustworthy.

  3. What's a fair price you think to pay for this? Say if I buy the parts, would you expect $300 for the labor? $500?

Thank you amigos.

Oh thank God, I thought you were about to buy a new car over the key shape

On the other hand, if there's ever a time to do something like that it's now. The used car market has gone mad. I could literally sell my car for more than I paid for it.

Meat. How do you know you're getting the good stuff and not some ultra-processed slop filled with cheap, rotting bits o' this and that?

It seems like this choice is a spectrum.

On one hand, you have the raw stuff: steak cuts, chicken thighs, pork chops, etc. Things that look like meat. Here, you can discern quality by figuring out the origin.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

But what's in between? Like, if I buy ham at the store, how can I discern whether it falls more into the ultra-processed category or rather into the raw stuff category?

(I'm trying to be more systemic about my diet and part of the equation seems to be minimizing ultra-processed foods. This is easy with stuff like chips, sweets, soda, etc. but not so much with meat.)

Edit: My thanks for the excellent advice!

I just stopped buying processed meat at all. Sometimes miss corned beef, but it made me realize that the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Honestly I'm going off of packaged meat entirely the way the quality of chicken has been dropping. DIYing the whole thing has kinda spoiled me on store bought stuff.

the majority of processed meats were just a byproduct of needing to store it without freezers. Like sauerkraut for the fall cabbage crop.

Well yeah. But the reason for developing those techniques doesn't change that they make meat delicious.

Eh, I've kinda gone off the salt content of stuff like bacon. Although right after posting I had some great Italian sausages, which tasted better than anything I cooked with a pig from the same litter, so who knows.

Hey, if you don't like it by all means don't eat it. We all have things we don't like, after all. I'm just saying even though the techniques of curing/smoking meat have outlived the need for food preservation, doesn't mean we should by any means stop doing it.

My two options are the following:

a) Buy expensive meat directly from local farmers where you can look the cows in the eyes or

b) Get whatever's convenient and don't look at all, just be glad it's something to eat.

Choices are usually dictated by the state of my wallet.

On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.

Hormel's Spam™ is perfectly fine meat made from pork rump and shoulder, salt, potato starch (to prevent the infamous gelatin at the top of the can), sugar and sodium nitrate. It really doesn't deserve the reputation it gets.

Of all the readily accessible preserved meats, Spam is probably the least processed option.

to prevent the infamous gelatin at the top of the can

But it's the best part of spam! I used to scoop it off every canful back when canned ham humanitarian aid was a thing in Russia.

It's also very good when cooked in a heavy skillet or flat top.

Yes. Slice, pan fry, enjoy.

Find a butcher you trust, get meat from them. How do you find a butcher you trust? That's a harder answer. I would look the quality of their meats, you should be able to tell visually to some extent (e.g. by looking at steaks for good marbling). Buy some and taste it, determine for yourself how good the product is. Get to know the butcher and talk to them about how they source meat. A good butcher will care about the quality of their product, and you should be able to pick up on that when talking to them.

All that said, I have a local butcher I trust and I don't always go to her shop to get meat. Sometimes I just get meat at the supermarket because I'm already there, and it's easier. But if you're concerned about the quality, finding a butcher you trust is the best way.

Good question, difficult answers. I’m assuming you’re in the US, because everyone on the internet is. This makes my number one tip more difficult: Find a butcher that still slaughters their own animals. If you generally like the quality of their meat, buy it. When in doubt, ask them.

More generally, buying things with a clear name definition can help. Parma, Black Forrest, etc. are protected and while that doesn’t guarantee everything, it might help.

Most generally, use your noggin. Ham, both dried and cooked (aka Prosciutto vs. Honey Glazed or whatever, should be from whole animal. I’m not going to get into what is healthier, but the difference between that and Bologna-style deli meat or any form of salami should be apparent in taste and texture. If it is mandatory, look at the label.

In general, meat that is not bought raw is probably quite a ways towards that processed label of yours. The one exception is air cured things, but even there, salts or lyes are often used to help in preserving. If you put some raw meat on a hook for 6 months, you’re probably not going to want to eat it.

I remember some posts at the previous place talking about an Islamist (Taliban?) leader that was radicalized when he studied in the US and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.

Does anyone remember the guy's name and have a link and/or more details?

Well, he was radicalized by things like church youth dances. Truly the most chaste and proper monitored mingling opportunities for young adults. Sayyid was of course horrified and disgusted by women in long skirts dancing with men who belong to church social clubs. But I don't think that acceptance of homosexuality was on anyone's agenda among these people.

Where’d you see this? Wikipedia only says that he condemned the licentious West, but doesn’t really give any examples.

It does sound like this guy was quite an idealist.

In 1948 or 1949 he attended a church social in Greeley, Colorado. Here are his thoughts:

The dance hall was illuminated with red, blue and a few white lights. It convulsed to the tunes of the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.

Which is a less disgusted and condemning than I recalled. But anyways, it is silly that he thinks a 1940s American church social "convulsed" with "seductive passion". He spent the rest of his life bitterly complaining about all aspects of American culture and saying that opposition to all white people must be the cornerstone of the Egyptian nationalist movement.

I was especially unimpressed by the part where he asserted an Islamist country would need no government.

and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.

And by the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside".

Almost certainly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb

This seems like the right person, thanks!

Do any of you keep diaries or journals?

If so - what do you write in there? What format do you use: notebook, digital, etc.? And how long have you kept it up?

I write down all kind of things from reviews to essay drafts and todo lists in Trillium.

I have a journal folder as well though I can rarely be bothered to touch it, usually only when something particularly interesting happens in my life.

I keep notes, random thoughts and pictures in an empty Discord channel because it's convenient and accessible from anywhere. Discord automatically timestamps everything and gives me a very powerful search engine and API to use bots to auto scrape and save an offline copy every week. Very useful for transferring small information between my phone, home PC and work PC.

Not judging because I've done it too, but oh God I hate that this is the easiest way to sync stuff between your own devices.

I use a slightly more bootleg version of this. I use a whatsapp chat with myself as a commonly shared dump among my phone, PC and laptop.

Much in the same way, GitHub is just free cloud storage for my personal coding projects.

I don't find much use in longform private emotional introspection but I do find it helpful to keep a record of any significant actions I've taken. It's useful for reference and for finding any patterns that could provide a benefit in making plans and adapting routines, whether it's charting exercise or recording work I've done around my home.

It's all kept in OneNote along with a plethora of other notes, drafts, saved documents, cuttings and the like. Before I started using OneNote I used various handwritten to-do lists for actions combined with minimally organised digital files for anything more demanding. Having everything available in a single trivially editable digital format is significantly more versatile so now I only use paper to-do lists for short term items and information.

Onenote is amazing but the absence of interoperability sucks. I have used it on and off for years, eventually exported everything and was all the happier for it. Unique features like infinite canvas are not that helpful, it turns out.

Inline calculation was neat.

Microsoft dependence is a drawback for sure but since I'm using the OS already it's a minor negative. Where it shows up the most for me is the disparity between integration with Edge and the Office suite vs Firefox.

Did you export straight into Obsidian? Or was it more involved than that? Is there anything major that you miss beyond little QoL features like calculation? I might start a new page of notes in preparation for adding it to my to-do list.

Basically straight to Obsidian, probably via this script, or some predecessor. The worst thing about it was garbled image OCR that got embedded into md files. Not pretty.

I wonder. Everything valuable about Onenote is either implemented natively, or via community plugins, or is a nothingburger. Command palette > OneNote UI. Even drawing is supported okay-ishly now with ExcaliDraw.

Obsidian tables are not as nice. There's no Excel integration (but there is some csv support). There is multi-frame and tabs, but no multi-window. No straightforward OCR. Eh, I can live with that.

For about 13 years, in different forms.

Used to be a physical notebook, with the chronicle of ongoing problems and solutions and dreams and other stuff. Now Obsidian-based pile of Markdown files (primarily). I hope to one day integrate it all – maybe neural networks will soon get up to the task of OCRing my scribbles.

