majestic

Negotiations for our new collective agreement are done. This one was pretty good, a 7% salary increase across the board, a 600€ one time payment, a 3.2% increase in overtime payment and the best part - a much needed work time reduction. Decent deal, all in all, particularily for me. Granted, I guess some workers are going to be unhappy with the so called "10% package" as the reduction in work time amounts to roughly 3% less work time for the same amount of money, but for me, as someone who is paid well above the collective agreement wage, well... a 7% increase on the amount isn't much, but I negotiated for a separate increase. So, all in all, pretty good. Funny to see the companies insist on the work time reduction in the face of our lobbyist-friendly government telling us that a general work time reduction is impossible. Yeah, we're really living in the end-times when even the lobbies lose touch with the wishes of their clientel.

Star Trek Picard, season three, finale. Not going to lie, there were some very, very enjoyable scenes in this episode, the problem is, they have absolutely nothing to do with the guano-insane plot or the "awesome" action in this episode, and everything with plucking the old nostalgia-afflicted heartstrings in just the right way. It was a good way to end the season and the series on a high note for former fans, but it leaves a rather bitter aftertaste insofar as it then feels like wool, pulled over the watcher's weary eyes. It almost makes one forget the torture this episode by far and large was. At this point I am convinced that the CIA has substituted waterboarding as torture method of choice by breaking people through nuTrek. Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman run the 21st century version of MK ULTRA. However, at the end, I can say one thing: I would gladly watch a Star Trek series with Seven of Nine as the captain of the Enterprise, provided the people from Paramount prostrate themselves before Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr and beg them to run it. Alas, as that is never really going to happen, well, I am looking forward to the final season of Discovery, if only to dance on the grave of that horrible TV/streaming travesty, and to the next season of Strange New Worlds, where we hopefully get an answer to the question whether Ensign La'an Noonien-Singh is coming back or not.

My wife's cousin is driving me crazy. He got arrested some time ago for possession of a large quantity of drugs in Germany, and has recently been sentenced to three years on probation. He is from the Balkan area and his German is decent enough to be told what to work on, but he is ill equipped to read legalese. One of the conditions of probation is that he is to sign up for regular drug testing. He, being the absolute moron that he is, has of course already lost the one part of the document that details precisely what sort of testing he needs to sign up for. He also asked about this on the same day that was basically the deadline to sign up. Man, that idiot will be the first person to fail probation by being too dumb to sign up for a drug test, not for failing it.

The Mandalorian, season three finale: Well, at least that's over and done with, until the next season. In hindsight, this season makes the first one look like great entertainment. Man, what a collection of stinker episodes.

Indeed, yes, it could have been an outlier on both ends, making the comparison somewhat lopsided, but variation within high end components is much less pronounced, so the chance is lower, but it is not impossible that it could have been a really good 13900K and a really bad 7950x, of course. Well that changed for some parts of the world, somewhat recently, although admittedly not everyone gets as fleeced by their energy providers as we Yuro-Peons do right now.

TL;DR: Up to 40% variance in power consumption during gaming on 7600s. Obviously much less on all-core workloads because those run at the power limit anyway, but that is pretty brutal for playing games. Would be interesting to see a larger sample size, but two bad outliers out of 13 tested CPUs, yeah, those aren't the greatest odds. Expected, as these CPUs - just like comparable ones by Intel - are basically whatever couldn't be sold for more, but still 41% difference under a regular gaming load is pretty brutal, especially if you pick one of those lower end Ryzen CPUs specifically because they're much more power efficient than their Intel counterparts*. *Which in reality is not something one can glean from the all-core workload charts anyway. There are significant differences in idle power draw, for instance - if your computer is mostly intended for lightweight activities, i.e. browsing the web, watching a video here and there and do some office work, the better you're off with Intel - not only do you not need the more expensive AM5 platform, but the power draw difference on idle is something between a factor of two and three - also used to be true for idle power draw of Radeon cards compared to nVidia's, but apparently that was fixed in a driver update. Anyway, Intel really shot themselves in the foot with the 13th generation aggressive boosting policy just to 'win' the benchmark charts. Manually playing with the power limits can make 13th gen CPUs perform the same as their AMD counterparts (X3D in games nonwithstanding) for about the same efficiency. There's a German video of Der8auer for this too, but yeah, it is German. If a 13900K is set to eco mode by manually limiting its power limits to 95w, it performs almost identical to a 7950x in eco mode, while both draw, well, 95 watts. Really, efficiency should be the baseline, and getting a bit more speed out of your CPUs for significantly more power draw should be the setting to be done manually Intel, not vice versa. *sigh*

Well, the weak are rabble, and the willful are just uppity and will resist, so both must go. I mean, that is what I guess it means, it just makes no sense either way. Well, but a dying captain also hands the conn to his second in command with his dying breath, basically, it really is whatever at this point. So, whatever. "No one has seen or heard of the Borg in over ten years." -- Picard, two months after more or less creating a new Borg Queen.

