Rodriguez is in a competitive primary for Wisconsin’s open governor’s race against democratic socialist Francesca Hong…

I don’t remember having the choice of 15-bit. I only remember having the choice of “256” (8-bit indexed palette), “thousands” (16-bit “high color,” with 5:6:5 bits per channel for RGB respectively), or “millions” (24-bit, 8 bits per channel).

EDIT: He is not. :-(

Prove it.

I actually remember the Solitaire card back images being dithered because I had the resolution turned up (and thus the color depth turned down).

I understand being intimidated. Under normal circumstances I’d say maybe try building a cheap computer for your first time, but there kinda aren’t any right now. That said, my first one was a reasonably high-end machine for the time, and it turned out fine.

I feel like the biggest sticking point is actually #2, not #1. I was the kind of kid who was obsessively reading tech magazines/websites/newspaper ad flyers and knew exactly what I wanted and where to get the best deal on it. So yeah, I definitely recommend doing your research first.

But good news: you’ve got it easy these days with YouTube showing you what to get and how to assemble it instead of having to read. The parts themselves are easier these days, too: no jumpers to set, and almost everything is keyed to only fit one way. Short of being really inept/careless and bending CPU pins or snapping the edge connector off a PCB or something, you’re not going to hurt anything.

The bottom line is, if you want to do it eventually you might as well do it now, because there really isn’t that much to it.

The only real reasons to get a Steam Machine are if:

1. You really want your computer to be a 6" cube
2. You really want HDMI CEC support
3. You really want to give your money to Valve instead of some other company

Otherwise, something else will be cheaper and/or faster, at the cost of being a more normal desktop size and shape.

I haven’t had a prebuilt desktop since I was 15, so I would definitely build my own. (In other words, if the thing stopping you is being nervous about screwing it up, don’t be because it isn’t actually hard.)

Otherwise, I don’t have any specific prebuilt brand recommendations for you, but I’ll echo the advice to get something with a Radeon 9060 XT (or better). Alternatively, if you think you might want to do AI things with it too instead of just gaming, consider a small-form-factor PC with a fast APU and a lot of unified memory (e.g. like the Framework Desktop or Minisforum MS-S1 Max) or a Radeon RX 7900 XTX (with 24GB RAM), but be aware that those would be a lot more expensive right now.

This is “you are an absolute fool for planting that second cucumber plant” month.

Because I’m a “car guy” and each vehicle is in a different niche. I’ve got a Miata (RWD, for autocross), a WRX (AWD, for rallycross), a 4Runner (4x4, for off-road trails), etc.

Some of them are currently non-running project cars, and almost none of them are practical. (Perhaps ironically, my “daily driver” is actually a cargo e-bike.)

Also, I’m sentimental and bad at getting rid of them, even if I probably should.

Obligatory Computerphile

From my perspective, a 2006 is still a pretty new car. (Most of mine are from the '90s.)

I’m just saying it takes a while to get far enough from an event for historians to be able to look at it in retrospect, consider all its context and consequences, and come to a reasonable consensus about which parts were important and what to write about them.

For example I saw this video earlier about the levee failures in New Orleans during Katrina, which was 21 years ago. It made the good point that the repercussions of the event (in terms of engineering and otherwise) are still unfolding today: the historical record of what happened then is incomplete without the context that’s happening now.

(The youtuber was also hawking his new book on the history of engineering failures, but never mind that part.)

Or for a more prosaic example, that’s why my history textbooks in school in the '90s stopped around 1970 or so. They weren’t 20 years old; they just didn’t know what to say about the '80s yet. (And if they had been 20 years old, they probably would have barely talked about anything after WWII.)

Kentucky’s governor is a Democrat. It’s not as safe a Republican seat as you think.

Yep: they’re not pee-pee tapes, they’re CP tapes.

What history book talks about all the violent uprising in the last 20 years?

None, because no history book talks about anything in the last 20 years. Stuff that recent is “current events;” it isn’t “history” yet.

Ah, I only skimmed their bullshit popup warning, saw a bunch of mentions of “processing,” and assumed they wanted to mine crypto or something.

Why the Hell does a solar inverter have a wireless data connection at all to begin with? Insanity.

If you’re installing solar anyway, you’re definitely running wires. So if equipment is “smart,” at least fucking hardwire the networking, damn it!

Also what the fuck was that spammy website? It wanted to run shit on my computer to let me read the article. I thought Europe was supposed to prohibit that abuse!

They’ll get there. They hate the idea of individual people being able to make things for themselves or having any other escape from consumer serfdom.

It’s not even just surveillance! It is destruction of property rights generally, including the right to repair and the ability for individuals to own their means of production.

The law. It would become a criminal offense to use open source firmware.

And that’s exactly what the tech oligarchs’ true goal is.

This goes way, way beyond ‘guns.’ It is an assault on property rights and freedom of expression as concepts generally. It would fully outlaw Free Software firmware (which is what the entire 3D printer hobby, having started with the RepRap project, is based on!). It would cut the Maker movement as a whole off at the knees.

It’s absolute tyranny in ways entirely unrelated to guns themselves.