I have a backbone structure in the form of a diary, where I write things I generally do not want to forget or might find valuable to review in a year or more, plus registration of mundane events that might or might not come in handy later (health/security concerns), plus everything else from drafts of Motte posts to documents to code to dumps of web pages, sometimes interlinked for convenience.

All of this is streamlined with templates. The daily template looks like

  • Headline (date, one-line summary)

  • Mission

  • Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

  • Diary section

  • What I have read (links to files or webpages)

  • What I have written/made (links to files)

The Weekly note template consists of a mission, one-paragraph summary, a table for recurring observations, and expanded links to individual days.

There are independent hierarchies of nested tags and folders, plus some minor structures implemented with dataview.

I believe that my system, like many others of this sort, is a product of path-dependency and cognitive sluggishness, far from optimal for its purposes, so I'm uninterested in providing more details and spreading it. There are communities of people obsessed with journaling, GTD, Zettelcasten, you name it; they care a great deal about optimizing it, but it doesn't seem to help very much.

Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

Interesting, how does the notification system work?

Yeah. I use mine it to mainly yell into the void. There are certain days where certain things bother me to such an extent that only way I can make sense of the situation; is if I force myself to sit down and write out my entire monologue on text as if its a writing I will have to put out into the world. I can write more calmly than I think.

Looking back at my earlier entries since I started in 2017; The quality of my writing has improved a fair bit. Incidentally I started getting all A's (used to get B's) in essay based courses after I started effort posting on the motte (Early 2020). Kind of a lame and too good to be true sounding anecdote, but it totally happened and no one will believe me if I told them.

Incidentally I started getting all A's (used to get B's) in essay based courses after I started effort posting on the motte (Early 2020). Kind of a lame and too good to be true sounding anecdote, but it totally happened and no one will believe me if I told them.

I think the same happened with me. Part of it is just practice, but the thing I was most conscious of while writing college essays was thinking "if I posted this confidently on themotte it would get torn apart in the replies" (my standards for posting on the rest of reddit are far lower in comparison).

I've always found "my fake internet friends will think I'm stupid if I screw this up," to be a much stronger motivator for good writing than grades.

That's pretty inane, I much prefer my prime motivation for writing well. "Someone is wrong on the internet, now I need to dunk on them as eloquently as possible".

Definitely a strong motivator that one.

Not as strong as that girl from college who totally remembers you exist watching you lift (while being on the other side of the country).

Weirdly, I use a spreadsheet with columns for various things I keep numbers on (lifts, dinner, garden, weather, animals, purchases, etc). It works surprisingly well.

When I go work out I take notes regarding my lifts, form, and how I feel in a given day. It's about as close as I'll ever get to journaling I think. Been taking dates since August, so not very long, but it's pretty helpful for figuring out what I should be doing and how to best approach the gym on a given day.

I tried to keep a journal. Did it for 3-5 years very off and on, just wrote about my day and general updates. Did a physical notebook, wasn't very helpful.

I've been doing another notebook for a dream journal for about 6 months and am much more consistent with it. Plus I remember my dreams more which is fun.

What does EA mean? I've seen a few people use the term but I guess I'm out of the loop. (Not electronic arts I don't think).

Probably Effective Altruism, a kind of meta-charity that seeks to find the most bang for your charity buck. The posts were about a recent scandal surrounding one of its backers, Sam Bankman-Fried and his company FTX.

Typically ban evasion is the reason for nuking posts and comments.

Not to be defeatist, but is ban evasion really solvable? Twitter's been in the news for months for its bot problem, and they had a ton more resources to solve it than this website, which doesn't even require email addresses. How do you stop someone from hopping onto a VPN while incognito and starting new accounts? I guess you can try to infer through whatever limited data you can gather from user agent?

I've never moderated a website so am just speculating. But my layman's perspective is that it seems far more practical just to delete posts because they intrinsically violate site rules as opposed to being suspected ban evaders.

We have some major advantages over Twitter:

  1. We have far less content to moderate. I'd also guess that our ratio of moderators:content is at least two orders of magnitude better than Twitter's, and possibly even three orders of magnitude better.

  2. Most banned users aren't trying too hard. Twitter is a big platform and lot of people want to be on it. This is a tiny tiny platform that only a few hundred people want to be on. We had rdrama users trying to come over for the first few weeks, but consistent banning and removal of troll content mostly solved the problem.

  3. Some of the banned users that are trying hard seem unable to avoid outting themselves. If we ban a user that can't stop talking about a particular topic, and then notice a new user account created the next day that also loves to talk about the same topic ... well things can be pretty obvious.

There might be a group of banned users that comes back under different aliases and successfully hide. And they don't break any of the same rules that got them a ban in the first place. Idk, I guess I feel like "mission accomplished" if that is what happens. We aren't trying to punish people with bans, we are trying to reform, and permabans take place for two reasons: we think you are beyond reform, or we are trying to protect the community from extremely bad behavior (for example we are generally going to nuke any accounts that post CP).

Yeah I'm moderately pissed that my comments disappear without forewarning or mod ping.

I silently lost one here, too. It was a request for update on the worker’s strike; I assume the level of effort was too low?

(@)johnfabian: Will you be making another report on the Ontario strikes? It sounds like they have seen an effect. I’d like to hear your impressions if you attended.

@cjet79 would you mind confirming?

That's my bad I removed that and had a message typed up, but never sent it. Basically what you wrote was too short for a top level post, I'd suggest just using the message feature instead of posting a top level comment in the culture war thread.

Thanks. Will do.

Which comments? I don't see any removed comments on your profile from the last month.

A branch here is purged and my comments are only visible through my profile. Same here. It's not technically a deletion, but responses to deleted/hidden posts are non-discoverable within the thread. We seemingly don't have the old reddit mechanic where [deleted] was a legitimate node.

Ugh, yeah, that kinda sucks. I don't think I've ever noticed it because mods can see deleted comments, so I just never got the opportunity to realize that was happening. Sorry 'bout that.

I've got a bug filed and I'm hoping I can get to this soonish, but it may be a bit, I'm afraid.

I'll bring it to zorba/the devs attention. I guess I don't really know the expected behavior there.

Not a fan of comments being removed. A bad post with a warning allows for discussion at least. OP would have limited opportunity to make bad posts anyways.

The forum should aim to maximise discussion given its position (much lower new user inflow than reddit).

In almost all cases, comments are either removed by virtue of the poster deleting them, or by virtue of us removing a ban evader. We have one annoyingly persistent evader right now (they're up to 15 separate accounts last I checked, most of which want to talk about the Jews, although there's been one lately which entertained me because he started complaining about how the community is obsessed with the Jews) and it would not surprise me if they alone are responsible for most of the removed comments in the last month or so.

I mostly want to inconvenience them and make it unfun to rejoin, but it's possible we're inconveniencing ourselves more than we should be in the process.

A moderation log does exist. In this particular case, though, it does not seem that the moderator (@Amadan) listed a reason for removal.

So, what are you reading?

I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Have never managed to get past the beginning.

I read The Picture of Dorian Gray maybe 15 years ago. I recall it being equal parts boring and pointless.

Edit: Below someone says it made a big impression on them. I guess it really shows different strokes for different folks. What a waste of paper and my time that book was.

Blood Meridian. Dorian Gray is on my shelf waiting to be read.

Just started Augustine's Confessions. Last book was Runaway Horses.

Two of my all time favorites. What did you think of runaway horses?

Amazing. Spring Snow was very good, but Runaway Horses was even better, perhaps because it draws so closely to the events of Mishima's life. I'm tempted to write an effortpost on my thoughts on it. I'm looking forward to reading Temple of Dawn, but I've heard that it and Decay of the Angel aren't as well-regarded.

Please do! I haven't read Mishima in years now and I'd love love love to think about it again.

Just found out yesterday that there's a new Mistborn book out, so I picked that up tonight. Really looking forward to it!

Still on Anne Rice's vampire novels. I'm on the fifth now and it's a noticeable drop in quality, I may stop on this one if it doesn't get better soon.

How did you find Flowers for Algernon? I remember it being very sad, particularly towards the end where Charlie goes to a lesson just like at the beginning of the book and his teacher runs out crying after realizing he had reverted to his old self. I also thought the author exaggerated or maybe found it hard to portray Charlie as being smart in a convincing way at his peak, especially implying he had learnt several languages during the experiment (which took less than a year iirc). This felt silly and the book would have been stronger without it.