Well, Star Trek: Picard went from copying Mass Effect plot points to copying plot points from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica while taking ludicrous dialogue from Pacific Rim. Ah, somehow, as this show stood on the precipice that Mike and Rich mentioned, I hoped that it will not plunge off in a way that rivals the other two seasons, but lo, it did. It did so spectacularily.

Every like five to ten minutes I need to take a break because I just can't. It's... painful. Still not done, 20 minutes into the episode, and I started watching a day ago.

Probably. Even then, no idea why anyone would want to have a pet with two inch fangs and the ability to inject you with enough venom to kill 20 adults that barely moves and is by all means impossible to handle, on the otherh and, there are also people who keep venomous spiders as "pets" - really, there are some things that should just be left to people with professional reasons to have these creatures. The white king cobra from the other video was at least visually impressive. Not so sure what is fun about a Gaboon Viper, except that it is massive. That IS pretty impressive, but for a pet? Yeah, dunno. I prefer cats, I mean, they'd probably murder and eat you too if they could, but they can't...

This channel is hilarious. "I have heard that at expos, kids sometimes walk away with a Gaboon Viper. Why not give them a revolver?" "To make this clear, a rattlesnake is a better idea. Not a good one, but definitely better. Rattlesnake bites you, you show up at the hospital, they'll take care of you. It'll cost you $ 100.000, but they'll take care of you. Gaboon Viper? That'll cost you $ 100.000, an arm or a leg and you might still die."

Ouch. :[

Hot take: If Rings of Power would not have been a dumpster fire, there would be no "hit pieces" on it.

Ah, you were quicker than my edit, thought of a better silly reply and edited it - just apparently not quickly enough. Damn.

High ranking members of Charlemagne's court? Yeah, yeah, I know where the exit is. *leaves*

"Is the King Cobra the best pet snake for you?" "Well... no. It most certainly is not."

Of course, Neil Breen is the best at everything, and that includes showing the audience his ball sack.

Yes, but it is fairly hard to reach for the average person, as retiring right now at the current cap would require someone to have earned over 30 years of 90th+ percentile incomes. Someone who has the necessary income and wants more out of their public retirement plan can supplement with private pension plans, or more likely, at this level of income, direct investments and special company pension plans. There are some exceptions, like government employees having generally better pensions in exchange for fixed income levels and fixed pay raises, i.e. they earn less than regular employees at comparable jobs for better average pensions later. Not that average income levels of government employees are bad compared to average income of employees, as there is not as much need for low wage unskilled labor, and the unskilled labor that does exist is not paid half bad - not in terms of general income, but they do get hazard pay (which then does not count towards their pension, if I recall correctly). Trash collectors and sewage workers earn a pretty penny in exchange for being subjected to health risks all day long.

Well, my current theoretical retirment money is a direct factor of what I paid into the pension plan as it stands right now, in case that was not clear from my post - so obviously that is not going to be a whole lot considering that I have 25 years on the work force left until I am old enough to actually retire. I'm like only a little more than one third through the amount of years I am supposed to pay into the plan before retirement. It also does not factor in my private pension plan and my company's pension plan, although the latter is not going to be much, I only have that because it is tax free (i.e. only a couple hundred bucks per year deducted from my income before tax) and therefore a better use of the money even with the somewhat measly projected return on investment than anything I could reasonably do with it.

Hellpoint, which I got on GOG in a giveaway two years ago. The DLC was on the spring sale for 2.99 €, so I bought that and off I went. Hellpoint is Dark Souls in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE. Well, on a space station. With less interesting and easier boss fights, but better exploration* - although that is subjective. Dark Souls (talking about the first one here) has better combat and equipment variety, and equipment that changes gameplay more than Hellpoint's, which while having similar items to regular action RPG staples like rings or amulets are not particularily interesting, most of them are flat bonuses. That pretty accurately describes everything about the game. I actually liked the game, warts and all, better than the clearly more polished and balanced Dark Souls, primarily because uncovering what the hell is going on was more fun in Hellpoint than in Dark Souls, but let me put a caveat here, I am someone who was disappointed by Dark Souls "story" (you're the chosen one, either go do what the dark snake or the light snake tells you, mmmkay, this is supposed to be incredible? Riiiiiiiight...) after hearing so many people rave about the depth and, uhm, subtle storytelling. Sci-fi worldbuiling is also infinitely more interesting to me than fantasy worldbuilding unless there's something interesting going on. It does have some fun concepts like a part in the DLC where you can set your game to change enemies whenever you kill one. Basically the setting causes all enemies in the game to move to the next NG+ level whenever one dies, making for an incredibly rewarding difficulty ramp that will have even the mookiest mooks one shot you pretty quickly. I survived long enough to realize that at some point the scaling just peters off. The less fun side-effect of this setting is that you'll just break the game really quickly, gathering millions of souls axions in short order. *Keep in mind that exploration rewards the player with a plethora of not really interesting gear, but many, many bits and pieces of lore. If you like the Dark Souls type of exploration that rewards players with potentially gameplay changing items, this is not really a game for you, or at least it will not be the primary motivation to continue. Lore and plot related elements was mine. Just something to keep in mind.

