Send Help: The Existential Crisis Of Expensive Hardware

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.

Nobody in the history of programming has ever chosen an endianness based on performance. But choosing big endian because it "looks pretty" in a hex editor? That's the kind of arbitrary decision that haunts codebases for decades. Some dev probably made this call back in 2003 and now there's an entire team maintaining compatibility layers for it. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how bytes are ordered in memory. Little endian (0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04) reads as 0x04030201, while big endian reads naturally as 0x01020304. Absolutely nobody cares until you need to transfer data between systems, then suddenly everyone cares very much .

So Microsoft brags about 30% of their code being AI-generated, then pushes an update that kills your SSD. Coincidence? I think not. This is what happens when you let GitHub Copilot write your disk I/O routines. Next update will probably require a blood sacrifice and your firstborn child just to boot up. Remember when updates just fixed things instead of creating exciting new problems? Those were the days...

The moment you realize RAM prices have gotten so ridiculous that you're genuinely considering whether Mr. Whiskers is worth more as a companion or as a down payment on that 64GB upgrade. Chrome's got 47 tabs open, Docker's eating memory like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, and your IDE is basically running a small country's worth of processes. The cat's looking at you with those big eyes, but you're looking at him calculating his resale value in DDR5 sticks. We've all been there—well, maybe not the cat-selling part, but definitely that internal debate where you're pricing out RAM upgrades versus literally anything else in your life. Priorities, right?

Oh look, it's a CPU from AMD checking if your code is actually alive! Just like in Squid Game, where contestants had to survive deadly challenges, your programs are constantly being judged on whether they deserve to keep running or get brutally terminated by the OS. That horrified expression is exactly what happens when you realize your beautiful algorithm that worked perfectly in development is now deadlocked in production. The CPU is just sitting there like "Yeah, I'm gonna need you to respond in the next 0.5ms or I'm sending a SIGKILL your way." Spoiler alert: Your thread doesn't make it to the next round.

Oh sweet merciful motherboard! PC gamers will literally drop $1000 on a fancy graphics card with RGB lighting that looks like a spaceship had a baby with a disco ball, but HEAVEN FORBID they spend $450 on a Nintendo Switch! The audacity! The hypocrisy! It's like watching someone complain about the price of a hamburger while ordering a $15 cocktail. "But my frames per second!" they cry, as they remortgage their house for the latest GPU that will be obsolete faster than you can say "ray tracing."