In other words, waiting for the day when antitrust law is properly applied against Nvidia’s monopolization of CUDA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_of_2001

It’s weird that you think it’s relevant.

There’s a difference between being banned and being downvoted to oblivion for pushing idiotic tactics.

No, you’ve got that backwards. Standing in line at a brick-and-mortar store on launch day is the best strategy to reliably get a card at MSRP. Otherwise, you’re either having to constantly keep checking for months on end to snag a card during the brief windows when it’s in stock, or pay way over MSRP for the privilege of easy availability, or deal with all the risk and complexity associated with Craigslist/eBay sales of used stuff.

Also, in this particular case, (a) a $600 9070 XT is a much better value than a $700+ 7900 XT with similar performance, and (b) this generation has tangible feature improvements (namely, decent ray tracing) that you just can’t get at all going back a generation. Edit: and oh yeah, © there’s also the imminent threat of Trump tariffs inflating the price 25% if you don’t buy pretty much immediately.

I mean this in the most polite way possible, but why did you need a new GPU so quickly?

7.5 years is “quickly?!” I’m replacing a Vega 56 from 2017!

If you mean why did I have to buy it on launch day, that’s obviously because that was my best shot of getting one at MSRP, or at all.

I’ll probably end up with a cheap Cooler Master Q300L, or maybe one of those Fractal Design tower cases with the walnut strips on the front if I decide to spring for it.

The main thing is, though, that I didn’t want to have to buy a new case at all. I’m annoyed at having bought the wrong card because of the urgency of the situation and then not being able to easily fix my mistake.

fractal design node 202

Won’t fit. That case supports GPUs up to 310x145x47 mm, but the one I just bought is 288x132x56 mm. It’s that extra width beyond “2 slots” that’s the killer, both for your suggestion and my existing case.

fractal ridge

That one does fit the new GPU, but did I mention that I’m also still using a 3.5" drive and a full-size ATX PSU?

What I really want is something that has a layout similar to my old case, but literally just maybe half a centimeter wider:

I stood in line at Microcenter Thursday morning to get a 9070 XT. I arrived at about 8AM (an hour before they opened), and the line was already wrapped around the side of the building. They let people in slowly after opening (apparently so as not to overwhelm the sales staff), and I got near the front door by about 10. They were handing out vouchers, and they actually still had quite a few left, with almost all the different models available when they got to me. After I got my card and left, I looked back at the store and the line still wrapped around the side of the building.

Frankly, from my perspective, I’d say the availability of cards was “surprisingly good.” It’s just that there was so much pent-up demand, even “surprisingly good” supply wasn’t good enough.

You want to know what the punchline is, though? Not expecting to have much choice in cards, and not having had time to research the differences between the ones made by different board partners, I ended up getting the “Gigabyte Gaming OC” version, which sounded good because it had a slightly higher max clock speed but was still $600. In retrospect, I should’ve gotten the PowerColor “Reaper” version because every other version is too wide to fit in my ITX computer case. [Womp, womp.] So now I have to decide between paying extra to replace a case that I otherwise like, or try to hope the cards actually do get restocked in a timely fashion (and still at MSRP) so I can attempt an exchange? I guess the moral of the story is, even if you “win” it’s still a fucking pain in the ass.

The last card I bought was a Radeon Vega 56, also on launch day (7.5 years ago!) and I was also damn lucky to get it. I cannot believe that the GPU market has been continuously fucked up since then!

In the UK, we don’t even have paper money anymore, it’s plastic… Maybe it’s more of a USA skill issue, too?

US “paper” money has been made of cotton-linen blend cloth for over 100 years.

Also, I don’t believe vague calls for violence like this are even illegal in the US. Has to be something specific and actionable.

Yep. It’s kinda dismaying how many people either don’t understand that or don’t want to understand that.

I’m sure that’s an improvement over the previous norm, but I think there’s still a long way to go towards treating these blatant traitorous shills appropriately.

A truly appropriate interaction would’ve gone something like this:

Merkley: “In factual reality, Russia started the war by invading the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Trump told a lie from the oval office, falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war. Which country do you believe started the war, Russia or Ukraine?”

Stooge: “I’m just gonna have to uh politely disagree–”

Merkely: “Nonresponsive; try again. It’s a binary question: Russia or Ukraine. You only get a one-word answer. Any word that comes out of your mouth other than ‘Russia’ will be understood as an admission that you’re a stooge and a traitor. Now what’s your answer?”

Andreessen had fuck-all to do with Firefox. He had worked on Netscape Navigator (which changed names several times over the years and is now known as SeaMonkey), but he had left Mozilla years before Firefox, which was a from-scratch rewrite, became a thing.

In that regard – writing shit code that was best thrown out – him and Eich (the fucker who inflicted Javascript on the world) are quite similar.

Finally somebody other than me says it!

If the co-op is purely doing contract work and the contract ends, how are they able to continue to pay workers on the bench?

I think this is the buried lede. How much is income reduced to tech workers vs traditional employers? Without strong social safety nets in the country a co-op with a much lower salary may not be a viable option because unemployment would leave the former workers without resources to live on.

I feel like the answers to these would be related. One answer could be that the organization maintains a large fund to act as a buffer to maintain salaries between contracts instead of operating “paycheck-to-paycheck.” An even simpler answer could be that the co-op chooses to take on a large number of small contracts instead of a small number of large ones, such that the revenue is relatively consistent to begin with.

They also flow from corruption (regulatory capture/failure to enforce anti-trust and other consumer-protection law). It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.

If I lived near that guy, I would have a strong urge to rebut those stickers using a sharpie or paint pen.

Some of the graphs are useful, but the message that site is pushing is weird gold-bug propaganda.

They’d still rather stay silent than break with Trump and ally with leftists. To be really fair, they deserve no fucking credit whatsoever.