I’m in agreement. I think where our opinions differ is that I’m not worried about consumer electronics in this new economic and political reality. And the reason I’m not worried is that I know it’s fucked.

We will not see the type of economy that we have been used to for quite some time. And if the last democrat admin is anything to consider, then I doubt these insane new regulations will be repealed even if the Republicans lost power in 4 years.

I think there are much greater concerns than consumer electronics and now is the time to plan for them.

I think I might get the point…but I think we are past trying to build budget friendly PCs for gamers wanting to play the latest AAA titles.

As a gamer myself, it’s sad but I’m tightening up my belt and preparing for much worse economic consequences. Like what a 100% tariff on Taiwan made chips will mean for the US military budget and the national debt.

Honestly, I’m anticipating buying junk hardware for at least the next 4 years that’s being auctioned off by companies that are not able to deal with the new economic hardships that this and other decisions are going to create. I doubt I’m going to be able to play the latest games nor will I be able to afford them. Luckily I have a backlog of games and there are a lot of books I want to read too.

I think one of the bigger consequences of this in terms of pure compute is people not being able to self host open source LLMs and similar models offline. As I think this will soon become something that’s expected to have access to in the next couple of years.

I am for getting tech you need when you need it. I’m against buying tech you might want to have now just in case it cost more money in the future.

If you are really concerned about future costs of essential items that you will die without, then I suggest stocking up your pantry with shelf stable food as much as you can and researching what you can do to help your local community grow their own food.

You know what’s cheaper than a $2000 RTX 5090? Not spending money or upgrading unless you actually need to.

Large Language Models don’t reason either. The idea that Artificial General Intelligence will come from LLMs is pure fallacy to drive stock price. When it is eventually announced that some company claims to have achieved AGI via LLMs, it will just be another arbitrary milestone that moves the goalposts more.

It depends on how you define “app” and “free”. But for free (as in beer) smartphone apps I really like.

• tidy
• Librera Reader
• these pre-packaged apks for the onnx text to speech engine which uses the piper voices that can be used in conjunction with the above Librera Reader to turn any compatible text doc to an audio book.