Society If GPUs And CPUs Were Priced Based On Performance

Remember when buying a GPU was just an expense and not a second mortgage? In 2009, dropping $500 on a graphics card felt like a splurge. Fast forward to 2025, and you're staring at a $4,799 price tag with the same horrified expression as someone who just found out their entire codebase has no comments. Thanks crypto miners, AI enthusiasts, and whatever unholy alliance of market forces conspired to make rendering pixels cost more than my first car. At this rate, we'll soon be trading organs for ray tracing capabilities.

The duality of dev life on full display. Top: Linus Torvalds, who revolutionized computing with a simple standing desk, basic setup, and pure genius. Bottom: Your average YouTube "coding expert" with a NASA mission control center who can barely center a div. Proof that RGB lighting is inversely proportional to actual programming skills. The universe's most reliable metric: the more humble the setup, the more terrifying the code.

When your SSD dies and you're forced to boot from USB, time suddenly becomes a theoretical concept. What used to take seconds now requires a coffee break, bathroom visit, and existential crisis. The monkey meme perfectly captures that moment of self-realization when you're complaining about your "slow" SSD but then remember you're currently running your entire OS off what's essentially a digital popsicle stick held together with hopes and prayers. Nothing makes you appreciate modern storage speeds quite like watching your cursor transform into a sundial.

The high-refresh-rate rabbit hole claims another victim. Once you've experienced the buttery smoothness of 144 FPS gaming, your standards get completely warped. Suddenly 60 FPS—which used to be the gold standard we all dreamed about—feels like watching a PowerPoint presentation. Your GPU is crying, your electricity bill is skyrocketing, but you refuse to compromise because "I just don't think at this age I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life." The gaming equivalent of refusing to drink anything but top-shelf liquor after that one time you splurged.

OH. MY. GOD. It's the Boston GPU Party! 💀 Instead of dumping tea into the harbor, these revolutionary programmers are HURLING GRAPHICS CARDS into the water! "No taxation without ray tracing!" they scream while tossing perfectly good NVIDIA GPUs overboard. The absolute DRAMA of it all! Can you IMAGINE wasting thousands of dollars worth of computing power just because of tariffs? The colonial gamers and machine learning engineers must be DEVASTATED watching their 4090s sink to the bottom of Boston Harbor. This is what happens when you mess with a developer's hardware budget, people! The revolution will NOT be rendered at low settings! 🔥

The ultimate DIY server solution: slap a threatening note on a laptop and call it enterprise-grade infrastructure. That poor laptop has been conscripted into 24/7 service against its will, now living in perpetual fear someone might actually try to use it as... a laptop. This is the tech equivalent of putting a "BEWARE OF DOG" sign on a fence when you actually own a hamster. Welcome to homelab economics: where repurposing old hardware as servers saves you money but costs your family their sanity when everything crashes because someone closed the sacred lid.