Less intellectual or darkly funny than I hoped it would be, given the humour at the beginning. Played heavily on sentiment. Felt a lot like a myth. Can't say it stirred much sympathy in me, but the portrait of the less intelligent was memorable, so it might become a counterweight to careless thoughts about intelligence in the future.

It gets credit for making the smart Charlie genuinely fascinating in his prose and focus, though it took some time for the writer to prove that he could write such a character. I think I would have liked to see this character play a more independent role. He was inspiring if cynical when he was being himself, unpleasant when he was crazy, dull when he was letting his life be owned by others.

Charlie whisking away Algernon, the quiet parts with Fay and his work were the best parts. Overall, eh. Can see why it's a classic. Seems like a book that I'll likely return to when I'm more interested in its themes, but it felt a lot like those sentimental sci-fi movies that pop up every now and then. Maybe it set the example. Either way, it managed to reach some heights, so it was worth the time.

I encourage you to stick with that book, it made a huge impression on me as a young man.

I am currently reading The Living Reed by Pearl S. Buck. I have a nearly complete set of Pearl Buck novels, which were previously my mother's, which were previously her mother's. There's something kind of neat about being the third generation of my family to read Pearl S. Buck; there's nothing specific about us or our history that would push us to do this. I just like it. I really appreciate Buck's virtuous characters, wide dramas, and honest, deep exploration of other cultures.

By the way: has anyone reading this ever read the works of Edward Rutherfurd? If so - would you recommend them?

Personally I'm pretty open to his ideas (leaning somewhat conservative and low-key wishing someone could explain Christianity in a way where I can accept it), but I found his arguments baffling and nonsensical on closer inspection. I had much more luck with CS Lewis's Mere Christianity. I'm glad it worked for you though!

Chesterton's fiction is also great. The Man Who Was Thursday was a kind of masterpiece. His Father Brown was good, though I only read a few of the stories.

I’m a recently re-reborn Christian. I was raised a mix of Protestant, agnostic, and none. I later became a non-Catholic Catholic, then a Catholic convert, then nothing, then somewhat Episcopalian, and nothing. Recently, I’ve really rediscovered my faith. I’ve started reading the Bible, and reading/listening/watching a lot of apologetics stuff. I’ve tried a couple churches, too. So, I have some questions:

  1. I attended a non-denominational church this morning for the first time. From their website and what I’ve seen about them, it seems to me like it is of the conservative and evangelical variety. That’s good. That’s what I want. But the more I didn’t, I can’t find anything firm beyond the “sola scriptura,” Grace by faith, stuff. No comments on LGBT issues or abortion. By contrast, there are some local churches that are very explicitly evangelical and conservative, though they approach it in a conservative way. Is this lack of clarity the norm for non-denominational churches? I’ve looked up reviews for the church, but those are all over the place.

  2. With that said, how much does denomination really matter? Of course, if a church is Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, etc it matters. But within, say, Arminian Protestantism (meaning non-reformed) does it REALLY matter as long as you believe the basics?

  3. Any book recommendations (or podcasts or articles) on apologetics, denominational difference, converting, or similar topics?

  4. Any denominational recommendations? I want a Bible-believing, conservative-ish, evangelical-ish, church. I like churches with groups. I like ones that help the community. I like both traditional and contemporary services, too.

Thanks in advance.

It sounds like you have commitment issues.

In my mind, it's key to commit to a church and stick to it. Be a Catholic. It's not that difficult.

Hi, I have a couple of thoughts for you on this. Re: #1, yes churches can be very cagey about that stuff. If you read a lot of the doctrines/statements of faith that they publicly post, it's astonishing actually how similar they can be on the surface.

It's no secret that polarization has hit the church as much as anywhere else. Some pastors have gone all-in on one political side or the other, and many, many more pastors try to walk a tightrope so as not to alienate anyone. I've found the only real way to know is to go and visit and see what the vibe is. Or you can at least start by emailing the pastor about questions or issues that are important to you, and see how they respond.

On your other questions, it's hard to answer because it's really such a personal decision and so much depends on the local community. I do think overall, unless you take a hard stance on certain questions, the question of denomination does not matter as much as things like small versus large church, worship style, member engagement (small group Bible study, volunteers), and community outreach/service.

Although, as a Christian who I believe takes the Bible seriously, just make sure it's a place that teaches the Bible above all else. Christian nationalism is not a Biblically defensible stance and neither is prosperity gospel stuff or the pastors who give the hard sell on giving. I'm a deconstructionist and an exvangelical, and if I may warn you to be discerning there - just because it's my home turf and I know the pitfalls. Too many non-denom evangelical churches get a nasty case of tunnel vision. Read stuff that's over 100 years old. Heck, read stuff that wasn't written in our current political moment. With two millennia of tradition and Christian theology and philosophy, it's inexcusable when a church wants to treat tradition as if it's a dirty word, when in fact evangelicals are as beholden to tradition as anyone else, they just don't recognize it.

FWIW, you may have seen this but here's a quiz to help you choose a denomination. https://www.quotev.com/quiz/13157643/What-Christian-Denomination-are-you

Here's a handy chart although this is Protestant only:

https://christianityhaven.com/threads/denomination-chart.6144/

Here is an article with probably more information than you wanted to know:

https://www.christianvalour.com/christian-denominations-guide/

TLDR; visit churches in several denominations. Listen. Meet people. Find one where you feel comfortable, and get plugged in to a regular small group for Bible study or prayer. Commit to volunteering and loving your neighbor. Go to a church service to receive blessing as well as bless others. Go in God's grace.

here's a quiz to help you choose a denomination

Man, I knew this was going to be funny, but we didn't even get past the first question.

The One True God is Triune.

(God is three people in one God)

.

Yes, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

or

No, only God the Father is really God, Jesus is created.

No other options. Fantastic.

I don't know how to ask it in a fanciful way, so: How can I be more evil and self-centered? I've basically sacrificed myself multiple times, halting my own life to help others (7 years to finish a BSc for being an active participant in a family problem) and I've received... Nothing. I've even had people refuse invitations for dinner, at my expense, because they're "soooooooooo busy" even though their social media reveal a very different schedule, one where I am not present.

Then I remembered during college we had a Physics Lab and decided to be a total dick as an experiment: disrespecting other, uneven workload, stumping my feet when others didn't do things my way, I was really disgusted at myself and thought other saw me as an asshole... and then I received lots of compliment for "my leadership", for having "a tough attitude but worthwhile the pain" (I'm copy-pasting literal text here). Are people retarded? Am I? Are they masochists? Was I taught wrongly and this is actually a positive role model? I don't really understand this social dynamics.

All advice is autobiographical. Which is the most obvious statement ever but that didn't stop Scott from having rediscovered it from first principles.

Your natural temperament might be far too agreeable and advice of "be more disagreeable" is made for you.

Social dynamics is very multi-factorial. Being an "asshole" worked in that context, with you, with those people, in that time, for that task with that exact position of the moons and the stars. Be wary about extrapolating too much insight from it.

I don't know if this qualifies as a "dark art" but as for being a "leader" there is something that will actually guarantee you get away with that every single time. Just be better at the shared task than everyone else. And be made sure to be seen working more than them.

Why do you conflate "self-centered" with "evil"? Those are very different. You can be focused on yourself without harming anyone - actually quite the opposite. Usually when you focus and better yourself you can pull along your loved ones, either by example or by gaining the means to help them (e.g., financially). I think the first step is to really hammer that in.

Another thing to consider is that nobody likes a covert contract. You can read more about this in the book No More Mr. Nice Guy, which is usually recommended in red pill circles for good reason. Actually, just read the book - it's not gospel, but it helps. I mention this because you said:

I've basically sacrificed myself multiple times, halting my own life to help others [...] and I've received... Nothing.

Which is a classic example of a covert contract. You did something, gave up quite a lot, and expected something in return. Did you ever mention that to anyone? What were you expecting? If the other party to your contract isn't even aware of it, how can they be expected to act on their side of this unstated contract? These kinds of things should be talked about, ahead of time, otherwise you can't expect anything in return.

