Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

Here’s the comparability list for your motherboard. Upgrade the bios if you haven’t yet

https://www.asrock.com/mb/amd/fatal1ty b450 gaming k4/index.asp#CPU

I searched on ebay and 😂 there’s a big jump in price between a 5700x/5800x to 5700x3d/5800x3d. ~$150 to $350-400

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

It doesn’t take 3nm/2nm chips to make a great computer. The Switch 2 is has a Samsung 8nm SoC. Steam Deck is TSMC 7nm. A Steam Deck has a better processor than my Intel N150 NAS. We don’t need the strongest hardware for self hosting. Don’t need it for a good gaming experience. Someday we’ll get second hand server parts salvaged into home equipment. The PS5 had that jailbreak. That can someday be a useful Linux machine. Someday the Xbox Series. Someday there’ll be a wave of RISC-V SBC’s that are better than the most recent raspberry pi

Go Valve go. Screw Facebook/Meta, Google, Apple. I want the future of VR to be standard desktop Linux centric. The iOS/Android state of mobile is annoyingly restrictive compared to even Windows let alone desktop/server Linux

Lol. Please everyone contribute to the change you want to see. If you’re not sharing spreadsheets and slide decks in a team, then for personal use you should be good with Collabora (LibreOffice based). It’s great. Write your novel and short stories in Collabora

https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-office/

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

Nice. Waiting for RVA23 boards with a PCI-E slot to become widely available so I can test out box64 on those

That newer open source driver is still far behind but is progressing. Those graphics cards will have a great new life with modern kernels someday

Get to acquiring Seagate external HDDs and shucking them for your own 3.5" drive bays before the data centers get them

Before big commercial companies can succeed with the mainstream, flatpak permission handling that is as smooth as Android and iOS. Not everything is going to be in the distros base package manager and devs need a way to distribute software that can be expected to work on any of these devices. No confusions over why they’re system doesn’t know what to do with a deb or rpm file. Flatpak is the closest thing right now to something with universal adoption. After that it’s a slow and steady grind for market share. Like how Macs market share 20 years ago isn’t very different from where Linux is today

I think a hardware company could succeed better by marketing the devices as creation devices. Focus on Blender, Krita, Ardour, Darktable, Kdenlive, etc. Pretty much the niche Macs were marketed as 25 years ago getting regular people interested with stuff like garageband and imovie

And the corollary to that, Windows 10S. Don’t remember of Windows 8 had an S mode option even if just only on the ARM edition of win8

Fifa ultimate team. Magic the Gathering cards. Both older

Other companies running game stores/platforms must think like this which is why their stores end up competing with a 2008 Steam. Does nothing is incredibly incorrect

Last I had it on my desktop was like 2 months ago. Oddities with games here and there was a deal breaker for me. Don’t remember if I could alt tab over video game windows yet. Not being able to alt-tab other windows over a video game is a deal breaker for me. There were random nich applications I don’t recall that didn’t handle dialog windows/file pickers well. That may be better by now. The file explorer is really bare bones even compared to nautilus. Not expecting Dolphin but I want something better.

High hopes though. I may give it another go as my primary with 26.04. The Cosmic applications are all pretty fast. I think I like how it looks more than KDE just KDE is way more fully featured

only difference with tech ceo’s is that a handful are relatively public figures. Finance CEOs have a stake in everything, mostly publicly faceless. Even the ones directly appointed around the Trump admin, non-news. The food/beverage conglomerates, mostly publicly faceless. Dupont family poisoned the world, mostly publicly faceless. Weapons exporters, mostly publicly faceless. Real estate investment trusts, mostly publicly faceless. Insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, mostly publicly faceless. Mob justice almost always fails because it’s easily swayed towards fall guys and/or it’s so minor to just be a pyrrhic victory. Expended so much effort for something that’ll wash over in short order. Next guy up

The outside display is just about 21:9 and internal about 4:3, sounds like it’s an ultimate retro gaming handheld. Lack of SD card support is a pain though

For folds, I like the old flip phone style flips better. The only puzzling thing with those ones are why keep the front facing camera when the rear cameras have a display on that half on the phone. The outer display on this is 6.5". It’s not a compromise in size at all like the flips/razrs. Internal screen shouldn’t have a selfie camera either

For a Logitech mouse on Linux I use Solaar. Pretty much why I go with Logitech mice now. Solaar works well for me

Sentience reached. Evidence of singularity and people just waltzing by blind

If you want it creamier, add something fatty. Milk, butter, peanut butter, sesame paste. Not a lot. Just a dash. A small slice of butter. Different chili oils. Primarily the bits in the oil rather than much of the oil itself. Buy fried shallots. Baby bok choy makes it a little sweeter. A bit of napa cabbage adds some good flavor. Tubes of tomato paste freeze well, squeeze some in

Throw in something a bit acidic. Lime or vinegar. A fermented or picked vegetable. Kimchi, som pak, something. A little tamarind paste can add a kick to it. Frozen dumplings. Thai basil. Shichimi togarashi. Five spice. Curry powder.

Back to the peanut butter, I always have powdered peanut butter for low calorie peanut butter flavor. Try a dash of soy sauce or fish sauce into it. Cayenne and/paprika powder.

If you have whole spices on hand, it doesn’t take long for coriander seeds, fennel, star anise, cardamom, etc to add flavor to a broth.