Hardware Memes

Remember when laptops had ports? Like, actual ports you could use? VGA, Ethernet, USB-A, headphone jack, maybe even a DVD drive if you were fancy. Those thicc boys on the left let you swap RAM, upgrade storage, and occasionally even replace the CPU without needing a degree in microsurgery. Now we've got these ultra-thin fashion statements that throttle at 80°C, have everything soldered to the motherboard, and require a dongle for literally everything. Sure, they look sleek in coffee shops, but good luck fixing anything yourself. One component dies? Better sell a kidney for a new motherboard. The industry convinced everyone that 2mm of thickness savings was worth sacrificing repairability, upgradeability, and thermal performance. We traded function for form, and now we're stuck with laptops that are basically expensive disposable devices. Real men prefer fat laptops because they actually want their hardware to last longer than the warranty period.

You know that moment when you decide to be responsible and dust off your rig, maybe swap out some thermal paste, reorganize those cable rats nests... and then the power button becomes a decorative element? Nothing. No POST beep. No fan spin. Just the sound of your own panicked breathing. Now you're sitting there mentally retracing every single step, wondering if you accidentally unplugged the front panel connectors, shorted something with a stray screw, or angered the PC gods by daring to improve things. The RAM is probably just slightly unseated. Or you forgot to flip the PSU switch back on. Or your motherboard decided retirement was preferable to another cleaning session. Maintenance: the fastest way to turn a working computer into a very expensive paperweight.

The classic gaming rig power imbalance. You've got a beastly GPU that could render the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in real-time, paired with a CPU that's basically flexing just as hard... and then there's the motherboard looking like it's one power surge away from having a complete meltdown. That's what happens when you blow your entire budget on the shiny parts and realize too late that you cheaped out on the foundation. The motherboard is just sitting there, tongue out, barely holding these two titans together while they're trying to communicate at blazing speeds through its budget-tier circuitry. Pro tip: Your $1200 GPU deserves better than a $80 motherboard from 2016. It's like putting a Ferrari engine in a golf cart.

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.