Was I taught wrongly and this is actually a positive role model?

Yeah, probably. It's good to be assertive.

That sacrifice is bad for unworthy causes doesn't mean it's not worth it for worthy causes! This is orthogonal to 'being a dick vs being nice' - telling someone how their work is shit when it is shit benefits them, and 'not being disrespectful' by saying nothing harms them, on a large scale, because they can understand where they fucked up. But that has nothing to do with 'self-centeredness'!

Perhaps you need to be more assertive and stand up for yourself more. People respect that. You may have an incorrect view of what an ‘asshole’ acts like.

There seem to be several areas to work on here. One is making good decisions. Another is having an attractive personality. Then there is leadership. Finally understanding social cues and dynamics.

The bad news is I think you already know there isn't one silver bullet that can change all these aspects. And if it were, it certainly wouldn't be to be "more evil and self-centered". The good news is you want to improve. Depending on what your life goals are, perhaps start by reading well-reviewed biographies of people whom you admire and want to become.

Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth. If that were true, these mass layoffs probably wouldn't be happening, and they certainly wouldn't be causing stock prices to rise, as they did when Meta announced its layoffs.

Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?

In my experience, most people working in an organization don't know or understand the big picture. This causes them to both overvalue the contributions of their peers - since they can understand them - and undervalue the contribution of other parts of the organization - which they fail to understand the value they bring. See e.g. this exchange I recently had with @thomasThePaineEngine regarding what HR does for the company.

If you mostly talk to programmers, you'll get a distorted image of the importance of programmers and probably some denigrating image of everyone else - first-level managers, C-Suite, marketing, HR - who perform non-technical functions that are vital for the company's existence.

In truth, while (almost) every function in the org is vital, most people performing those functions aren't. This is true for every discipline, and as such includes programmers. At the very least 50% of the people in any one discipline could probably be safely replaced, with minimal overhead.

On the other hand, there really are some high performers who deserve a high paycheck for what they do. Not all of them get what they deserve, and that's a shame. Sometimes it's because those people aren't assertive enough, or because some company policy prevents them from getting a very high raise. Some other times it's because they're very valuable to the org they're in, but much less valuable everywhere else - which means they don't have leverage.

I think it's practically impossible for anyone to calculate "worth" in this sense. It's like when Marxists talk about "surplus value." Even for simple jobs like cashier—okay, we know we're paying them 12 and hour, now how can we know if this is more or less than their "real" worth? It's not clear to me market value is different from actual value.

Some software devs are in a position to make changes that save companies millions of dollars per year. I guess in that case you could make an argument that they are worth as much money as they saved for the company, but they could only do that once for one company. They can't go from company to company saving millions of dollars in infrastructure cost. They might not be put in that position in each company, and there might not be the opportunity to save that much money for each company. It doesn't seem right that they should capture all of the savings as salary year after year, so, given that and the stochastic nature of optimizations like this where it's easy to measure the impact in dollars, what's a fair salary? Probably near the range of salaries we have now.

Because the times are weird. Lots of tech companies went through a period of essentially free money reaching the apex last year with corona bux and currently collapsing. So hiring as many people as possible, starting moonshot projects and acquiring any remotely promising startup became a normal practice since everyone was trying to be the too-big-to-fail behemoth when the music stopped. Now they are reckoning with some of the excess and dumping dead weight.

There's a meme in software eng of the 10x programmer who does the work of 10 normal ones. In my experience, these people exist. But the 10x is more that the average programmer is lazy to a fault, i.e. the 1x is such a low standard that 10x isn't really all that.

So the answer is that the 10x are grossly underpaid while all the 1x are overpaid. And there's a lot more of the latter.

Its worth noting that the productivity of the 10x engineer doesn't mean he writes 10x the code or anything as such.

It might be that the "10x" engineer can just add 1 line of code that would take x engineers 10t amount of time. Or sometimes that one line of code could be incomprehensible to everyone but the 10x engineer, in which case even an infinite number of normal engineers wouldn't be a sufficient replacement of that one 10xengineer.

Viewing (engineer) productivity as something that can be measured is the wrong way to think of it. The correct way is "What is now possible with the addition of this engineer that was previously impossible?".

Einstein might have the raw intelligence of 50 toddlers, but even 50,000 toddlers couldn't do what Einstein did. IQ doesn't scale.

My hot take here is that every engineer is getting paid exactly what they should be getting paid. If your baseline calibration is the 10x engineer then yes some engineers should probably not get paid at all, and the inverse of that would mean the 10x engineer gets paid infinite money. Neither of those makes sense with even a minimal understand of marginal utility.

So, the market is probably much closer to the truthful salary than your intuitions.

"H1b slaves"

Yeah, won't disagree with the blatant one-sided class warfare. These dynamics are very salient to me given I come from a relatively poor and low status background and my technical skills are the only leverage I have, surrounded by nepotism and classism of the likes incomprehensible to most Americans. (I live in a shithole country).

I don't know which monster or Elder God symbolises this specific problem, it's not entirely Moloch. But whatever he is, I will forever live in his shadow, its etched into my mind, My (future) kids are going to go to the best schools and have the right tastes, because I didn't and I know the potent bullshit that comes along with not doing so.

Managers continue their wishful thinking

It's not that all engineers are not not fungible, some certainly are. But as you said, those whose work isn't are difficult to spot. A bad thing avoided can rarely ever be credited.

However this might be a good place for Hanlons Razor. A manager who doesn't know this is probably a bad manager. A manager (standin for all non technical people engineers have to deal with) might not know what a good engineer looks like, but he should know what a good manager looks like.

A good managers work is just an in-fungible as the good engineers. The fact that he might stay calm and hold the teams morale together by taking the blame himself when they are not working well together will not show up in the quarterly report.

Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

This is a bizarre statement to make.

Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?

If you put a gun to my head, and told me to make the best argument I can think of in favor of that statement, I'd go with something like: A lot of companies are bloated. You could fire a good chunk of the workforce, and be none the worse for it, which would imply you are overpaying the people who remain hired, and underpaying those that would remain if you got rid of the bloat.

...but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean software engineers would be disproportionately spared from being fired...

What would sales for a small startup look like?

Lets assume Startup X in making enough money to sustain 10 engineers and 1 sales person. So the 10 engineers hire an MBA. What does the MBA do?

I'm asking this because the activity of sales is completely opaque to me. I can intellectually understand that for a company of sufficient size, that work needs to be offloaded to someone who only does that. But for a small company I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

As David Mamet so artfully put it in Glengarry Glen Ross, [They] get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

The core competency is being able to be told no a zillion times while your pay depends on getting a yes and still sounding confident on the next call.

As an actual salesperson in the tech space, I think a lot of the other comments are misguided. Gone are the days of salespeople doing easy fun shit with clients like golfing or going to the pub to drink. Nowadays salespeople have to challenge their customers, essentially change their beliefs about what they know/need in their business.

Look up the Challenger Sale, it explains the history of sales well.

The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions.

The idea is that sellers and buyers are in a perpetual arms race. Relationship building used to be the way to sell, and that's how it is now in the cultural consciousness. Unfortunately that idea is way behind the times. Excellent salespeople now have to be able to toe the line between pissing off a customer and convincing them that the salesperson is the authority, and knows better than they do, if they want to sell in a tough market or sell a lot.

For a very small company CEO and sales is often the same thing.

Otherwise it's not much different from a larger corporation except account management and front line sales will be the same person, and there won't be any support functions.

This is a point I keep coming back to, which is that many jobs without obvious arcane technical skills nonetheless require a skill, it just happens to be one which is hard to define.

Sales is a good example here. Sales people have to understand their clients, they have to understand how to take clients golfing or fishing or bring in a mobile barbecue trailer to their place of business, how to field client concerns- which necessarily entails being able to understand their product and then explain it in an 85 IQ way, because clients rarely have specific knowledge of your product- how to present as competent professionals representing their chosen field, and finally have to have good enough people skills to forge a meaningful connection with their client(this is usually but not always by discussing something completely unrelated to the product), move it into a discussion of the product, and then ask for the sale, all without the client noticing or feeling awkward. They also need to be able to get inside their client's head and figure out who to talk to.

