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The PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.

My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.

This is exactly why my comment goes over the head of people who cry just get the basic boards. No, this is why the basic boards for $100 don't cut it. You now need to dive into the technical data and realize that the $100 board seems like a deal for a reason, and suddenly the $300+ category is your only option if you want to get a PC that doesn't run on fake specs.

I'm just struggling to figure out how many people actually need the PCIe lanes for anything more than GPUs and storage, though.

Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to?

The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O.

If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.


They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.

Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots.

I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.


I think the biggest aspect is that there’s so little demand for the configuration that you’re looking for.

Most people only need the PCI lanes for graphics cards and storage. There aren’t many other internally installed devices out there that actually need that kind of bandwidth, and a lot of those use cases are already covered by alternatives like Ethernet or USB, or they’re already on your board (m.2 slots, fast Ethernet ports).

The 6x16 slots with 1.0x1 bandwidth are there so that people can plug in stuff like sound cards and other random stuff that generally has pretty light bandwidth needs.

If I just search for “PCIe card” on Newegg most of the resulting products max out at x4, and most of the ones that do are already on the board (m.2 cards, additional USB/Thunderbolt).

The one use case that seemed useful and unusual in my search results was a quad port HD video capture card which seemed to require x4 bandwidth.

If you had a scenario like you describe where there isn’t a single x16 slot, you’ve instantly annoyed 95% of the market that needs that full bandwidth for a GPU, whether it be for gaming or for professional applications.

Some solutions that avoid expensive workstation boards and CPUs include getting a higher end chipset to get gaming boards that come with 2x x16 slots, or you can use accessories and adapters that just plug into m.2 slots.


That is precisely the problem, you look at the inflation and compare it to what you payed 5,10,20 years ago and your either getting less or paying more than that inflation. Average price inflation of a big mac in the US for the past 25 years is 4% versus average CPI inflation of 2.29%. So instead of increasing in price by 65% it increased 166%.

> Average price inflation of a big mac in the US for the past 25 years is 4% versus average CPI inflation of 2.29%. So instead of increasing in price by 65% it increased 166%.

Because a big mac isn't a TV or smartphone. It doesn't get those juicy negative adjusted inflation values applied to it because of "more features". CPI for ground beef is ~4% YoY. Processed cheese? 4%. I don't doubt some of it is price raises just because they can, but let's not just compare two difference averages as if they represent the same thing.


A burger at any restaurant today costs $15. The quarter pounder at McDonald's is $5.50. You get to sit and eat in both restaurants. McDonald's is 3x cheaper... complaining that it's not 4x cheaper is first world problems

Yes and if you live in the first world you want to fix the problems with the first world... You're looking around and saying McDonald's is cheaper than everywhere else why are we talking about it, others are looking at it and saying why is the cheaper option so much more expensive than it used to be.

Personally I'm pissed at both. A large jump in requirements without warning is bad, if I want to avoid it I now need to take immediate less considered actions or get stuck with the consequences. Plenty of decent software actually lets you decide what plugins to install for added functionality, chrome actually has a extensions store that they could have put this crap in.

Yes it's also that it's AI and mostly that chrome is foisting off all the cost of that AI model to me and other users. Without warning and explaining what this model is, is my workplaces power cost going to be up 10% because of whatever they want to run it for? Who knows.

There'd be a lot less complaining if they'd actually warned and less still if they asked.


I'm picturing a splash screen announcing the feature(s) it enables, with a Download button

No he was saying he doesn't care that creating a backdoor for encryption means anyone can use that backdoor and that you must both follow the law by being secure but also follow the law by being insecure. People arguing that that creating encryption that both did and didn't have a backdoor was impossible got that little gem in return.

The people doing the lending can still make a profit. They get their interest payments and have a secured debt against the company. I.e. If interest and repayments until time of bankruptcy + liquidation of assets at bankruptcy is more than you'd get investing elsewhere at lower risk it's still a good investment. It's the other stakeholders (employees/community/unsecured debtors) that lose out.

The employees and the community are irrelevant in our society. The owner of capital decides what to do with that capital. You don't get a vote.

Assuming it can't super hack all computer systems and cripple competing SI incubation to at least increase its lead time indefinetly.

The assumption would be that in the lead time it has the super intelligence at least takes a small lead and undermines any paths a later arriving super intelligence could take to interfere with it's goals, which naturally includes stopping competing SIs from becoming more powerful in a way that could undermine it.

So assuming the super intelligence has goals and work towards them it will be initially trying to solidify its own power, iterating on that small lead, assuming it's the smartest super intelligence[1], should be enough to win. The scary part is that assuming no guardrails [2] it's going to be as ruthless as possible in achieving those goals. That does not necessarily mean it will appear ruthless in achieving those goals, just as ruthless as it judges optimal.

1. Which being so smart one of it's chores would have been reinvestment in making itself smarter than competition and being smarter than its makers has a good chance of actuating those self-improvements.

2. In the internal balancing of goals sense not the don't feed the mogwai after midnight sense.


You're looking at that pre-covid time with rose tinted glasses. Half the reason sites like reddit or twitter offered free/open APIs was to ensure that the bots were being as efficient as possible rather than hammering the sites (The other half was altruistic but that good will is a very small line item to an MBA). Scrappers got so much better at just going to what's presented to humans because these kinds of APIs are no longer common so they had to. So now the lazy option is to no longer check if a site offers an API, rather than to check if it did and save time / not worry about maintenance by coding for an API.

Yeah but the situation used to be you don't need to jump through flaming hoops on android and you do need to jump through flaming hoops on ios for installing. Now it's you have to jump through X flaming hoops on android and X+Y on ios for installing. If I'm not going to jump through flaming hoops then I'm not installing so it doesn't matter what Y is in the equation and I'm not taking into account installing when comparing those devices, which mean ios might be a better proposition.

Alternatively if the difficulty of moving from 0->X is not negligible but moving from X->X+Y is then I may still be installing but I'm not considering the Y in the comparison then either. i.e. If I have to show my id to google once and apple twice it's the initial showing that is the turn off, or if it's the action of getting my credit card out in the 1st place rather than the cost difference that concerns me.


My understanding was that it was more that words can be concatenated into new words in German which is not so much a stereotype as more a misunderstanding of fact. I.e. You wouldn't think much about something like enjoyable-comuppence but schadenfreude looks more impressive without the hyphen.

I would argue it's not the exact same thing. Sure, when overdone then you would get the same. But the way it is, commonly used concatenated words are words, not just hyphenated words. They are used as words and without an extra though people don't parse them into separate parts, unlike they do with a list of words with hyphens.

E.g. you don't think of firefighter as fire-fighter in ordinary usage.


Even assuming your incorrect framing of immigration as a privilege (You may as well say parents give their kids the privilege of going to play with their friends so grounding is not a punishment) consider the following.

It would be a privilege for me to give you a parachute for free. If you jump out of a plane with that privileged parachute, then it turns out to be a backpack with a sheet in it, what are your thoughts? Now you may not necessarily feel the word punishment fits in me giving you a backpack instead of a parachute, but you do see that I'd be the one in the wrong in that situation and that you are considerably worse off than before? I could wax lyrical about how thousands of people are in the air above the ground every day while jumping about, it doesn't change the fact that your position 3000ft in the air is a lot worse than those 2ft of the ground if you don't have the privilege of a free parachute you thought you had.


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