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

Because that’s what true “citizenship-by-blood/heritage laws more or less straight out of the 19th century” would imply.

I wish. My ancestors moved to the US from Germany in the 19th or early 20th century, but I’m pretty sure I’m not eligible for German citizenship.

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

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.

If the property tax scales with inflation and social security is also adjusted for inflation, but your property tax is getting more expensive relative to your social security income, something’s not right.

Call all the Republicans, too.

The kleptocratic oligarchs really won’t regret it, and they don’t give a fuck what the rest of us think.

We need to make them regret it.

can you really copyright your comments?

By default, everything you write, from a novel to an Internet forum shitpost, is not only copyrighted by you but also “all rights reserved.”

What that guy is doing is (a) making his writings more available for reuse than they would be otherwise, and (b) making a point about how fucked-up it is that corporations treat stuff posted to social media as if it were a free-for-all they could use however they want.

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.

What do you mean, “soon?” There’s an entire fucking Wiki article about the “sharing” that’s already happened!

It’s a version control system, not social media!

I get that you’re explaining it, not endorsing it, and so this criticism isn’t directed at you, but the notion that people would pick Github over Gitlab or Codeburg because of the bandwagon effect is just dumb and weird.

if that happens, people should migrate

Or better yet, they should just go ahead and do so right now. What’s the point of picking Github over the other better alternatives anyway?

Somebody’s feeding him grandiose ideas about global warming and northern sea routes. Probably some flattering lies about splitting said routes between them and dominating world trade too, once Canada and the EU are out of the way.