The RAM Aristocracy

The massive tower labeled "ALL MODERN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE" vs. the tiny rectangle labeled "AI" pretty much sums up the current state of tech hype. Billions in VC funding for what's essentially a fancy pattern matcher running on infrastructure built over decades. Yet somehow AI is going to replace us all by Tuesday. Sure thing, buddy. I'll start worrying when it can configure a printer without having an existential crisis.

Self-hosting enthusiasts watching cloud providers rain down their "enshittification" on the masses. Meanwhile, Arduino—the beloved open-source hardware platform that powered countless DIY projects—just updated their ToS to prohibit reverse engineering. You know, the exact thing their entire ecosystem was built on. Nothing says "we're getting acquired by a massive corporation" quite like suddenly caring about IP protection after years of encouraging hackers to tinker with your stuff. Qualcomm's lawyers must've had a field day drafting that one. The self-hosted crowd is sitting pretty smug right now, and honestly? Can't blame them. When your Arduino board starts requiring a subscription service, at least you'll know where to find them—in their basement server room, running everything on a Raspberry Pi.

Ah yes, the duality of tech compensation. Six-figure salary, sleeps on cardboard. The fancy ergonomic chair and RGB gaming PC suggest this dev can afford nice things... just not silly luxuries like "beds" or "plastered walls." Priorities straight as a binary digit. All money goes to the battlestation while living in what appears to be an abandoned storage closet. The true programmer lifestyle - where your computer has better living conditions than you do.

The RGB gaming peripheral struggle is real. After kicking out all the flashy rainbow keyboards, chairs, and monitors, Mr. Krabs keeps just the plain black mouse. Because when your setup looks like a unicorn threw up on it, sometimes all you want is that one piece of hardware that doesn't blind you at 2AM while you're debugging production code. The mouse – the only adult in the room of gaming peripherals.

Steam announces "PC 2" and gamers everywhere are SLEEPING through the announcement... until they mention 8GB VRAM and suddenly everyone's eyes bulge out of their skulls! 💀 8GB of video memory in 2023?! Are we building a gaming PC or a CALCULATOR?! Modern games are out here demanding 12GB minimum while Steam's over here acting like they invented fire with their pathetic offering. The audacity! The betrayal! The sheer MEDIOCRITY of it all! For the price they're probably charging, you'd expect at least enough VRAM to render more than two blades of grass without catching fire. But I guess we're supposed to be grateful for technology that was cutting-edge... five years ago. 🙄

Oh great, now I can disappoint my manager while checking the time! Someone actually got VS Code running on an Apple Watch, which is both impressive and completely unnecessary—like implementing blockchain in a todo app. Sure, the screen is tiny, the keyboard non-existent, and you'll develop carpal tunnel in your neck from squinting, but hey—you can technically say "I'm coding" while pretending to check if it's time for lunch yet. The saddest part? Some startup is definitely adding "Apple Watch compatible" to their job requirements as we speak.