Hope You Bought Hearing Protection For Your GPU

Top panel shows assembly code with "is0dd" function checking if a number is odd by bitwise operations. Bottom panel shows someone who skipped all that and just lit up LEDs on a breadboard. Why write complex bitwise logic when electricity already knows if a current is odd or even? The universe's physics engine doesn't need your fancy algorithms - electrons have been doing modulo operations since the Big Bang.

The legendary Gabe Cube—Valve's unreleased hardware that shows Gabe Newell's facial expressions based on your code quality. Smiling face when your code is optimized, horrified face when you try to implement Half-Life 3. The USB ports at the bottom are for plugging in your tears when Steam rejects your game for the 17th time. Rumor has it the cube crashes if you say "3" three times in your codebase.

The sweet, sweet euphoria when your assembly code finally compiles after hours of manually managing registers and memory addresses. Nothing quite matches that "org.asm" feeling—a play on words that needs no explanation for anyone who's survived the trenches of low-level programming. It's the digital equivalent of solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded while riding a unicycle. The rest of us are writing in Python while assembly programmers are basically performing brain surgery with tweezers.

The evolution of gamer expectations is brutal. In 1997, blocky polygons had us gasping in awe like we'd seen the face of God. By 2013, we're complaining about "pixelated" graphics that would've melted our 90s brains. Fast forward to 2020, and we're cursing our $2000 rigs for struggling with photorealistic landscapes that NASA couldn't have rendered 10 years ago. It's the tech equivalent of kids today not understanding why we were excited about 56k modems. "What do you mean you had to WAIT for images to load? Like, more than 0.001 seconds?" Meanwhile, developers are in the corner having nervous breakdowns trying to render individual pores on NPCs that players will rocket-launch into oblivion anyway.

The eternal computer science debate that makes absolutely no sense to normal humans: endianness. On the left, the logical person crying because "end" should refer to what comes last (little-endian should be MSB first). On the right, Danny Cohen smugly enjoying the chaos he created by naming it backwards - where "big end" refers to the most significant byte coming first. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how multi-byte values are stored in memory. It's like arguing whether to read a number from left-to-right or right-to-left, except we've been fighting about it since the 1980s and nobody will ever surrender.

Remember when NVIDIA and AMD used to compete for who could give us better value? Now they're joining forces in a sacred pact to empty our wallets with overpriced 8GB GPUs. It's like watching two ancient enemies realize they can make more money as a cartel than actually competing. The budget gamer sits in the corner, crying into their 5-year-old graphics card that's somehow worth more now than when they bought it.