A Senior Sys Admin Selects A Monitor That's Ripe

The GPU hierarchy portrayed as a medieval throne room is absolutely genius. The legendary GTX 1080 Ti sits on the throne like an immortal king, while newer cards like the RTX 3060Ti, 3080Ti, and even the mighty RTX 4090 and 5090 bow before its greatness. What makes this so damn funny is how the 1080 Ti released in 2017 still commands respect in 2024. It's that one graphics card that refuses to become obsolete despite its age—the perfect price-to-performance ratio that haunts NVIDIA's marketing team to this day. Gamers still cling to it like it's the holy grail while newer cards struggle to justify their kidney-selling prices.

The eternal GPU pricing purgatory we're all trapped in. Every hardware cycle, that one friend swears prices will drop "soon" after the next release. Meanwhile, your wallet weeps as prices only climb higher while you're still running a 1060 from 2016 that sounds like a jet engine when you open Chrome. The tombstone for "GPU prices will settle soon" might as well be my desktop background at this point.

That network switch has clearly been running flawlessly since the Clinton administration. Covered in dust, cobwebs, and what appears to be ancient plaster, it's the digital equivalent of that one load-bearing piece of code written by someone who left the company 8 years ago. Touch it? Might as well pull the pin on a grenade while you're at it. This is why network engineers develop that thousand-yard stare by year five.

Ah, the classic game dev pipeline of diminishing returns! First, you spend weeks upgrading textures that players will barely notice. Then you crank up those polygon counts because clearly what your game needs is characters with more triangles than actual gameplay features. Next comes the obsessive addition of microscopic details that absolutely nobody will see unless they're inspecting your models with an electron microscope. And finally—the pièce de résistance—just blur everything with fancy lighting effects and call it "cinematic." DLSS/FG (Deep Learning Super Sampling/Frame Generation) is basically saying "let AI fix our performance problems" instead of optimizing the code that's running at 12 FPS. It's the digital equivalent of sweeping dust under a really expensive, ray-traced rug.

Ah, the infamous 12VHPWR connector - the tiny plastic menace that turned $2000 GPUs into expensive space heaters. Nothing says "we value your business" like engineering a power connector that melts faster than my will to live during a production outage. Three years of toasty graphics cards later, and NVIDIA's still wondering why gamers are developing trust issues. Pro tip: when your GPU's power connector doubles as a fire starter, it's not a feature.

When your legacy server keeps crashing but you're out of technical solutions so you install a religious icon as a CPU heatsink. That machine's been running for 7 years straight now, and nobody dares to update it. The icon isn't covering anything important anyway, right? RIGHT? The sacred art of hardware debugging—where divine intervention meets thermal management. Beats having to explain to management why you need a budget for new equipment.