All of this is a skill, it's a totally separate skill from engineering, and it's also a more or less full time job because sales guys need a lot of flexibility to respond to client needs which necessarily entails taking time out of doing some other job. All of these factors militate heavily against hiring an engineer to do sales.

All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.

There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.

The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).

I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.

I've heard it a few times, but only from a generalized "exploitation"/pro-labor PoV. I haven't seen any arguments that would apply to programmers but not assembly line workers (etc.), but maybe OP has.

Do you mean people here? Or just in people general? Can you link an example?

People on the internet say it often.

Happy Sunday everyone. I am at a bit of a loss with how to go about potentially upgrading my desktop PC.

There is a well-established culture & system around upgrading phones every 2-3 years. Companies make it enticingly easy with trade-ins that reduce cost and waste. Same system exists for cars.

But not for PCs.

I have an HP Omen desktop that I bought for $1700 before tax in Nov 2020. It was on sale and had/s excellent specs: i7-10700K, RTX 3080, 32gb ram, 500gb SSD. I'm pretty sure it still sells for $1700+ today, at least in nominal dollars, which is bonkers for what should be fast depreciating. Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

I don't game much, maybe a little bit of StarCraft 2 and RimWorld every now and then. So the graphics card was an overkill from the start and meant to be future-proof. The 3080 will easily suffice for at least another 2-3 years, I'm sure.

But I'm tempted by a new CPU. UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed. By the time the 14000 series comes out next year, perhaps it'll get to +50% effective speed and +80% single core. At some point, the $600 or however much the next-gen costs will be is worth it to me if my computer runs 50-80% faster depending on the application (for example, RimWorld is mainly CPU limited and has no multithreading.

But it seems cumbersome to upgrade the CPU. I could watch a bunch of YT to learn how to swap out the CPU myself, but I'd rather not, in case I mess something up. I have no passion for tinkering, so the time I spend learning and failing would be stressful and a waste of time. I also understand that not all motherboards support newer CPUs, and the 13900K also draws double the power than the 10700K, so I may need to get both a new MOBO and a new PSU. All that feels like a tremendous headache to me if I were to DIY.

Alternatively, I could wait until the desktop is dying after 2-3 years, and then I toss/recycle it for a new one. But this seems suboptimal too, given I value and am willing to pay for a faster processor, but that's all that I care about. I don't want or need a brand new PC.

The third option is to find a pro to upgrade the CPU (and possibly the MOBO and PSU). Microcenter seems to have a CPU installation service for $80 (plus a $40 "recommended diagnostic"). I could also take it into a local repair shop, which I tend to think of as somewhat seedy and serving computer illiterate people at a premium, but that's probably just undue prejudice.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

This isn't normal. Or rather, perhaps it's normal in the statistical sense that the average person's computer is an unreliable heap of junk, but it's not nominal, and you shouldn't put up with it. "It just does that sometimes," is a piss-poor way to relate to computers, and if a hardware problem is causing your machine to crash that hard, it might also be corrupting your data.

You can use a couple passes of memtest86+ to identify some problems with your memory. It's not great for overclocking-related instability, but if your memory chips are going bad it should be able to detect it. You can run prime95's blend test overnight to ferret out CPU/memory/motherboard problems.

In my experience, poor electrical connections are the cause of a significant fraction of weird computer problems, although this may depend on the humidity in your climate. You can try re-seating your RAM and graphics card, as long as you are careful to avoid ESD. (Touch your computer's metal chassis immediately before touching any components, and do not remove from the confines of the chassis. Pop it out of the slot and right back in again.)

If none of that fixes it or finds anything, your computer is probably still under warranty if you bought it new. BSoDs are not supposed to happen, and you should make them somebody else's problem. The ability to do that is the whole point of buying from an OEM.

But I'm tempted by a new CPU.

First off, don't. In my opinion, your current machine will be fine for at least 5 years.

The newest CPUs that might be compatible with your motherboard are Intel 11th-gen, and those were widely panned for being an insignificant improvement over 10th gen. There are some workloads where they win, but some where they lose because the 11th gen i9 has only 8 cores compared to the 10th gen's 10 cores, and the power consumption is very high. That could be a problem for upgrading, because OEM (HP/Dell/Lenovo) motherboards are typically not designed to be capable of supplying significantly more power than needed by the CPU the PC comes with.

Furthermore, even if you replace your motherboard, published benchmark results for the 13th gen CPUs are usually using the newer DDR5 memory standard unless they say otherwise, so you'd have to replace your RAM too or else have slightly (only very slightly) less performance than the internet says.

UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed.

Userbenchmark is notoriously terrible. The operator has a strong anti-AMD bias. That wasn't too much of a problem back when Intel had a solid lead in single-thread performance and he could just weight low-thread-count benchmarks heavily, but since they've caught up he has to put a heavier and heavier thumb on the scales. At this point it's practically an entire arm.

The 13900K has as many P-cores as the 10700K, and 16 extra E-cores on top. Therefore, it makes no sense for the "effective speed" difference to be less than the single core speed.

The tricks, in this case, are:

  1. The "effective speed" does not account for workloads using >8 threads at all.

  2. The "effective speed" includes memory latency in the average. Memory latency contributes to the performance of a computer, but it isn't independently observable outside of its effect on any particular benchmark. It's an implementation detail. Picking a CPU based on memory latency makes about as much sense as picking them them by clock frequency or die size (i.e., none, unless you are designing a chip).

Unfortunately, unless the application you care about (Rimworld) is directly benchmarked, reading benchmarks properly is very difficult without a decent understanding of the characteristics of your application -- how threaded it is, how big its memory working set is (this is not the memory usage task manager shows you), etc.

Also, a lot of the published benchmarks really suck. Examples include single-thread cinebench (completely fits in cache on modern CPUs, and real users don't use Cinema 4D that way), Factorio benchmarks with small factories that run way over 200 UPS (broken by large L3 cache, which won't happen for factories that struggle to maintain 60), benchmarking Civilization games for frame rate instead of turn time, benchmarking frame rate in games that aren't CPU-limited in typical play (400 FPS 720p is benchmarking the graphics driver, not the game), etc.

What I would suggest is to find the openbenchmarking.org link from a recent CPU comparison article on phoronix.com, and filter the results to show only benchmarks that have similar characteristics to your application. For example,

  • Web browser tests: lightly threaded with small-ish cache footprint (based on 5800X vs 5800X3D.

  • Compiler benchmarks: heavily threaded with moderate cache footprint.

  • Google Draco: lightly threaded with large cache footprint. Most CPU-bound games are likely to fall in this category.

First, I respect your expertise and appreciate your willingness to educate the noobs.

About the lifetime of BSOD, I think I've mentally resigned to suffering from monthly strokes because basically every PC I've ever owned has suffered from it. They ranged in manufacturers: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, they're laptops and desktops, they ran various versions of Windows. I am a very respectable average user, I swear. I don't subject my machines to harsh physical conditions, never spill anything on them, don't live in filth where dust covers everything, don't live with electrical surges, don't have little cousins borrowing it, don't mine crypto, don't pirate or visit sketchy sites with viruses, don't open phishing emails, don't leave it on 24/7, don't unplug USBs until I'm told it's safe to do so, I update fairly frequently, etc. The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers or Amazon/Best Buy. Anyways, you get the point. And yet I've literally never owned a single fully stable machine. Whenever I feel frustrated by a sudden crash, I remind myself that engineering is already a marvel, that these extremely complex machines can handle so much abuse and still have 99.99% uptime. The occasional hiccups do make me perpetually a little paranoid about losing data, though thankfully most applications are very good with real-time saves.

I will share one suspicion I've had about the cause of the BSODs, in case it provides any obvious clues to you as to what's the main culprit. I use a browser plugin called video speed controller to speed up all kinds of media that are too slowly paced. I think my freezes have semi-frequently coincided with when playing a video at higher speeds (say, maybe 2.5x or even 3x). Do you suspect that to be a RAM-related issue?

At any rate, you provide interesting resources that I will be sure to check out. I guess it'll take a couple of months to know for sure if anything changed, and it'd be a shock to me if it does (but I look forward to that)!

