Society If GPUs And CPUs Were Priced Based On Performance

Ah yes, the classic "I built a computer but have no way to install an OS" problem. That moment when your engineering prowess meets its match in the form of a USB adapter chain that looks like it came straight from a hardware hacker's fever dream. Nothing says "I'm a professional" quite like downloading Windows through a phone connected to a flash drive via what appears to be three different adapter technologies stacked together like some sort of cursed tech sandwich. The modern equivalent of using stone tools to build a spaceship.

The classic teenage PC build saga. Kid discovers PC Part Picker, immediately sorts by "Price: High-Low," and suddenly has a 2000W beast that could probably mine Bitcoin and heat a small village simultaneously. Meanwhile, their poor parents' credit card is somewhere crying in a corner. We've all been there – dreaming of hardware we absolutely don't need but desperately want. That PC isn't running Minecraft any better than a $800 build, but try telling that to a 13-year-old who just discovered what "enthusiast-grade" means.

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.

Behold the ULTIMATE networking protocol fantasy! Child asks for a dragon, Santa says "be realistic." Then the kid asks for an MSRP 5090 router (which doesn't exist yet) and SUDDENLY Santa's like "what color dragon do you want?" 💀 Getting your hands on next-gen networking equipment is apparently HARDER THAN ACQUIRING A MYTHICAL FIRE-BREATHING BEAST! The absolute state of tech supply chains has Santa reaching for his magical dragon-summoning powers instead of dealing with backorders and scalpers!

Remember when games fit on a 1.44MB floppy? Now Call of Duty is like that friend who keeps saying "just one more beer" but shows up to your house with a U-Haul full of storage requirements. At 105GB, SpongeBob thinks the madness has peaked, but Patrick knows better - slapping us with a 300GB reality check. Your SSD isn't crying, it's having a full-on existential crisis. And game developers are just sitting there like "What? It's just 4K textures of the same gun from 37 slightly different angles."

The bravado of developers who claim they "fear no API" only to cower in terror at the sight of Vulkan is just *chef's kiss*. For the uninitiated, Vulkan is the low-level graphics API that makes even seasoned graphics programmers wake up in cold sweats. It's like saying "I'm great at assembling IKEA furniture" and then being handed the blueprints to build the actual IKEA store from scratch. The documentation alone is thicker than a computer science textbook, and the error messages might as well be written in ancient Sumerian. Meanwhile, OpenGL (referenced in the title) is like the friendly neighborhood graphics API that suddenly looks like a cuddly kitten in comparison.