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Cake day: January 20th, 2026

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  • Unrelated to the topic of the article, looking at the graph made me realize that GPUs didn’t use to be so expensive, and the change is not so recent.
    I have been gaming on PCs since I was a kid, first on a 286 in DOS. I don’t remember what were the first games, but I think it was ASCII graphics. Sprites were of course even better.

    https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2255336-prehistorik-dos-level-1-begins.png

    I have been building my own computers for decades. I never wanted to spend more than necessary, so I only updated things every now and then, and I always picked a good value GPU from the budget to mid tier. I always understood that PC gaming has a niche where people build monster configurations with powerful GPUs to run games at max settings with unnecessary high resolution and frame rates. It makes sense for a hobby, it’s cool. But you don’t actually need that much power to enjoy games, right?

    What I just realized is that the slice of people who look for high performance GPUs for games is likely much bigger than I thought. At some point the industry made consumers believe that you need 4k and 120 fps (or maybe more). That the point of PC gaming is to beat the specs of consoles. But that’s so not true. A PC is great because it’s a general purpose open platform to run whatever software you want. If a game is not fun at mid setting full HD 30 fps, it’s not fun. How many of the people dishing out north of $300 on a GPU are competitive e sports players or popular streamers? Probably most of them are not. 90% of the progress in GPU hardware is likely spent on generating frames that are not perceived at resolutions that are not seen.




  • There exists multiple types of people who upload pirated stuff. One of these types is the person who, instead of getting a day job, makes a living on selling content that they don’t own. I don’t know what to call that person other than a criminal. And it’s not too far fetched to assume that some people in that scene resort to pretty nasty techniques to obtain content, and that can be way more problematic than sharing torrents.


  • I love piracy as much as anyone, but I got to be honest, I am a bit irked by how much of a hardon you have for the amazing people who develop these beautiful tools in their free time driven by nothing else just an outbursting of love from their hearths. In reality, while I am sure there are innocent enthusiasts, many of the people who run private trackers, usenet servers, and I’m assuming are developing client architecture, are basically criminals who make a living off stealing protected IP and selling it to people who prefer a subscription for a tracker or server over a streaming service or over purchasing audiobooks, games, or porn directly from publishers. The arr stack is the infrastructure for hosting industrial scale streaming services using pirated content. So that’s part of the reason why the free piracy software is good. There is a very real paying market for it.