In my opinion, your current machine will be fine for at least 5 years.

I love your optimism. I can tell you that none of the machines I've owned lasted 7+ years. It's not that they always become inoperable at that point, but that they seem obsolete by the 5 year mark at the latest. I don't mean to sound like a snob. It's just that a computer is what I interact with the most both professionally and leisurely, so I think it's worthwhile to invest good money in it. Like, if I drove 8 hours a day for work and for fun, you bet I wouldn't be trying to extract every last bit of value until it qualifies for cash for clunkers. Plus, I really don't think it's that wasteful; people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years, so going all the way to 7 years for a $1700 computer seems comparatively overly conservative.

About the lifetime of BSOD, I think I've mentally resigned to suffering from monthly strokes because basically every PC I've ever owned has suffered from it. They ranged in manufacturers: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, they're laptops and desktops, they ran various versions of Windows. I am a very respectable average user, I swear. I don't subject my machines to harsh physical conditions, never spill anything on them, don't live in filth where dust covers everything, don't live with electrical surges, don't have little cousins borrowing it, don't mine crypto, don't pirate or visit sketchy sites with viruses, don't open phishing emails, don't leave it on 24/7, don't unplug USBs until I'm told it's safe to do so, I update fairly frequently, etc. The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers or Amazon/Best Buy. Anyways, you get the point. And yet I've literally never owned a single fully stable machine.

There's probably some common factor, although we can only guess at what it is. Whenever I've seen a machine behave like that it's been some combination of

  • Installed in a shed with no climate control and free access to outside air.

  • Over a decade old (chips and capacitors do degrade).

  • Manufactured during the early 2000s "capacitor plague" (rumor says one capacitor maker tried to steal a formula from another and didn't get it quite right).

  • Fixed by spraying contact cleaner in the memory slots and re-seating.

  • Showing messages in the log that match a common complaint on the bugtracker for the Linux kernel or graphics driver, and the problem goes away when that bug is reported fixed.

  • My own damn fault for overclocking/undervolting something.

Things that might be different between us:

  • We have different electrical grids.

  • We have different levels of background radiation. (EPA says gamma cross count rate in my location is ~3000/min.)

  • Almost none of my machines run Windows (only the one in the shed). But people on the internet say Windows BSoD-ing all the time is supposed to be a thing of the past.

  • All of my machines are either home-built or business grade.

  • I run one pass of memtest86 whenever I get a new machine or replace RAM. Only time this found something though, was when I was buying dodgy RAM from eBay.

If your electrical supply is spotty, you might be able to fix it with an uninterruptible power supply that has the "AVR" (automatic voltage regulation) feature. Unfortunately they're kind of expensive and the batteries usually have to be replaced every few years.

I will share one suspicion I've had about the cause of the BSODs, in case it provides any obvious clues to you as to what's the main culprit. I use a browser plugin called video speed controller to speed up all kinds of media that are too slowly paced. I think my freezes have semi-frequently coincided with when playing a video at higher speeds (say, maybe 2.5x or even 3x). Do you suspect that to be a RAM-related issue?

Playing back video at high speed is obviously a heavier load than 1x, but it could be any of CPU, RAM, power supply, or even the graphics card, assuming your browser uses hardware video decode (probably does).

The first thing you might try is to see if you can reliably reproduce the problem by cranking the video playback speed to the moon. I use a similar extension, "Enhancer for YouTube", which has no upper speed limit AFAICT. Use youtube's "stats for nerds" to detect dropped frames, which means you have reached the limits of your computer (or internet connection). This probably works best with a short video that you can re-play without having to re-download.

If you can reproduce the problem, you have a very good "my computer crashes when I do this" story to tell the warranty people.

If that didn't work, to try to differentiate between causes and maybe find a better reproducer, I would suggest...

First, install hwinfo64. This will show you a bunch of things, but the important ones are the Windows hardware error log counts and the CPU temperature and package power. Here's an example of it in use.

Then download prime95. Run the "small FFT" test for at least an hour. If your computer crashes, any of the threads crash, any of the self tests fail, or hwinfo shows any errors in the Windows log, it is probably a CPU or power supply problem. If the CPU package power is not near or above 125W while the all-thread test is running, and the CPU temperature is at or very close to 100°C, it's a cooling problem (heatsink detached in shipping?). If "small FFT" doesn't find anything, you might try blend. Keep in mind "CPU problems" are likely to be "motherboard power delivery to the CPU" problems, so replacing the CPU might not fix it.

For the graphics card, you can use any of the unigine benchmarks. Superposition is the most similar to modern AAA games, but also a large download. You have a monster graphics card with a much higher peak power draw than the CPU, but if you only play games like Rimworld and SC2 with vsync on, it's probably not being pushed close to full power. Unigine will do that. Unfortunately, I don't know any GPU tests that check their own results and are easy to run. But if it crashes, that's a fail obviously.

For the memory, memtest86+ is probably easiest. There are better tests that the overclockers use, which you can find here.

To really put the hurt on your power supply and cooling, you can run 7 threads of prime95 and unigine at the same time. This will draw more power than pretty much any real workload other than folding@home, crypto mining, or things involving custom job schedulers, but a proper computer should be able to take it.

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that you will be able to identify the problem. But the good news is that you only need to find a reproducer, to use as ammunition against the customer service line. That's part of what you're paying for when you buy OEM computers and replace them before the warranty runs out.

I love your optimism. I can tell you that none of the machines I've owned lasted 7+ years. It's not that they always become inoperable at that point, but that they seem obsolete by the 5 year mark at the latest. I don't mean to sound like a snob. It's just that a computer is what I interact with the most both professionally and leisurely, so I think it's worthwhile to invest good money in it. Like, if I drove 8 hours a day for work and for fun, you bet I wouldn't be trying to extract every last bit of value until it qualifies for cash for clunkers. Plus, I really don't think it's that wasteful; people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years, so going all the way to 7 years for a $1700 computer seems comparatively overly conservative.

No doubt. But security update stoppage and battery degradation are big drivers of phone replacements, and neither is a problem for desktop computers. I am using a $200 phone, a CPU launched in 2013, and a graphics card from 2016, and they do what I need them to do.

Thanks, I definitely plan to run your recommendations the next time the PC crashes for no apparent reason. Until then, there is still hopium that somehow the problem goes away all by itself...

No doubt. But security update stoppage and battery degradation are big drivers of phone replacements, and neither is a problem for desktop computers. I am using a $200 phone, a CPU launched in 2013, and a graphics card from 2016, and they do what I need them to do.

Different usage levels and/or preferences, I suppose. What you describe sounds a bit too ascetic for the vast majority of people, at least those in middle class. Unless you never dine out or order delivery, food has gotten so expensive that $200 lasts like two restaurant dinners for two in a big city, at which point I'd much rather skip those two dinners and save toward say a $400 rather than $200 phone or upgrade to a $200 CPU from this year, and either would deliver much more utility.

people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years

Yeah, and that's idiotic. I haven't needed a smartphone upgrade in probably 5+ years. The only reason I've gotten a new one is hardware failure (one I dropped and the screen cracked, one stopped taking a charge).

Don't upgrade your PC because people upgrade their smartphones for no reason every couple of years. That's like saying "well Bob down the street gets a new car every year so I do too".

Hard agre with the other posters, BSOD is not normal, and shouldn't really ever happen during normal use, much less a couple of times a month. For comparison, i have not BSOD'd for years outside of deliberate overclocking-to-failure tests.

The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers.

This is your problem. All "manufacturers" (they arent the ones actually building your system) are going to ship your PC with reams of shitty, unstable bloatware. Bloatware and its associated background processes is probably the #1 source of BSOD for normal users. Even doing a "fresh install" of windows is not usually sufficient to get rid of it, as the bloatware is now being hidden on separate partitions of the hard drives (you can thank Dell for starting this practice). So unless you installed your own freshly downloaded copy of windows (from MS only, not the computer seller), on a freshly wiped and single-paritioned hard drive, you probably have bloatware.

So either go with a PC building service that is just compiling parts and lets you do the windows install, or build a PC yourself, its really quite easy these days.

Man, I love this community. Hope it doesn't die from the break from Reddit.

