My parents side stepped having this conversation by letting their first child serve as a negative example for the rest of us

I have a deslopped setup that I’d recommend, but keep in mind all of my stuff is a few or more years old at this point so the newer models may not behave the same.

• an LG oled that has never been connected to the internet, though I did do a firmware update when I got it using the usb port. If I remember right, the factory loaded firmware was limited.
• an nvidia shield tv pro with updates disabled. These are android TVs so they can run the real netflix/prime/whatever app that you want, but they’re unlocked enough to let you put custom apps and disable system apps as you like. Updates needed to be disabled because the current version of the launcher added ads, but you can alternately use a custom launcher if you want to keep updates enabled. I keep mine separated on the network to limit any damage it might be able to do if there’s any security issues.
• a logitech harmony companion remote. They stopped making these a while back, but they continue to be supported. I may swap this for a Flirc Skip 1s if it stops functioning.
• a minipc running linux. I have a sort of nostalgic channel surfing interface video player thing I’ve been working on that runs on this, but you could also use something like this in place of the android tv entirely. A good mini-pc will be small and silent, a usb IR receiver will let it read commands from a remote control, and the GPUs in new ones are even capable of gaming directly, but can especially handle streaming well if you have a gaming PC elsewhere. If you want that, make sure you find one that can do 4k@120, a lot can only do 4k@60, and will only do 120hz at 1080p.

No ads, no bs buttons on my remote, it all works together with my audio setup and it’s the same experience every single time I turn it on.

I think this is a problem inherent to this style of communication, whether massive social media or individual niche forums. People used to talk a lot about groupthink, though I don’t hear that term as often today. It seems to be a fundamental thing for human beings to come to a consensus as a group, and then for some individuals to react to that negatively. When positive this looks like science, accepting consensus as truth to have a foundation to work off of, and individuals rejecting the consensus to build stronger foundations.

Outside of the Internet we have much less ability to change our environments, so there’ll naturally be more diversity within groups of neighbors, coworkers, students, etc. But here, there is so much less friction to movement, similar people tend to group up more quickly.

The solution is probably not to expect opposition within a group, but to be a member of many separate groups. You are definitely in an echo chamber, but at the end of the day what you choose to accept as true is your responsibility.

I’ve been looking to do exactly this, thank you!

The ten commandments are future imperatives, but English doesn’t have that mood and instead archaic language is used in place of it.

They are as strong a command as can be given, but a literal translation would just be “you will not”. That lacks the weight of the original form so translators try to make it read more seriously than the language allows with “thou shalt not”.

Depends on what I’m cooking, but always for chicken breasts. Roasting at a high temperature works great (it’s not the only way), but can mean the overcooking time is pretty small. It’s an easy way to respect the bird and get the best results possible.

Thighs on the other hand, I just go by eye, you really have to try hard to overcook those.

Might be worth noting that using a thermometer well does require some amount of skill and experience, you need to insert it into the right location for the data to be repeatable. Easier to learn than cooking by eye, though.

I think with your budget you’d want to upgrade either your CPU or your GPU, but not both, and should first identify the bottleneck for each of your use cases. At a guess, I’d say GPU for starfield and possibly CPU for minecraft especially if you’re using mods, but it’s worth spending time measuring that and picking the direction you want to go. You can try smaller upgrades for each, but my sense is that it wouldn’t sum up to as worthwhile upgrade as focusing on one.

An nvme drive would be nice, but I wouldn’t prioritize it above cpu/gpu. I think 16GB of memory is fine for what you’re wanting, and there’s nothing wrong with that motherboard.

Used 2080ti’s sell within your budget (and for less there are 2080 and 2080 supers on the market), and that would be a huge upgrade on the GPU side. Not a recommendation, just something to consider.

Sorry, on demand is not a good way to state this, it’s just how my weird mind thinks of things. By “on demand”, I mean, like you are actively using it to store something or view something. If you’re not intentionally doing something with it, the drive should be completely idle. That’s more of a target than a requirement, though. It’s a way to keep storage drives tidy and not littered with temporary cache files, or databases used to store runtime state by various services. It’s just a strategy I like to take, to keep bulk storage separated from the applications and services that use it.

Even if a usb drive is intended to be permanently attached, it should still be treated as a temporary component. The reason is so that if something happens and the drive is disconnected, it limits the disruption to the system. You lose your media and documents until it’s reattached, of course, but the computer keeps chugging along happily.

If you use it for writing log files, then its loss can disrupt those services (and also prevent the problem from being reported). Also it’ll be constantly making noise, which can be annoying.

That’s my reasoning, anyway, you might prefer it done differently.

I’m not mixing up units, but let me better explain what I mean. The max speed is only in a best case scenario with a single sequential reader, and that speed drops dramatically when adding other simultaneous operations because the read head needs to seek to different locations. Random read speeds regularly test at less than 1MB/s, and even though multiple sequential streams wouldn’t be random, it’d still require plenty of seek time.

I did a little testing on a drive I have here just now to make sure I’m not completely full of shit. Single stream read was about 120MB/s and I was surprised how well it handled multiple read streams. My drive could handle roughly 9 sequential read streams from different locations on the drive while staying above 10MB/s, so while it wasn’t reaching its max speed, it wasn’t horrible, matched your expectations almost exactly. The real killer, though, was writing. If I added in a single write stream, the read speed dropped to about 1.5MB/s because it seemed to strongly prioritize writing over reading. Maybe some configuration could improve this? Interestingly, adding more readers improved this, but only up to about 4.5MB/s.

My results shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s just one drive and me mucking around with dd, but I think still illustrative of what I was alluding to, that if you are using a single HDD for multiple things simultaneously, the performance can suffer badly. Actual performance will depend on its use, of course, and honestly the results are way better than I expected, so this isn’t likely a realistic concern at all unless you will be constantly writing large amounts of data to the drive.

Thanks for calling me out on this, these are really interesting results, I think.

2.5" is going to limit the storage size a lot. So if you need >4TB, the internal option isn’t going to work. A janky solution would be to route the SATA and power connector outside the mini-pc so that you can fit a larger drive, but that’s going to be pretty ugly, and still limit you to only a single drive.

A single hdd can be fast enough to serve UHD ripped 4k video, but it’s much closer to the limit than an ssd would be, and might not be a great experience if you will be doing anything else with that drive at that time. Having a cache drive or multiple hdds in an array (or even better, both) greatly improves this.

A usb enclosure would let you easily have multiple hdds, but as everyone will say, they are less reliable. My opinion is that while you should never use one as a boot/system drive, they’re fine for bulk storage for home use. Make sure you’re not writing logs or anything like that to it, it should be on demand use only, and you might have to reconnect it occasionally. Anecdotally, I’ve never had issues with usb enclosures, they’ve worked fine for me in the past and I continue to use one for backups, but maybe people with some horror stories would have very different views on this.

If you’re in the US, check out webstaurantstore for those items. Way better pricing than Amazon, so you can have a whole stack of every size mixing bowl, sheet pans, glassware, etc, for what you’d pay on Amazon for one.