• 5 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Quicksync

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re transcoding in a way that’ll show any particular benefit from Quicksync over AMF or anything else. My ‘it’s better’ use case would be something like streaming to a cell phone at 3-5mbps, and not something local or just making a file to save on your device.

    DDR4 and no ECC

    That’s what my build is: 128gb of Corsair whatever on a 10850k. I’m sure there’s been some silent corruption somewhere in some video file or whatever, but, honestly, I don’t care about the data enough to even bother with RAID, let alone ECC.

    I will say, though, if you’re going to delve into something like ZFS, you should probably consider ECC since there are a lot more ‘well shits’ that can happen than what I’m doing (mergerfs + snapraid).

    power consumption

    A $30 or whatever they are kill-a-watt plus something like s-tui running on the NAS itself to watch what the CPU is doing in terms of power states and usage. I’ve got a 8-drive i9-10850k under 60w at “idle” which is not super low power, but it’s low enough that the cost of hardware to improve on it even a little bit (and it’d be a very little bit) has a ROI period of longer than I’d expect the hardware to last.


  • If you’re going to be doing transcoding for remote users at lower bitrates, quicksync is still better than AMF, so I’d vote Team Intel.

    If you’re not, then buy whatever meets your power envelope desires and price point.

    For Intel, anything 8th gen or newer should be able to natively do anything you need in Quicksync, so you don’t need to head to Amazon and buy something new, unless you really want to.

    Also, I’d consider hardware that has enough SATA ports for the number of drives you want so that you can avoid dealing with a HBA card: they inflate the power envelope of the system (if power usage is something you’re concerned with), and even in IT mode, I’ve found them to be annoyingly goofy at times and am MUCH happier just using integrated SATA stuff.





  • where we can’t trust their levels of education can protect them against capitalism run amok

    I’ve been dealing with more zoomer-and-younger kids and uh, it’s less that we can’t trust that their education level will protect them from the evils of capitalism, but more that we can’t even trust that their levels of education are sufficient for them to be able to both read and write, nevermind more complicated things like determining the accuracy of factual data and be able to make a reasonable decision based on you know, critical thinking and analysis.

    It’s shockingly dire in a lot of places, and it’s unlikely to improve, at least in the US, since nobody values education and nobody wants to fund education, and we just elected a pile of geriatric rich white people that think we don’t need to do anything but add more Jesus.

    And yeah, as adults we’ve absolutely failed the two most recent generations, and are going to epically, epically fuck up the next one too.




  • Speed test from who?

    I’ve got gigabit fiber from AT&T and Netflix’s site is the only one that can reliably shove a full gigabit at me. (Or ,rather the 940mbps, which is “gigabit” according to Ma Bell.)

    Maybe try fast.com and see if you get different reported speeds?

    Maybe the router is just too weak? Well, I used iperf3 between two desktops that are both hardwired in and I got ~940 “Mbits/sec”.

    Also this doesn’t mean anything: switching is probably handled by an ASIC in the router, and routing is handled by the CPU to keep track of all the NAT table state stuff, so you 100% could have a device that’ll pass gigabit on the lan, and only 10mbps on the wan.


  • It’s not even really that bad: a new patch will force recompiling of the shaders in Fortnite, and by the time you hit the ground from the battle bus it’s usually… fine?

    Like, yes, it’s a stuttery mess in the lobby and while landing, but who cares? That’s not gameplay where it matters in the least what the pixel-peeping frametime stats say.

    This kind of thing is why I’ve just stopped caring about product reviews. It’s either pixel-peeping nonsense that nobody but the reviewer thinks is important, or it’s nonsense like ‘The new Gaming Blaster X 2000 Mega Pro! For $1499 it’s the best thing since the last thing, you should buy it, recommended!’ and you look at the benchmarks, and you see that last gen was 148 fps, and this thing is 158 fps on the minimums and like, who gives a shit.

    You won’t notice this if you’re playing the game and not playing watch-a-stats-graph, and this has kinda become the norm for a few generations of reviews on everything.



  • New (7000 and 9000) ryzen CPUs have an iGPU that can transcode via AMF, so the ‘equivalent’ would just be buy a modern AMD CPU.

    AMF isn’t quite as good as Quicksync, but it’s probably fine for most use cases for most people, though I can notice the image quality losses when you’re doing something like transcoding to 1080p low(ish) bitrate for remote streaming, and so have a very big bias in favor of nvenc or quicksync.

    Also, I’m in the more-ram-is-better camp, so buy as much as you want and/or the platform supports.







  • The lie was WORSE than that.

    A lot of the fintechs invovled actually told people their money was safe, because it was subject to “passthrough FDIC insurance”, because their money was ultimately put in an insured bank, and thus was safe.

    Problem is that’s not how it actually worked, so basically everyone was straight up lied to.

    Basically the whole thing is that the bank keeps track of who owns which account and how much money they have, so if they go bust, you just have the FDIC come in and use that data and write checks, basically.

    Except since they’re disrupting banking, they also decided to just fucking not bother, and so even if there was going to be a payout, nobody has any fucking clue who has how much and in which bank said money was.

    Absolute clusterfuck, and about what you’d expect from silly-con valley types.



  • big fan of mini PC’s

    Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

    I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

    Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.