I would do nothing if I were you. The CPU upgrade process isn't that complex (but I have been upgrading my PCs since my dad let the magic smoke out of the floppy drive and hung up his hat):

  • pick the CPU you like

  • find out the socket

  • check that your cooler can mount on the socket

    • you might have to order a new mounting bracket for it

    • or you might need a new cooler

  • check that your mobo has the same socket and its chipset supports your chosen CPU

    • or you might need a new mobo

  • if you need a new mobo, pick one that has the same form factor as your current one and that has enough expansion slots for your devices (not a problem for most modern PCs)

  • if you need a new mobo, check that it will work with that GPU or SSD you might want to buy next year (PCIe version)

  • if you need a new mobo, check that your RAM is compatible (DDR4 vs DDR5 in 2022)

    • or you might need new RAM

  • if you need a new mobo, check that your PSU is compatible (no new connectors)

    • or you might need a new PSU

  • just in case, check that the new wattage won't overload your CPU (there are websites for that)

    • or you might need a new PSU

  • if you need a new PSU, check that it will work with that GPU you might want to buy next year (power and connectors)

  • order your new CPU, cooler, mobo, RAM and PSU

  • disassemble your PC

  • assemble you new PC

lol

I really appreciate your taking the time to write out the detailed steps, but I have to ask, you do realize what you wrote out does not mesh with "isn't that complex", right? I'm stereotyping here, but maybe forward the list to someone who is not your dad and isn't a DIY tinkerer, and ask them if they think it's a stroll or a massive undertaking. Just a few examples:

pick the CPU you like

I mean I would just go by userbenchmarks but as another poster nearby commented, you can't necessarily even trust that because of its anti-AMD bias, and the "effective speed" metric isn't as straightforward as it sounds like. Now I have to go down another rabbit hole to understand what's best.

find out the socket

I have no idea how many types of sockets there are and the pros and cons of each.

you might have to order a new mounting bracket for it

There's another hour at least of research to understand what's going on

disassemble your PC

assemble you new PC

This reminds me of the draw-the-rest-of-the-owl meme.

Honestly you see willing to make some non-optimal choices and maybe give up some money or porformance for ease. if you just buy a new motherboard and cpu bundled you can just follow the lego like instructions that come with the motherboard. You will probably spend some two digit number of dollars more and have slightly worse performance but it's probably the middle ground you're looking for.

I did expect this reaction, but it's honestly not that bad. Building a shed or changing a tire is harder, because you actually require some manual dexterity to turn your knowledge into practical results. Learning how to upgrade a PC takes a few evenings of scrolling and the parts actually slot together with minimal effort.

For example, if you search for 13900K on Wikipedia, you get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake, where it says in plain text it uses socket LGA1700. Then you click through to the page about the socket itself and see the list of chipsets that work with Raptor Lake, of which there's just one, the most expensive Z790.

Unless you're regularly running CPU-heavy applications, there's no reason to upgrade unless you're actively seeing detrimental performance. A few years ago my MB crapped out and I decided to upgrade my CPU and RAM because it was Black Friday and everywhere was running deals. So I upgraded to a six0core Ryzen with hyperthreading and saw fuck all of a performance increase except certain processes (like converting large files between formats) ran faster. Interestingly enough, it was useless for the one area where I did need increased CPU performance; at the time my job required me (or at least it was easier) to OCR 1000+ page documents, which took a substantial amount of time on my work laptop and locked me out of doing any other work since I needed Acrobat to accomplish pretty much anything. The new CPU certainly made the process a little faster, but Adobe doesn't support hyperthreading so it was still running one page at a time (albeit at faster speed) rather than the 12 pages at a time it could theoretically handle. I was super pissed that a pro-grade product that costs a decent amount of money didn't have such an essential feature. The punchline is that even in cases where you would see a difference software limitations may prevent you from seeing it. Like you, I'm not much of a gamer so I have no idea how it will effect that end of things, but for most everyday tasks you should be fine with what you have unless you're performance is lagging.

Makes sense. I do expect that everyday tasks will see virtually no difference, and that the upside comes from just a couple of CPU-heavy apps. But as you note, once you do have those use cases, it does feel a bit magical to just cut down the processing type by 30% from one day to the next (and hundreds of dollars later).

Oh, good chance to ask, how good is acrobat OCR? I've been using the one built into Google drive, but it's not possible to batch it.

It's pretty good but it's time consuming for larger files. To provide some context, I was doing legal work for oil and gas and I had to determine if certain assignments pertained to certain leases (an assignment is when one company conveys lease rights to another; I'll include things like mortgages and financing statements in this category). They often do this in large documents conveying several thousands of interests at one time. It can be incredibly time consuming to do this by simply reading the document, especially since most of them are ordered by some kind of internal lease number rather than alphabetically or geographically or by some other parameter that I have access to. It gets even worse when they're conveying different interests for different leases and there are several exhibits to go through. After OCR I'd usually search by lessor name first. If I found what I was looking for, great, if not, I'd try parcel number, and if that failed, I'd search by the recording information for the original lease. These latter two parameters were kind of dicey because the information is often laid out in a table and the OCR occasionally has trouble determining where the line breaks are. With a name you at least have the security of knowing that the first few letters will be consecutive without a line break. If I got to this point and didn't find anything then I figured I could safely assume that the document didn't apply to the lease I was concerned about, unless, of course, there was some kind of blanket language, but that's usually easy to find. It wasn't 100% accurate, though, because there were some cases where I knew that what I was looking for was in there but it wasn't coming up because of a typo, or bad scanning, too-small printing, etc. at which point I'd have to search the whole document manually. My superiors didn't like relying on OCR because of this, but in my experience mindlessly scanning page after page was more likely to lead to an error than the OCR was. The advice I'd give to the client relied pretty heavily on the applicability of certain of these documents, so I'd say that it's probably good enough for whatever you plan on using it for, assuming that it isn't an application that could get you fired or cause some other kind of serious problem.

I never had to batch scan so I can't comment on how well this works. One final caution I'd give is that OCR info causes the file sizes to balloon considerably. The firm I worked at required us to eliminate all exhibit pages from these documents except the ones that were directly applicable to prevent the already-large size of the client's product to balloon to unmanageable levels and take up too much room on our cloud storage. This was followed by a prohibition on including OCR'd stuff in our final client PDFs for the same reason, as we saved copies of all our work and it was taking up entirely too much space. It wasn't uncommon for one of these large documents to take up in excess of 300 megs due to all the additional OCR data. So if you plan on saving all of these PDFs locally, it's something to be aware of.

Wow, thanks for the review. If you trusted it with that, it must be more than good enough for the stuff I was doing (casually browsing through old French books)

Speaking as someone still running an I5 8400: if you upgrade, send me your old one?

I wouldn't say this upgrade is worth it unless lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills can't burn your loose change fast enough, but if you did the valuable part would be the learning process. Being able to pull out parts is important, and putting the actual CPU in is just a matter of slathering on paste and slotting it in. The most annoying part is ensuring all the mobo cables are plugged in firmly, but that's another useful experience. And you'll need a new mobo because 12th gen changed to a new socket, so you'd basically be building a new machine. Your PSU might be fine though.

Another thing to check out is your ram: HP prebuilds often use cheapo stuff to pad out the gigs. I salvaged 16Gb from one of their Envys to get my machine up to 32, and it slowed the XMP timings way down. Actually makes a 5-10fps difference on a 100% Factorio benchmark save. Or you could just wait for DDR5 prices to drop and upgrade to that later.

I would agree with your analogy if I were desperately looking for a scalper to sell me a RTX 4090 stat because my 3090 Ti is just not shiny enough. But come on, we're talking about 3-4 generations of CPU later. That's hardly cartoon billionaire status we're talking about. Plus, it's an asset! Would you think someone who spends $600 on round trip tickets to the Caribbean is lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills?

I have "HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 XMP SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)". Is that el cheapo ship? Should I upgrade those instead? I believe I can handle pulling out and inserting memory sticks... I hope.

I have "HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 XMP SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)". Is that el cheapo ship? Should I upgrade those instead? I believe I can handle pulling out and inserting memory sticks... I hope.

