My family got this set off craigslist to replace an objectively better dining table set that just needed to be refinished. Tried using cushions with them, but they were still a bit uncomfortable.

Saying that, the OP set would unfortunately be quite the upgrade compared to all the MDF and engineered wood that’s so common nowadays :(

As a non-German who has never seen one of those, that actually looks quite nice, I’d gladly put that in my house :p

I was using the term upgrade just in reference to the relative performance delta between the two platforms from the perspective of someone deciding between which one to invest in. When I personally am making a buying decision between different tiers of equipment, I think of the more expensive option in terms of ‘if it’s worth the upgrade’, even before any purchase has been made, if that makes sense.

You mentioned that you regret buying into a dead platform, AM4. AM6 does not yet exist, so your only other option when building/buying a new PC was AM5, and I’m pointing out that had you gone that route, it wouldn’t have made a monumental difference in most average gaming scenarios. It only would’ve made a large-ish difference unless you were also able to afford a top of the line GPU and/or stuck with lower resolutions.

Did you mean that you wish you had stuck with whatever you had before you built your AM4 system and waited until AM6?

I’m not sure I understand, you said before you were prioritizing value and longevity. AM4 is the value king, and will last for many years into the future, especially as you have an affordable upgrade path to the AM4 X3D CPUs.

AM5 would only be a meaningful upgrade if you had fairly specific requirements, which would be if you prioritize low resolutions for high FPS monitors (with at least a 180hz refresh rate or above), and were able to also afford a top end GPU so that the CPU and RAM actually become the limiting factor for what the framerate will be.

Is the above scenario what you are targeting? Because if not, an average or good value AM5 system paired with the same GPU you have now would result in very little difference in actual performance, since most games will max out your GPU long before the CPU or RAM speeds can even come into play.

Future proofing isn’t generally worth it, IMHO. I doubt the difference in performance between a top end am4 CPU and a top end am5 system will be great enough that one can play a game well and the other can’t.

And high-end CPU power is generally only really taken advantage of by a small number of games, or at lower resolutions where the game can become CPU bound and push high framerates for high refresh rate monitors.

If you use a 1440p or 4k monitor, then an old CPU is usually more than adequate and won’t be the limiting factor; it’s the GPU that’ll be the bottleneck.

I find it’s better to wait until there’s a significant enough jump in performance to where the upgrade will provide a truly meaningful benefit, and there are games on the market that truly require that extra performance.

Are you often encountering games that your currency CPU is not able to handle?

As someone who only used Onlyoffice briefly, to me they both seemed to do the same tasks about as well as each other. I didn’t notice Libreoffice’s age except in the settings menu. For actually just doing normal stuff, like word processing, it felt comparable, besides some minor stylistic UI polish in Onlyoffice.

Are there any specific pain points in Libreoffice that you can recall that Onlyoffice does significantly better in?

I imagine Onlyoffice’s settings menu is better (I’m not a fan of Libreoffice’s settings), but for average use, what areas does Onlyoffice do better UX-wise? I believe Onlyoffice is better at handling microsoft office documents, but hopefully that will become less relevant with this movement to get away from US products.

Still waiting for gloomwood (spiritual successor to Thief) to come out of early access. Probably will be a few years yet, tho.

They look and feel fairly comparable, IMO.

Onlyoffice

Libreoffice

One of those spray-can extension poles would probably work pretty well.

You are describing a Free 2 play game monetized with micro transactions.

At least in Europe, the Stop Killing Games group would argue that those micro transactions would be considered buying a perpetual license to that good (the skin/character), and thus it would be a breach of contract for the publisher to arbitrarily remove your ability to access that content. They would need an end of life plan so the buyer could reasonably still access the goods they purchased after the publisher drops support.

Only a truly free game where no money changes hands would be exempt from the legislation, or perhaps a game that was subscription based up-front, as then it makes clear you are only purchasing access to the content for a finite amount of time.

Thanks for mentioning harper, hadn’t heard of it until now.

According to wikipedia, Tinnitus is listed as an uncommon side effect of that drug, so that is indeed the most likely culprit, meaning it is very likely not permanent. :)

Constant background sound does not hurt your ears unless it is over a certain decibel level.

