efaardvark

Decided to go with cachy first. Rufus and I don't get along. Amazon's search has always been horrible. If I'm inputting a particular model or SKU then don't waste my time showing me other crap that I wasn't searching for, or bury it on the 3rd page after all the sponsored links. Rufus was just more of the same. If I asked about a particular feature of an item Rufus would say something like, "I don't see that in the item description". I can read the description myself faster than I can get the answers from Rufus. Rufus is like some pushy salesman that doesn't even know much about the merch he's pushing. Gemini was also horrible. It was one of the AI's that I tried when I was putting together the new computer system. Even just asking about features and specs of various components seemed to be beyond it. I'd been thinking about this build for several months and had already done most of the research so I already knew the correct answers. Google got it wrong so many times. I'd hate to have to trust it on matters where I didn't already know the answers. It couldn't even answer a question like "is X CPU compatible with Y motherboard?" I had a list of parts and I went through the whole list. When I got to the end and asked it to summarize and find prices for the items we'd "discussed", the list it presented even contained items that hadn't been mentioned! Links were broken. Prices were misquoted. Links went to items other than what was shown in the list. Again, more trouble than it was worth. FWIW, the best AI in my test case was Grok. It was certainly more "conversational" in that even when I wasn't extremely precise in my questions it seemed to understand the intent correctly and respond appropriately. A couple times it suggested alternative parts that were cheaper or better than the items on my list, though in the end I only made one change from my predetermined parts list. It also seemed as we went along to get better at understanding the intent of the build and respond appropriately with that in mind when it came to making suggestions. It responded with sensible answers when I told it to give its reasoning behind its suggestion(s). A couple times it even asked me questions about why I chose one part over another. I'd like to believe that it incorporated my answers into its responses. Gemini would say things like, "that's what the people on the reddit forums seem to think". Great. I'm going to trust Reddit to build a $2K system for me?

Played minecraft with my brother in Wisconsin. We found out that if you put knockback on the new spear you can knock a rider off his horse. So we built a jousting arena.

I don't use Windows so I wont be dual booting. (Believe it or not I've never owned a Windows system.) There's nothing in the hardware that would get in the way of doing so if I wanted to however. If it doesn't work then I'd consider it a MSFT / software bug.

Welcome!

Welcome!

And finally the last piece of the build arrives…

Got most of the way through Akujiki Reijou to Kyouketsu Koushaku, aka "Pass the Monster Meat, Milady" today. (Seriously, who comes up with these title translations? ) Surprisingly it's kinda fun. Not my preferred SF but at least it isn't an isekai with an OP main character going after a demon lord, and the romance isn't just said character collecting a bunny/elf/cat-eared harem along the way. I'll take what I can get. I'm actually finding it worth watching to the end, which is somewhat more than I was expecting tbh.

Yeah.. though I was thinking about getting more. Emphasis on the "was". I did order a GPU. I was going to wait until the new year and maybe catch a price drop from an after-sale. After seeing this I decided not to risk it. This batch of GPUs is expensive, but the price includes GDDR prices from back at the time of manufacture. The next batch will likely have a much higher price due to having to bake in the input costs of these ridiculously high current prices. I don't know when the current inventory of GPUs will run out but I decided it is better to be safe than sorry. Unless the AI bubble pops and floods the market with silicon that would otherwise have gone into datacenters. If that happens then we might finally see some reasonable retail prices for both GPUs and RAM.

The DDR5 memory that I bought only 3 weeks ago now costs twice as much as it did then. This is nuts!

Got a CPU cooler to add to the pile of parts I’ve been collecting for a completely new computer build. At this point I’ve got pretty much everything. I just have one key part left to acquire, the GPU. Once I have that I'll start putting it all together. Still haven't quite decided which OS to put on it. Linux for sure but I haven't picked the distro. Definitely not Ubuntu. I might have to try a couple distros before selecting a winner. I have Pop on my laptop so that's one contender. CachyOS is getting a lot of hits on distrowatch lately. It's also Arch based, which is a plus in my book. Maybe one or two others will get a chance if something interesting catches my attention. (Suggestions welcome.) I'm keeping my old system (that I'm typing this on) at least until I get the new one up and running and I took a couple weeks off work for the holidays so I don't really have a deadline to meet to get it all done. I can take my time deciding the details.

Not a complete list by any measure but for titles that have extremely sad themes (or at least moments) I'll add .... Grave of the Fireflies Anohana Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 Wolf’s Rain Erased Angel Beats! Plastic Memories Made in Abyss Gakkou gurashi! Tasogare Otome x Amnesia

Got some more DSN swag from work today.. a DSN 60-year anniversary poster:

THanks. I think the meds worked. Something did anyway. Sometime in the afternoon I could suddenly breathe again, my ears popped, and the headache almost immediately went away as well.

The "still life" mod can generate some pretty massive trees. This one is 5 blocks wide at the base and easily twice as tall as the vanilla 2x2 "christmas tree" spruce towards the right edge of the pic.

Woke up feeling like I have a bad head cold this morning. Everything sounds like I'm underwater, I have a headache, and my nose is completely useless. Feels like someone stuck a bicycle pump up my nose, plugged up the exits, and proceeded to start pumping. Everything else seems to be working properly however so I'm thinking/hoping it's just allergies. Took some cold meds for the painkiller and decongestant properties and I'm waiting for those to take effect. Also some hot coffee. Stomach is ok so far so if those don't work then maybe I'll try something like a spicy tuna sandwich for lunch.

Got a couple more parts in. This time the CPU and the SSD. I still need a cooler and a GPU before I can start making the soup. Got my eye on a cooler but I may wait until the after-Xmas sales to get the GPU.

So today's the day pre-ordering for Hytale goes live. I don't advocate pre-ordering games. How many times has the gaming industry burned customers with that scam? I'm also a bit concerned about the original devs' plans for the future of the game. I mean, the reason Hypixel got into trouble was the micro-transactions ran afoul of Mojang's EULA after all. I'm totally not interested if they go down the path of pay-to-win and micro-transactions. All that said, I am very interested in the game itself. Maybe they've learned a lesson from that? The devs have said no pay-to-win or MT. (yet?) I will likely be checking it out when it gets to the early access phase if they deliver on the linux version, and definitely when it comes to Steam. From what I've seen of demos this game has a chance to be very popular with the Minecraft crowd. At the least it will be good to give Minecraft some competition, especially given MSFT's ownership and the direction they've taken some of their other software. (Slant-eye at Windows 11.) Anyone else have any interest in this title? ('tubie w/more about the pre-order and EA here)