Aha! As Herr Bernd says below, that's decently fast memory, if HP enabled the XMP preset. But also, if they enabled the XMP preset, that's technically an overclock of your processor's memory controller, which is spec'd at 2933 MT/s max. XMP almost always works, even when it's out of spec, but... sometimes it doesn't. That might be the cause of your instability.

Unfortunately, memtest86+, which I suggested before, is more aimed at finding problems with the memory itself, rather than problems with the communication between the CPU and the memory. For that you'll want one of the overclocker-preferred stress tests that I linked before.

You can poke around in the BIOS setup options and try to find out if XMP is enabled, if so disable it, and see if that makes a difference to stability tests (assuming you find a test that reliably reproduces a problem). Turning off XMP will make your computer slower, and how much slower depends on what non-XMP settings are burned into the memory sticks.

If you're up for a challenge, you can try to stabilize the XMP profile with extra voltage, or find a stable intermediate speed between XMP and default non-XMP. If you try, the rest of that DDR4 OC guide will be helpful. But I do mean challenge. Memory is kind of the last bastion of "real" overclocking, in that every other part of a modern desktop has self-test circuits to characterize its own timing margin, and is able to run near maximum performance out of the box (if only for a short turbo boost time window). And unless you have error-correcting RAM like on a server or workstation, a memory overclock is the most difficult kind of overclock to validate, and the most likely to persistently corrupt your data.

It's so unexpected for someone who is clearly highly knowledgeable about this to go with a 2013 CPU and 2016 GPU. It's like the cliche that you never trust a skinny chef. I'm sure your choices work for you, but unless you're rarely on your computer for work/fun, I wonder if in 20 years you'll look back and think that the savings just wasn't worth the last-last-last-last-last-gen performance or experience.

Where'd you see a 2013 CPU?

Remember he's repurposing all these as Linux machines for specific roles, where using old hardware literally doesn't matter in the same way that smoke alarms don't need 5nm process chips.

I still use 4th and 6th gen i7s picked up from the dump, and for the jobs I use them for there's no difference in user experience. The 4th gen was thrown away weeks after someone tried to "upgrade" it to win10, turning it overnight into a laggy piece of shit with broken Bluetooth and GPU drivers lol.

Hang on, can't he just set it to 2933 in bios?

Probably? I don't know if that would pick JEDEC timings, re-use the XMP timings in cycles directly, or adapt the XMP timings in nanoseconds.

I think he should try it and see, but I don't think he's reported back about whether he's found any test that reliably produces a crash.

Oh, no, that's pretty good. The last hp i7 prebuilt I saw had ddr4-2133 4x8.

Honestly it might be worth it considering you'd probably have to recheck all your mobo connections as part of the bsod troubleshooting anyway, if you spend a lot of time in RimWorld lategame.

I'm in a similar situation with Factorio, but had to force myself to admit that I'm not CPU-bound in any actual work process, and any upgrade was only for a fraction of the ~2hrs of game time a week.

Building consumer desktops is more tedious and time consuming than it is a tremendous headache. If you can't figure out how to put together silicon LEGO then you're the perfect market for the local computer shop's services. They're not seedy but they are more or less charging an idiot tax. If your ego or wallet can't handle paying that then spend a few hours on /r/buildapc to figure it out.

Also it doesn't even sound like you have any reason to upgrade. Is any game you're playing not running at smooth 60fps?

Some CPU cooling systems really are a pain to mount.

That's why you watch a video review of the cooler you want to buy to see how much of a PitA it is to mount.

I bought one, took great pains to mount it and now I can't get it off. :S

Please, there may be children reading this.

Eh, idiot taxes are charged to everything. I don't think the world is better off if everyone changed their own oil, raised their own chicken, filed paper taxes, or drafted divorce paperwork.

I think my interest in upgrading the CPU is not dissimilar to people who buy the latest iPhone Pro Max Supreme every year. No one really needs that camera upgrade, but it's nice. And the out of pocket cost isn't too different either. To answer your question, there are a few applications that noticeably chugs due to CPU limitations. RimWorld (in late game) is one, and Excel (large data sets) another.

My RimWorld doubled in TPS going from a Ryzen 1700 to a 5600x. That felt nice, it meant I could play a single save game for like 30 hours before it became unbearably slow as opposed to 15 hours haha.

This is exactly what I'm talking about! I wish they had multithreading but people say that'd require the code be rewritten from scratch, so only recourse is to brute force it with better hardware.

Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.

If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.

Eh, Elon Musk still shitposts all day when his time is worth like a million an hour (if you divide his 189B net worth by the number of hours in 33 years between his age and when he turned 18, you get 0.65m per hour). I think we mortals should be allowed to complain about complexity even if we can afford to have a pro take care of it.

Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

No it isn't.

A bsod isn't normal, there is something wrong maybe in the OS level, maybe with drivers, maybe hardware, but its more than a mere warning that can be ignored most of the time.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Fix the bsod issue, then literally nothing.

Your setup is so hilariously overpowered (in all aspects) for StarCraft2 and Rimworld that you are doing this for no reason other than to please your lizard brain that just wants to buy shit.

You are asking "I drive my Ferrari to the grocery store all the time, should I buy a Lamborghini?" WHY WOULD YOU??

I play similar old school games like you and I'm using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a GTX 1070 setup I bough 5 years ago. Still running strong.

I would have fixed the BSOD if it just required the latest drivers and updates. It's probably something at the hardware level, which sort of goes back to my lack of interest in DIYing diagnostics.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld. This is too much detail, but once you get to 50+ colonists the game barely runs on 1x, let alone 3 or 5x speed.

Also, my setup hardly compares to a Ferrari. It's a $1700 machine. 14'' MacBook Pros start at $2k, and I know the average startup doesn't issue its developers a Ferrari on day one. It's more like a base model 2020 BMW 5 series, with me asking the best way to swap the engine for the 2023 model.

If your main goal is Rimworld performance, AMD's 5800x3D CPU is going to be the best value you can buy (or the 7800x3D when it comes out next year) because its huge cache makes a big difference (up to 40%) for complex sim games with lots of entities.

I've been drooling over these for Factorio, but similar sort of position where I can't justify it for the ~2hrs a week I spend using the PC that way.

CPU sim games are such an upgrade trap: "yesss, now I can simulate seven million pieces of iron moving down a belt! Progress!"

The widely-touted Factorio benchmarks run at well over 200+ UPS. The outsized gains from the big cache don't hold up as well with larger factories that struggle to maintain 60, presumably because they overflow it. Something that does help Factorio run faster on pretty much any computer is forcing it to use a larger page size with mimalloc.

Even in that case it's going toe to toe against a CPU twice its price with vastly higher single core speed, which is pretty amazing!

Thanks for the tip. If my business programs were available on Linux I'd switch over entirely at this point.

Interesting. Never thought about the cache mattering. Thanks for the tip.

Your CPU is in fact overpowered for Rimworld. Having 50+ colonists is an extreme outlier case, like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

Is there any point to factorio other than building mega factories? It's not called Cottagecorio, and only like 25% of the content is really involved in a playthrough that just "beats the game."

There are factories and factories. I've had a lot of fun building (quite large) factories in that game, but I have no desire whatever to try to get into the megabase game. Building a factory to produce thousands of science packs per minute is not my idea of fun.

Regardless, though, people who do that in Factorio are at the extreme edge of pushing the game. The hardware they need to sustain that is far greater than what the average Factorio player needs. Similarly, if one has a Rimworld colony with 50+ colonists that's outside the norm, and it means they're going to have higher hardware requirements.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld

I do not know the particulars of RimWorld.

But exotic usecases are insatiable. You can make any CPU in the world struggle if you just spawn an arbitrarily large number of bots in games made in the 90's.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played, then I suppose just do whatever you want. (Do it regardless, but you asked for suggestions).

Ferrari

The point I was aiming to get across is that a Ferrari is far far far too overspecced to drive to the grocery as is a a high end CPU is for running games that were modestly intensive from half to 3/2 a decade ago.

Not about the expense of it.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played

It is way outside the bounds of how Rimworld is normally played, for what it's worth. So a CPU upgrade may help, but it's hardly required by the game.


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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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