You can get temporary tinnitus from an active ear infection or a swollen/inflamed ear, it may not be permanent.

Were you exposed to any overly loud sounds recently, or chronically over the course of your life?

I don’t think that’s a good scene to judge it on, personally.

As someone who hates modern star wars, and only mildy enjoys the original trilogy, I thought Andor was extremely compelling, and some of the finest sci-fi, or fiction in general, that I’d ever seen (and I am very picky).

It is, in essence, a brilliantly written rendition of an oppressed people building an effective and realistically depicted underground resistance movement against a fascist regime which happens to be attached to the star wars IP (which it uses well, aesthetically). So more of a tightly written political/espionage thriller than it us traditional space opera.

The quality of the writing is far, far beyond any other star wars movie or show, going very much into the territory of Where Eagles Dare, The Godfather, or or 3 Days of The Condor. The dialog is excellent, the plots excellent, the pacing excellent, I have very few complaints.

I think the quality of it comes from the writer Tony Gilroy putting a tremendous amount of effort into researching historical revolutions and drawing from those, which makes it feel very grounded.

If you dislike modern star wars, I really implore you to give Andor a chance, it makes none of the mistakes of modern Disney star wars, in fact it could not be more different.

It’s a short video, and I found his speech pretty moving, I’d recommend watching it in its entirety.

Here’s an Irish Mayor recounting how Catholic priests raped and beat him repeatedly as a child, and how the catholic church of Rome sent out a priest during the investigation into the rapes just in an effort to discredit him and call him a liar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq-BB_aZUVI

Top military brass are still vulnerable to making blunders. Take the Bay of Pigs as an example, which fumbled so hard it eventually led JFK to say “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

And that’s with ‘normal’ generals. Now imagine replacing them with compliant generals that will take orders regardless of how bad the idea is tactically or politically.

The same thing happened with Hitler, who ordered his compliant generals into some insane military blunders. The duo of dictatorships and Yes Men massively increase the chances of incompetence compared to systems where those lower on the totem pole can safely push back against dumb ideas.

The regime could’ve manufactured some more controllable distractions to Epstein without the dramatic downsides the Iran war has brought, such as fake assassination attempts or false flag operations within the US (like a Reichstag fire situation).

The Iran situation would be like if Hitler tried to invade Poland, but instead of swiftly conquering it, continually started and stopped peace negotiations while Germany’s cost of living skyrocketed.

I’m not saying they won’t use it as a distraction since it’s the only beneficial action available to them, but I very much doubt that was the original plan, or that they correctly assessed how badly this would go for them.

AFAIK, the concept first appeared in the dystopian sci-fi novel The Shockwave Rider written by John Brunner back in the 70’s. It was called a Delphi Pool in that. Great book, btw. Though unfortunately another example of tech-bros old dystopian novels as a model to build a business.

The description of it from the book:

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I…

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statical returns.

It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

And here’s how the concept was used in the real world (before polymarket), according to this source:

Perhaps the most striking attempt to make use of this kind of idea was the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a proposed futures exchange developed by our friends at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). PAM was intended to be a kind of “futures market” for the Middle East; investors could trade futures based on political outcomes in the region.

The idea is that the monetary value of a particular “future” (a stated outcome in Middle East politics) would tend to increase as the outcome became more likely. That is, the value of a futures issue would tend to reflect the relative likelihood of that future actually occurring.

Unfortunately, it turned out that PAM would allow trading in such events as coup d’etats and assassinations; the resulting uproar caused the cancellation of PAM.

The Delphi method was used in the late 1940’s at the RAND Corporation. In their implementation, a panel of experts was regularly polled by a facilitator to predict future outcomes of events related to the Cold War. Brunner probably derives his Delphi pool idea from this work.

The name “Delphi pool” is derived from the pythia, or priestesses, of Delphi in ancient Greece. The pythia would take questions and make predictions (which modern-day geologists attribute to hydrocarbon gasses like ethylene, which bubbled up from the faults in the region).