Anyone Else Feel Like This Is All Of Computex?

Remember when NVIDIA politely asked you to upgrade your graphics card? Those were the days. Now they sit on their silicon throne, looking down at us mere mortals with contempt. "Buy our $2000 GPU or continue living in your pathetic low-polygon world, peasant." The transformation from humble tech company to aristocratic overlord is complete. And we just keep throwing money at them like the desperate frame-rate addicts we are.

You spend years being the designated "tech person" in your friend group, fielding questions about why their printer won't work and explaining that no, you can't hack their ex's Instagram. Radio silence for months. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, they emerge from the shadows with actual tech curiosity! Your heart swells with pride. Maybe they want to learn programming? Build a website? Understand how databases work? Nope. Gaming PC. Because of course they do. The one thing that has absolutely nothing to do with your software engineering expertise but somehow you're still expected to know the difference between a 4070 Ti and a 4080 Super. Welcome to being the "computer friend" – where your CS degree qualifies you to be an unpaid hardware consultant apparently. At least it's not another "can you fix my phone" request, right? Right?

Ah, the classic "I'll just borrow your WiFi for a sec" that turns your 16K gaming experience into a potato-quality slideshow. Nothing says friendship like watching your bandwidth get absolutely massacred while your buddy streams 4K cat videos, downloads the entire Steam library, and probably mines some crypto on the side. Your internet provider must love that sudden spike in usage that makes your router sound like it's about to achieve liftoff. Next time just hand them your credit card instead—it'll be less painful.

The perfect illustration of the bizarre hardware flexing in tech communities! Top-tier devs brag about running non-existent processors like "Ryzen 9800x3d" and mythical "5090 RTX" GPUs that would melt your house's electrical grid. Meanwhile, their storage solution? A fossilized 2003 Toshiba HDD with questionable sectors that somehow survived Y2K. The cherry on top is coding on a monitor with specs (720p 50Hz) that would make even Windows 95 feel claustrophobic. It's the digital equivalent of claiming you drive a Ferrari but it has bicycle wheels and runs on cooking oil.

The ultimate PC hardware question has evolved, but the anxiety remains the same. In 2008, we measured our rigs' worth by whether they could handle Crysis—that notorious system-melter that brought even high-end machines to their knees. Fast forward to 2025, and we're still doing the same song and dance, just with Borderlands 4 as the new performance guillotine. Seventeen years of technological progress, and we're still asking if our $3000 investment can run a game without turning our PC into a jet engine. Some traditions never die—they just get more expensive.

Regular developers: "Let's just call it version 1, 2, 3." Semantic versioning enthusiasts: "Excuse me, it's 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 — we're civilized here." Ancient CPU architects: "8086, 80286, 80386 — because nothing says 'I was coding when dinosaurs roamed the earth' like naming your versions after Intel processors from the 1980s."