Thank goodness, now I can defend my home against tyranny and people who look different than me with a pseudo-machine gun, just the way the Founding Fathers intended! (/s just in case)

worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.

I would probably still brew decaf coffee to go with them for the taste and smell.

Also don't hack me plz

We're having a pretty nasty thunderstorm right now and it barely misses a beat. I swear I'm not a musk shill lol, I just remember 3G hotspots and how much worse this would have been.

Unfortunately, for me the spot where the signal is strong is ~250 feet up on top of a mountain. We had a cell booster that worked great on 3G but I'm not real keen on spending another $150 on a new repeater that may or may not pick up a signal from our roof. Another fun aspect of being out in the country is that I'm living in a converted pole barn which has a metal "skin" with double layer mylar foil/foam insulation that makes it quite difficult for signals to get inside. There's no mesh so it's not a full Faraday cage but it creates a lot of attenuation.

I really miss t-mob from living in northern virginia. I'm up in the Appalachian mountains tucked between two peaks. There was a plan at one time to utilize the old 800mhz band for some sort of municipal internet (since 800mhz can either punch through the rock or "ride" along the earth, been too long since RF school to remember). But as far as I know nothing ever came of it.

The AT&T hotspot is actually data capped, higher ping, and quite slow since we only have HSPA+ (4G) way out here. We used a hotspot while we were on the wait list for Starlink and just knowing there was a data cap made it pretty unpleasant to use. I should have specified that in the original post.

aesthetics, i would guess. everyone has different tastes.

Unfortunately we only get AT&T and maybe a whiff of T-Mobile once in a blue moon. Gotta go a few miles into town to get reliable service, especially if you want 5G. Thanks though.

I'm super jealous. I'm out here in Western Maryland and I'd be happy to see us get plain old telephone service.

I'm wondering if it's something with the mobile plan? I only have the fixed address plan and I've never seen a data cap. Hell, I run my homelab off of it with Plex and shit. They seem to be pretty chill but I'm do make sure to throttle my upload to be polite.

I'm one of those people for who Starlink very much is the only option. I moved from Northern Virginia to Western Maryland. This land used to be state park and all it has is electricity and mail delivery. No water, no sewage, no telephone, no internet other than cell hotspot or Starlink. It sucks but I have to try and separate my distaste for Musk with the engineers and people who actually run Starlink day to day, because at the end of the day the service is pretty damn good. The only issue I have (besides the price) is with VoIP traffic; but SIP acts fucky even with Cat5/6 sometimes so idk. I looked up the current policy and at least in the US they do not have a soft data cap. They did when the service initially launched AFAIK but that's been replaced with a more general "network management" policy (throttling, etc) . https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90?regionCode=US

I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulent word.

Caveat: I am not a programmer, just an enthusiast. Windows programs typically package all of the dependency libraries up with each individual program in the form of DLLs (dynamic link library). If two programs both require the same dependency they just both have a local copy in their directory.

oh shit you may be right lol

An 1/8th to a quarter of weed, a cake, AND a new shirt? lucky man

I can (anecdotally) confirm the overclocking sensitivity. Although it seems to be more that this game just REALLY pushes hardware if you let it which is naturally gonna draw out overclocking instabilities.

i can't find the article for the life of me but i read an interview with a dev who basically said that the UE5 engine is fine unless you try to crank all of the visual bells and whistles on at the same time. Now imagine being a dev team trying to convince marketing not to use all of the features they paid for? Can we blame Epic and Nvidia?

This was my first thought too lmao. "How considerate of them to recreate the experience of not being able to play it smoothly until half a decade after it comes out"