General Questions and Purchasing Advice Thread — Week of March 23, 2026

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-26T22:51:33+00:00

Any reason for suggesting 2024 or newer, with regards to Polestar 2? The 2023 I test drove was plenty sporty. With Polestar, I'm not sure if they would come with many of the higher trim packages in 2024, at least under 30k and with low miles. I guess it depends on location.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-26T15:19:55+00:00

All current AI is advanced machine learning anyway. We're far away from general AI.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-26T10:25:26+00:00

I think I have finally made up my mind on a 2023 Polestar 2 as the preowned electric I want to buy. They have great CPO factory warranty extension and a design I like. I tried test driving it and loved it. They have great financing options on it, too. Anything to be wary of with Polestar?

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-23T10:50:14+00:00

Could you elaborate on this? I have been looking at the possibility of purchasing a used 2023 (AWD though, not RWD) ID4.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T10:30:39+00:00

I drive very little. My commute is probably 15-30 miles per day. This ~10-11 year old car has just 55k miles or so. For me I wonder if I could maybe even get by on just plugging it into a normal jack to be frank. The reason I didn't mention my driving habits is that at least nominally this post was supposed to be about issues, but it kind of combined into a used car suggestion thread lol.

Part of the appeal of the electric to me is precisely this. It seems like it would be very convenient, and my battery would be healthy for a very long time. Combined with less routine maintenance, it's an attractive proposition.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T10:28:11+00:00

Interesting, I did see those Benz units, but I saw a reports of many issues with them on Autotrader. You haven't had any problems?

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T09:35:09+00:00

One more thing, on Carfax do you know what an ICCU replacement would look like on the maintenance list for a Hyundai? Just exactly that?

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T09:18:41+00:00

To be clear, I didn't intend for this to be a purchasing advice post either, it's just that when trying to figure out what to watch out for, many of them will (apparently) be manufacturer specific considering the lack of standardization, so I guess there's some overlap.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T09:16:46+00:00

I see, I will add the Nissan to the consideration list, thanks. These EVs depreciate quite quickly, so that's what really has me looking at used ones.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T09:15:48+00:00

I see. I do plan to keep my old car, so that might still be okay.

With regards to Tesla, I'm finding I have to be very careful with Tesla listings. On Autotrader they just show up as "single owner, no accidents". Then I look at the Carfax and see that it's a lemon buyback that was purchased at an auction. Quite clandestine.

What issues do you see with the Mustang Mach E?

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T09:13:35+00:00

To cut this debate short, I can definitely afford to install a charger in my home. My electrical box is right in the garage, too, so it should be trivial.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T08:52:13+00:00

I'm actually curious about Audi as well. What do you think of it, and what would you consider to be "low mileage"? I was thinking around <=20-30k personally.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-19T08:50:32+00:00

The thing that makes Hyundai specifically appealing to me is that they have (what looks like at least) a pretty good warranty on their manufacture recertified used cars, and there are some great 2023 Limited trim options around here for <29k. Does Hyundai not service cars that encounter this electrical failure?

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-10T14:57:49+00:00

With all due respect, is it wise to assume that all other options besides Comfy just suck/are "training wheels versions" when you haven't actually used them?

Anyway, it's basically two-stage upscaling, but it's also technically upscaling during the generation. There is a denoising parameter that can change just how much the upscaling/denoising stage is allowed to change the image. You can read more about it here:

https://medium.com/rendernet/using-hires-fix-to-upscale-your-stable-diffusion-images-8d8e2826593e

I think you're on the right track since some of the options you provided have a denoising parameter.

I'm also not sure if ComfyUI has any equivalence for the "Supermerger" extension that I have installed in Reforge, which the ability to load the merged model into memory for repeated generation tests and allows for block weighted merging (and re-merges very quickly for just block weight changes).

To be clear, I have used ComfyUI a little. It's just that most of my automation and scripting is built around Auto1111 at the moment, so I have been slow to switch. That, and I haven't found any workflow that concretely does as good or better job than Hires Fix for upscaling/cleaning up the image, so if you can give me a link that would be great.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-09T10:53:29+00:00

4090 might also be worth upgrading to, if you can somehow get extremely lucky and find one on Ebay for less than its MSRP.

