2023-09-11

One of the ways you know you are getting old is when you see the
state-of-the-art desktop PC technology and ask the question "why
would you need all that?"

that's a bonafide sign you are too old. I hit that point a few
years ago but I was reminded of it again when I saw a younger family
member's workstation.

His workstation was an AMD threadripper based workstation with 32
cores and 64 threads. I literally couldn't understand why anyone
needed that....but then again I guess I'm getting old.

It honestly took me back nearly 25 years ago when 'I' was the guy
that needed the compute power and just couldn't get enough. Hell
I was one of the few people that even bothered with what we old
timers called SMP...aka running 2 CPUs in a computer. I built a
dual 450MHz Pentium 2 in college just so I could encode DVDs faster.

So I definitely understood at one point the need for speed...but
64 threads in a desktop computer? sheesh.

I don't even watch videos in 4K and I haven't played a triple-A
video game in 10 years. Plus my main driver is a 12 year old laptop
and I'm here phlogging on gopher for pete's sake.

ah well. one thing I like about unix culture and the wider
retro-computing culture is the attitude of making do with what you
have. Instead of just trying to buy your way out of things, just
try to find alternative software or workflows to do the things you
need to do.

of course one final funny note about my family's beastly machine.
I notice that even though he's got a 64 threads, he still uses VIM,
irssi, and mutt just like everyone else on Linux no matter how
humble their computer is.

so if you're rocking an old linux computer...you're doing just fine
;-P