Have fun with your coronary, please let us know if you collapse and die so we don't worry. Discovered that I already worked enough to earn a pension. If I would retire now I'd get a measly third of my current income, but there's a problem: I can only retire after working a certain amount of months to qualify and after reaching at least 65 years of age. I don't think I can fool the government into believing that I am much older than I am. Money would also be a bit tight.

First money I ever earned from a (mandatory, for school) summer job went straight into new hardware. A "Deschutes" P2-400, 256MB RAM and a mainboard. Certainly not the best of times, because I blew most of my allowance savings on a Pentium 200 MMX upgrade just a handful of months earlier, as the Pentium 120 was slowly showing its age. Gotta say the Slot 1 P2s made for the easiest hardware setup ever. Slot CPU in, lock the retention mechanism, put mainboard into any old case, done.

The demo version flat out refused to work with anything other than 3dfx add-in cards, as did the one I, uhm, "acquired" to check if I can play the game. That was a no, so no Final Fantasy VII for me, as I did not have a PS1 at the time. I should really check that game out at some point, although I doubt it will sway my opinion that Final Fantasy VI remains the best of the series. The Riva 128 and Riva TNT 16-bit image quality was famously bad, yes, particularily compared to the popular combination of Matrox 2D cards with a 3dfx add-in card. I had a Riva 128 card for a short while, although not because nVidia claimed it could beat the Voodoo 1, but because I did not buy my own hardware at the time and it is what I got from my parents, and having very little money to spare, well, that is what they went with. Still a damned sight better than the S3 ViRGE card I had before. The TNT was the first informed GPU choice I made for myself (paid out of my allowance), driven by my intense dislike for proprietary limitations. Shortcuts and specialized driver "features" to improve benchmarking performance was not something I considered to be as problematic as Glide. It was also a time when I still had Linux installed for private use, heh, there's a certain irony in nVidia cards being better supported on Linux at the time, although we also of course complained about the drivers not being open source. Kind of funny how that goes, in time, many of the things I tried or did in the past are much easier now, but I have lost all interest. Using Linux is much less of a chore than it used to be in '96, multiplayer is much easier to set up (even on legacy titles with virtual networking software like Hamachi), hardware is much more easy to transport these days, I mean, I used to haul my heavy ass 19" CRT screen and the computer several storeys up to a friend's place every time we had school breaks. If it would be 1996 right now, I would probably not give a damn about Glide, really. Certainly not enough to have spirited discussions with other teenagers about it. Still good for the occasional bout of nostalgia though.

Fun video, but even more fun comment section. People have strange recollections of the time, really, although a handful of comments (at the time of posting) talk about the one really great point of 3dfx later lineup, the hardware antialiasing. That was a pretty neat feature, one not seen since. Boy had we discussions in the classroom back in the day. Playing games in higher resolutions (for the time, which meant above 800x600) was only possible if you had a Riva TNT, or a Voodoo 2 SLI configuration. The Voodo 2 SLI was leaps and bounds ahead in performance, but it also necessitated having three graphics cards. With me being the computer equivalent of a freedom loving hippie at the time, I went with a Riva TNT card primarily because it offered almost (single) Voodoo 2 level performance without resorting to proprietary APIs, and it ran games in 32 bit color, which looked pretty good, but then I also had the hardware to back the card up, as 3dfx add-in cards generally scaled much better with lower end hardware, or cheaper alternatives, like the wonderful AMD K6-2, the absolute bane of my existence and the reason why until this day I will not use AMD hardware in my own builds. To be fair though, nVidia released improved drivers, named Detonator, at a later date that increased performance on lower tier hardware by a whole lot, but at the time, well, it was what it was. A Riva TNT was unlikely to compete with a single Voodoo 2 on any system that was not at a high end level - and even then not fully. As a downside, some games only came with software rendering or glide (or, in the case of the Final Fantasy VII PC port, only worked with 3dfx cards, and nothing else), which was a bit of a letdown - although funnily enough, some 3dfx products of the time were not capable of running the entirety of their own API. Yes, looking at you, Voodoo Rush. That was an unmitigated disaster. Always like strolls down memory lanes. Kind of want to bet that all those 3dfx fanboys in the comments are the same sort of people that complain endlessly about anti-consumer practices by greedy corporations while championing a company that invented trying to drive board partners out of the market and having an unhealthy grip on the market with a proprietary API that eventually was phased out because it hindered innovation and adaptation.