The CHIPS (etc) Act was enough to justify his presidency by itself, IMO. It was insane that such a huge percentage of the world's semiconductor research and production were concentrated in one country, especially a small one that China has been eyeing like a feral cat for years.

I know, right?

I chuckle with smug superiority as I hit "add comment" on one of my several Samsung devices

I use MakeMKV and an Asus BW-16D1HT in an external enclosure. Run into very few disks that I have trouble ripping, but eventually an update comes out and solves it. Or cleaning the disc and trying again, cleaning again and retrying, on and on until it works.

At 80+Gb that means it's a straight blu-ray rip without being recompressed at all, which is perfect if you have a nice home theater system. You definitely notice the difference then. But if you're just watching on an average monitor with headphones or such, then you're honestly better off finding a smaller version that someone properly compressed down a bit.

AI is much more taxing than gaming. Machine learning will peg a gpu at a flat 100% constant use, while gaming fluctuates up and down depending on what's going on on screen. So being more power efficient while running a card at 100% 24/7 saves money on power costs, and corporations love saving money.

They're not that different, really. CUDA processing cores are the most used in AI training, and those are the main processors used in both Nvidia's consumer desktop cards and machine learning enterprise cards. As "AI" is on the rise, more and more of the supply of CUDA processors and VRAM chips will be diverted to enterprise solutions that will fetch a higher price from deals with corporations. Meaning there will be less materials available for the consumer-level GPU supply, which will drive prices up for normal consumers. NVIDIA has been banking on this for a long time; that's why they don't care about overpricing the consumer market and have been trying to push people towards cloud-based GeForce Now subscription models where you don't even own the hardware and just basically rent the processing power to play games.

Also just to be anal, the 3090 and 4090 have 24Gb of vram, not 32Gb. And unlike gaming nowadays you can distribute the workload to multiple GPU's in one system, or over a network of machines.

John Cho was solid, the writing was terrible and tried too hard to make it have light hearted jokes, a la Marvel. Like the "Shower bath shower" scene was out of character for both Spike and Faye and didn't land under the circumstances.

Yes, nearly 71% globally.

Apple is the biggest really only in North America.

I have an IQ2 and IQC and I'd say they're great vapes. The really nice thing with them is their dosage pods, the stainless steel ones are only 0.3g capacity (ceramics are 0.2g and don't heat as nicely, in my experience) but you get 6 in a pack to load up. And the grinder they sell to load the pods is fantastic. You can easily do a sesh, let the unit cool down for like 10 minutes, pop in a fresh pod and maybe battery if needed, and go again. Great system, you just gotta look around for coupons to get the price down.

I've been using a DaVinci IQ2 for a while and really like it. I'm a pretty light user, I just vape one time a day an hour or two before going to bed, gives me some time to relax and helps me fall asleep. Anyways, the thing I like about the IQ2 the most is their stainless dosage pods. They only hold like 0.3g but that's enough for a vape session. And they have an ingenious grinder that you easily pack a 6-pack of pods super easy, and a storage holder for them that's pretty nice and helps with smell. It makes it so easy to prep for a few sessions and minimizes cleanup by quite a lot. And with their app you can set up your vape and even put in your strain info to track THC consumption, if that's something you want to do. Downside is their ecosystem is pretty pricey, but they have been including their pods or a grinder lately.

Overall if you're not a heavy smoker DaVinci makes some really good stuff. It gets pretty hot so I'd recommend getting their silicone glove and giving it some time to cool off between sessions. Gotta look around for coupons, though. MSRP is like $299 for the IQ2, but I think I got mine around $230. IQC is a bit cheaper, I have one as a backup just in case, really just the mouthpiece and some app functionality are what you're giving up. Plus the IQ2 has a 10 year warranty and thr IQC I think it's like 3 or 5 years.

Drop has kinda gone to shit anyways. Though I have gotten some good headphones off them. But I ordered a set of wood IEM's back in January. Got and update like a month later that the supply chain got messed up, will ship in June. Current order status is "Reserved for shipment. Estimated ship date: July 10". So like a week ago. And all the emails from them lately have been

"Check out these amazing keycaps!11!1!"

"Hey look, we got more keycaps!!!!"

"Limited time only super-special keycaps!"

"Hey, you looking for some keycaps?!"

It's not what it used to be, just like everything else on the internet.

Cpu is a ryzen 2600, it doesn't have an iGPU.

MakeMKV (at least in windows) lets you rip a remuxed mkv without having to rip everything. So you can just select the titles, audio, and subtitle tracks you want without ripping all the other stuff. You don't need to make a full backup and then pull all that out.

Hitting the kbin logo takes you back to your feed, instead of having to click it and then go over and click the Home button. That's a huge plus, IMO.

This actually pushed me and a couple of friends to subscribe to Nord; I'd been thinking I should get a VPN for a while anyways. I looked through VPN's and I ended up liking Nord's feature set and price vs ExpressVPN. Never thought I'd use them back when they were EVERY video's sponsor on YouTube lol.

Well by all reports they did a shitty job, so....

With all respects, this is a kbin. Please address us as kbinians.

I game at 3440x1440 ultrawide, and upgraded from a 3090 to 4090. 4090 is significantly faster and smoother. And DLSS3 frame interpolation is no joke- in Hogwarts Legacy with every setting cranked up and max ray tracing, turning on DLSS3 jumped me from around 80fps with noticeable 1% low stutters and now pegs it at the 144fps limiter I set in game. Smooth as butter.

Also I mess around with some AI things like stable diffusion, and it's much faster for that as well. As much as I hate the term "future proof", the 4090 is more worth it in that regards, IMO.

Microsoft's Gamepass gives you a discounted price on games, so if you see that something is going to fall out of their subscription catalog you can purchase it for less. It's only like 20% off but it's nice that they offer it.

Dark Helmet above them all, as it should be.