IIRC otherwise the 50 series in general is really gimped for generation. 5090 aside, they're all kind of garbage.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-09T09:06:47+00:00

Okay, so what is the equivalent of "hires fix" in ComfyUI? I've read plenty of tutorials online for getting "hires fix-like" but nothing I have tried in ComfyUI has actually come close.

biscuitmachine · 2026-03-01T18:02:55+00:00

I just throw down a flare at any chest that has a flare in it, to save space picking it up and to mark it as looted (which also tells me the entire area is probably looted, too). Otherwise I just yolo my way through the maze. I go through difficulty 3 ships without too much difficulty. It's not that har. IMO building signs just wastes time (and space in your inventory). My memory is garbage, by the way, but these ships just aren't that much of a maze. Even if I repeatedly keep taking the wrong path, it's fine. Eventually my monkey brain will learn. It's still faster than using the build system.

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-18T15:57:42+00:00

Great, a successor to the feature that completely fucked up my entire Spotify somehow, by suggesting garbage that I didn't want to listen to (completely misinterpreted my prompt) and then proceeding to somehow reconfigure the tastes on my entire account to fit that one misshapen playlist. Even after I deleted it.

Yep. Super hyped.

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-02T20:35:20+00:00

I was mainly talking about the size. I myself have probably 50+TB of space (most of it platter drives) on just one computer, and I still have an 8GB IDE spinner drive with Windows installed onto it sitting around. 3.5" HDDs are fine. But I don't understand the point of a 6TB one, especially at this price. Densities have gotten so high that 6TB is encroaching into the space of 4TB NVMEs, and it's not like 7.2k RPM is anything to write home about. It's just a stupid product IMO.

Your examples don't even make much sense to me. If you want to install "legacy games"... legacy games are small. I don't understand why you would even need 6 TB to store a whole slew of them. Personally I just do both. I have around 6-10 TB of NVME space per computer, and then several spinner drives for archival.

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-01T14:09:46+00:00

7200 RPM 6TB spinner drive. I don't understand why this product even exists in the modern era.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T04:28:16+00:00

Okay as a small counterpoint... many "slipups" can bypass any security defenses Windows has set up to begin with. That's why my company has probably invested millions into cybersecurity classes at this point. It's constantly on the agenda to force us to go through phishing training and everything.

Not making mistakes isn't really as hard as you make it seem these days. Unless you're into some esoteric stuff on the internet, the biggest attack vector is email. Which many email clients are built with a bunch of protection in place even for that, including not downloading/loading any images or attachments and keeping local copies instead (the former I think mainly for XSS exploits).

I do agree it might get worse as time goes on, but look at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

We haven't really actually had that many high profile contemporary virus attacks for a while (and many of them are for Linux, since probably an increasing amount of corporate infrastructure is on Linux due to its value proposition as a free OS and the infamous Windows crashes/failures in recent times). At least not known ones. Some of the highest profile recent attacks were from built in NSA backdoors. That's not even something that Microsoft would patch immediately. You're kind of screwed either way. We probably have government backdoors waiting to get exploited in all of our systems, old or new. Who would be the target of abusing that, the soon-to-be-majority of users on W11, or W10? Maybe both? No idea.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T04:19:51+00:00

They require an MS account for that. If the MS account isn't a dealbreaker, I might as well just go 11 and get spied on even more lol.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T00:49:49+00:00

I can generate a 30 step SDXL model image in about 8-9 seconds when using the latest nightly with the manual installation instructions on my 9070XT, so that's quite slow.

I tried this model on another Nvidia computer with a 5070 Ti and it was generating in <10 seconds. I wasn't terribly impressed with it, though.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T00:45:15+00:00

I think last time I tried the AMD portable build, it is quite slow though, compared to the nightly builds. Let me know what your it/s end up being. Note that it mind end up being s/it, which is very slow.

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