Hardware Memes

OpenAI out here speedrunning the "how to burn the most venture capital" category. They're projected to torch a staggering $218 billion—making Uber's $18.2B look like pocket change and putting Tesla's early struggles to shame. That's not a typo, that's a bar chart that needs its own datacenter just to render. The beautiful irony? They're hoarding every H100 GPU on the planet, creating a shortage that makes the PS5 launch look organized, all while hemorrhaging money at a rate that would make a CFO spontaneously combust. It's the Silicon Valley equivalent of buying a Ferrari dealership just to drive into a lake. At least when you train GPT-5, you can say you lost money at scale .

Oh look, the Grim Reaper of tech components has arrived, and he's got a VERY clear priority list! While compute and memory are getting absolutely OBLITERATED (because who needs those when you're training the 47th iteration of ChatGPT, right?), storage is just chilling in the corner like "hey guys, what's going on?" The AI boom has turned the hardware market into an absolute BLOODBATH. GPUs? Gone. RAM? Extinct. But SSDs? They're just vibing, watching compute and memory prices skyrocket while everyone scrambles to build AI data centers. The 990 Pro going 2x its original price is just collateral damage in this silicon apocalypse. Fun fact: The AI gold rush has caused such insane demand for compute that even STORAGE prices are getting dragged up because, well, you gotta store all those training datasets and model weights SOMEWHERE. RIP to anyone trying to build a PC in 2024 without selling a kidney first.

In the dystopian future of 2049, the AI overlords are hunting down RAM hoarders like they're war criminals. You thought hiding a few sticks of DDR4 was harmless? Wrong. But our hero here? He's playing 4D chess. "It's DDR5, officer. Bought it before the great shortage of 2025." The real genius move was panic-buying DDR5 during the shortage like it was toilet paper in 2020. Now he's sitting on hardware that's basically cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still running Chrome with 8GB and praying to the OOM killer gods. Fun fact: By 2049, your RAM will probably need its own RAM just to run the bloated Electron apps of the future. But at least you'll be able to open three browser tabs without your system catching fire.

You start with innocent vertex inputs—just some dots, really. Then you build your vertex shader and assembly, feeling pretty good about those wireframe models. The vertex shader transforms things nicely. Rasterization converts it to pixels. Fragment shader adds some color and texture. And then... you realize you forgot to clear the depth buffer and your entire scene becomes a glitchy nightmare of corrupted pixels and existential dread. The Vulkan graphics pipeline is like a Rube Goldberg machine where one forgotten flag can turn your beautiful 3D model into abstract art that would make Picasso weep. Each stage is another opportunity to mess something up in ways that won't be obvious until you've already spent 6 hours debugging why everything is magenta. Fun fact: Vulkan gives you so much control that you can literally forget to tell the GPU to clear the screen between frames. That's like forgetting to erase a whiteboard before drawing—you just keep layering chaos on top of chaos until reality itself breaks down.

OneDrive's "On This Day" feature is trying to be all nostalgic and heartwarming, showing you memories from February 23rd throughout the years. But instead of vacation photos or birthday celebrations, you get the classic "Keyboard not found" BIOS error message. The beautiful irony here is that the error instructs you to "Press F1 to continue" when it literally just told you the keyboard isn't detected. It's like telling someone to call you back after their phone dies. The system is basically asking you to use the very device it claims doesn't exist – peak hardware logic right there. Nothing says "special memories" quite like troubleshooting boot errors. Some people have wedding anniversaries; we have the day our PS/2 port gave up on life.

Microsoft really said "security first" and then rejected a perfectly good i5-7500 from 2017 that has TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, while somehow blessing a Celeron N4020—a chip so slow it makes dial-up internet look responsive. The N4020 is literally a budget processor designed for Chromebook-tier performance, yet it made the cut because... it's newer? The kicker is that you can bypass these arbitrary restrictions with a simple registry edit or installation workaround, proving Microsoft's "strict hardware requirements" are about as enforceable as a "Do Not Enter" sign made of tissue paper. They created this whole TPM 2.0 security theater, then left the back door wide open. Classic Microsoft energy: make arbitrary rules that inconvenience users, then make them easy enough to bypass that the only people who suffer are non-technical users who actually follow the rules.

