Outdated GPU Purgatory: The Window Licker's Lament

Remember when we had to optimize code to run on 2MB of RAM? Now we're out here with 16GB machines running Electron apps that somehow still manage to lag. The PS5 and Xbox Series X sitting smugly next to our gaming rigs while ancient consoles like the SNES and original PlayStation got by with kilobytes. Those old-school devs were literal wizards—squeezing Doom into memory smaller than a modern email attachment. Meanwhile, I'm over here watching Chrome devour RAM like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet.

This meme is a hilarious play on words with "OnlyLAN" (a parody of OnlyFans) where someone is holding up an Ethernet cable in front of a hotel building like they're connecting to it. For the networking nerds out there, this is peak humor! Instead of subscribing to content creators online, this person is making a "physical connection" to the building - literally plugging in via LAN (Local Area Network) instead of using WiFi. It's that classic IT joke format: "I don't need cloud services, I prefer my connections to be physical and direct!" The visual gag of holding up an Ethernet cable to a distant building perfectly captures that "I'm technically connected" energy that network engineers live for. The "toyoko-inn" hotel chain visible in the image makes it even funnier - like you're paying for premium access to this specific hotel's network. Exclusive content indeed! 😂

The CPU is making you an offer you can't refuse, mafia-style. It demands 32x more computational resources to give you a measly 1.7x speed boost in return. This is the classic multithreading paradox - throwing massive parallelism at a problem only to get diminishing returns because some tasks just don't scale linearly. It's like hiring 32 people to dig a hole when only 2 can fit in the space. The rest just stand around drinking coffee and collecting paychecks. The purple lighting really sets the mood for this computational extortion. Your CPU is basically saying "Nice application you got there... would be a shame if something happened to its performance."

The GPU shortage has driven us to new lows. Someone thought they scored an RTX 2080 graphics card for under $10, but ended up with... toothpaste. The "Power Shield" is protecting your teeth, not your frame rates. At least your breath will render in 4K while you're sobbing over crypto miners buying actual GPUs at 300% markup. The only ray tracing this provides is the trail of mint as you spit it into the sink.

Previous generation at 23: "Let's buy a house and plan for our growing family!" Developers at 33: "If I save $100 a month, I might afford that GPU that'll be obsolete before I finish typing this sentence." Nothing says "I've made it" quite like calculating how many Cup Noodles you need to skip to afford hardware that'll run your poorly optimized code slightly faster. Financial planning at its finest!

Ah yes, the dark ages of computing. Before FORTRAN showed up in 1956, programmers were just keyboard warriors in the most literal sense - manually toggling 0s and 1s like prehistoric savages. Nothing says "I'm having a productive day at work" like frantically flipping physical switches for eight hours straight while your coworkers wonder if you're having a seizure or actually programming something. The best part? Debugging meant checking if your finger slipped on switch #4,271. Good times.