The GPU Hunger Games

Remember when converting a WAV to MP3 required summoning the digital gods with seventeen different programs, three system crashes, and a blood sacrifice to LimeWire? That chaotic mess of hardware isn't NASA mission control—it's just what it took to compress "My Chemical Romance" into something that could fit on your 128MB MP3 player. The best part? After 4 hours of work, the file would inevitably corrupt halfway through the song. But hey, at least you learned enough terminal commands to qualify as a junior sysadmin.

Congratulations! You've just witnessed a technological funeral without even sending flowers. Remember when we'd spend hours burning installation CDs, driver discs, and backup DVDs? Now we just click "download" and forget physical media exists. That beige CD drive is basically a museum piece now—like finding a dinosaur fossil in your desk drawer. The silent tragedy is that some poor Verbatim disc factory worker probably shed a tear the day cloud storage took over and nobody noticed. Pour one out for those 700MB circular heroes that got us through the pre-broadband dark ages.

Remember when game devs were literal coding demigods who could squeeze a full RollerCoaster Tycoon into Assembly language and fit shooters into kilobytes? Now we've got bearded dudes stealing breast milk while shipping 500GB games that still need a "day one patch" bigger than entire operating systems from the 90s. Modern AAA game development has truly evolved from "how can we optimize this to run on a potato?" to "just buy a new PC, peasant." And don't forget the always-online single player games because heaven forbid you enjoy content you paid for without a constant internet connection. The industry went from "first few levels free as shareware" to "that'll be $70 plus $20 for the season pass, $15 for the cosmetic DLC, and $10 for the soundtrack we removed from the base game."

Ah yes, the classic "let's use the example key from the documentation" approach to security. Like putting "1234" as your bank PIN because it was the example in the manual. AMD apparently used a test cryptographic key from a NIST publication in actual Zen CPUs for years. The stunned ellipses and "I have no words" perfectly capture that special moment when you discover someone's treated a security example as production-ready code. It's the security equivalent of finding out your nuclear launch codes are "password123".

Remember when we thought these janky polygons were the peak of technology? In 2000, we'd sit there amazed at what was essentially a potato with hair clipping through a horse's neck. Now I'm disappointed when my 4K ray-traced game drops below 120fps. The best part? Those old games actually shipped without needing 50GB day-one patches. They just worked... mostly... if you ignored the nightmare fuel character models.

When the hotel advertises "high-speed internet" but you show up and it's just two ethernet cables you need to physically connect between buildings. Sure, technically it's a "direct connection" with "no router bottlenecks." Next they'll tell me their cloud service is just a USB stick taped to a weather balloon.