Graphics card marketing teams have entered their villain era. NVIDIA and AMD keep slapping new acronyms on upscaling tech and claiming each one "looks better than native resolution!" First DLSS supposedly beats native rendering, now DLAA is supposedly better than TAA. Next they'll tell us 720p with DLSS 17 looks better than looking at things with your actual eyeballs. The gaming industry has basically turned into "why render at 4K when you can render at 1080p and let AI hallucinate the rest?" Sure, the performance gains are real, but calling upscaled imagery "better than native" is like saying instant coffee tastes better than freshly ground beans. Marketing departments are out here gaslighting us into thinking less is more.

You write some completely incomprehensible OpenGL code with function names that look like keyboard smashing—glCreateShader, glCreateBuffer, glDraw(gdjshdbb)—sprinkle in some magic numbers like 69 and 420 because why not, and somehow a beautiful gradient triangle appears on screen. Graphics programming is basically alchemy where you sacrifice readability to the GPU gods and get rewarded with pretty colors. The best part? You have zero idea why it works, but you're not touching that code ever again.

Remember when lumber prices went absolutely insane during the pandemic and plywood became more valuable than gold? Now in 2026, RAM prices have apparently decided to cosplay as housing market circa 2008. The joke here is the absurd inflation trajectory—what was once a pandemic-era construction material shortage has evolved into RAM sticks becoming the new currency. Eight sticks of 16GB Kingston RAM for a Corvette? That's 128GB total, which at today's inflated prices might actually be a reasonable trade. The "No low-ballers. I know what I have" is the chef's kiss—the universal Craigslist battle cry of someone who's absolutely delusional about their item's value but also... might be right this time? In a world where your gaming rig costs more than your car, trading RAM for vehicles is just sound financial planning.

Someone tried to dunk on Linux saying it "never succeeded" and got absolutely ratio'd with one of the most devastating comebacks in tech history. Linux runs everything from servers to smartphones to Mars rovers... and apparently the embedded systems in adult toys. The beauty here is that Linux's success is so overwhelming that you can't escape it even in your most private moments. Linus Torvalds really did take over the world, one microcontroller at a time. The person who made that original tweet probably sent it from an Android phone running Linux, connected to servers running Linux, through routers running Linux. The irony is thicker than kernel documentation.

Someone took RAM sticks, heat pipes, and what appears to be a power button to craft the most terrifying weapon known to IT: a literal memory upgrade sword. Because when Chrome tabs get out of hand, sometimes you need to take matters into your own hands. The question "Does anyone want RAM installed in them?" hits different when you're holding a blade made of DDR4. It's the ultimate solution for when someone says "just download more RAM" – no, Karen, I'll STAB you with more RAM instead. Props to whoever built this absolute unit of hardware repurposing. Your computer might be dead, but at least it died with honor as a legendary weapon. Plus, that power button on the hilt is *chef's kiss* – because every good stabbing needs a proper boot sequence.

Ken Olsen, CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, confidently declared in 1977 that nobody would ever need a computer at home. Fast forward a few decades and we're literally panicking when our phone battery drops below 20%. We've got computers in our pockets, on our wrists, in our fridges, and probably embedded in our toasters at this point. The irony here is chef's kiss level. The guy was literally selling computers while simultaneously predicting they'd never be a household item. It's like a car salesman saying "nobody will ever need personal transportation." Digital Equipment Corporation eventually went bankrupt in 1998, probably around the time people were installing Windows 98 on their home PCs and playing Solitaire instead of working. Fun fact: Today we have more computing power in our smartphones than NASA used to land on the moon. So yeah, Ken... we found a few reasons to have computers at home. Like doomscrolling Twitter at 2 AM and arguing with strangers on Reddit about whether tabs or spaces are superior.