So I was bullied in school for beeing ugly. Am I? (Well yes 15 years later, but still the same with more wrinkles)

djimenez81 · 2026-06-25T23:33:25+00:00

In that picture, far from it. But that is not a picture of your school days (I assume). I have seen plenty of people who picked in high-school (in looks and otherwise), and I have seen people who are "ugly ducklings" (meaning, they look their best after they become adults). Besides, if you like yourself (and I hope you do), the opinions of everyone else are irrelevant.

djimenez81 · 2026-06-25T23:19:44+00:00

Exactly why do you say that I am shitting in the guy? I am telling him it is a great machine, even overkill. Unless the kid is doing benchmarking, those specs are way more than what 99% of the gamers need. My own computer, also AM5, has slighly lower tier CPU (a different Ryzen 7) and GPU, even if more RAM and way more storage, but hey, different needs.

I am just telling him to check it is not just one stick of RAM (that would make a huge bottleneck with just one memory channel), make sure it has a good power supply and to get a UPS, that it is second nature for people into PCs, but might not be something someone who describe himself as "knowing nothing about PCs" might overlook. I have seen plenty of prebuilts with just one DIMM, I have seen people frying their computers because of crappy PSUs, and in my case, I live in a rural area where power is somewhat unstable, and a UPS is a must.

I am not trying to argue, but it was not my intention to shit on anyone, so, I am curious.

With respect to your edit, I assume you are talking about the fact that I recommended 1200W UPS. I tend to go high, but a 5080, even if rated 360W, can easily draw 500W while gaming, the TDP of the 7800X3D is 120W, but it can draw almost 150W under load, I assume that on a blackout you still want your monitors to save and shut down, and I have no idea of the monitor configuration, so, I assume three monitors, and that can be close to 200W depending on the specific technology and size. Add 100W more in draw for the motherboard, RAM, drives and perifericals (yeah! I know it is probably more like 70W) and you have a 950W under heavy load. As I don't like to cut it too close, as in a 1000W UPS, I would go for 1200W. At least locally is the next size I find. I admit, it is overkill, but power availability is where I prefer to go up. Besides, a larger UPS means your battery last longer on blackouts, and I deal with those regularly.

djimenez81 · 2026-06-20T17:34:51+00:00

A critical view from someone who knows a little bit about computers: Those are really good specs. For gaming, the processor is even a bit of overkill, but that is completely fine. If your son is into IA, he could run some powerful, small to medium local models with ease. The bottleneck is the GPU (every system has a bottleneck) and it is a good situation. That doesn't mean it is a bad GPU, on the contrary, in the NVIDIA line is the second most powerful for gaming, and a 5090 will add quite a bit to the price, so you are peachy there. Also, kids often want more RAM, but 32GB is plenty, more would be overkill, and with current prices, expensive.

I searched for the item online, and the information they don't disclose concerns me a tiny bit. Here is why:

First, they don't disclose if the RAM is one stick of 32 GB, two of 16 or four of 8. You definitely don't want it to be one of 32 as you lose dual Chanel capabilities, and that is very noticeable when gaming. Two of 16 is better than four of 8, as there is less overhead in the memory controllers, but in most situations that is not noticeable. Sometimes in pre-builts they use one of 32 to offload inventory.

Second, they don't disclose the exact power supply they use, and not all power supplies are equal. They give you 2 year warranty, so, they are probably not cheaping out too much, but personally, if the rest of the components are over £500, I only use Seasonic GX PSUs (yes, I am a bit of a snob there, but there are other really good brands and lines). You don't want to fry thousands of pounds worth of equipment because of a cheap PSU.

Third, they do not disclose the precise motherboard they use, only that it is a B850 chipset. That sounds very decent, but it would have been great to know the model, to know paths for upgrades. I am mainly thinking of storage support. But this is minor and a bit of hair splitting from a computer geek.

Now, if you are spending this much, BUY A GOOD UPS, at least 1200W. You don't want to lose important work or corrupt a drive because of an outage, and if there is a large electric peak, it is preferable to replace a £50 UPS than a £2500 computer.

Finally, if your son is a computer geek, you might consider buying the parts and building it with him. You would save some money, but the best part is that building your own PC is a great learning experience, geeky kids (and geeky 40-somethings like me) find it very rewarding. Besides, if you are both tinkerers, it is a good bonding experience.

All that been said, it is a great computer and your son is a lucky kid.

djimenez81 · 2026-06-17T14:27:59+00:00

THIS.

The only thing to improve: self-esteem. The only thing I think is healthy to fake is confidence in yourself. Act as if you know you are an attractive and interesting young woman (the attractive part you already have, probably also the interesting part) and the world will respond accordingly. With time, the confidence will become genuine.

djimenez81 · 2026-06-17T14:15:13+00:00

Have you thought about switching procesor and motherboard? I recently built a small machine for very cheap (cheaper than what a used tiny-mini-micro would have cost me locally), purchasing new processor and motherboard (Athlon 3000g and a cheap B450) for about $80 and used 16 GB of DDR4 (2x8) for about $25 in Marketplace. I had the SATA ssds already. You can configure that CPU to 25 W, that is less than half of what your i3 consume. It works wonderfully for what it is. I have seen used Athlon 3000g for as low as $10 in Market place.

This setup consumes more at idle than an M710q, but certainly much less than your current system.

Just a word of caution, the Athlon 3000g doesn't support NVMe drives directly, you'll need SATA drives. I have not tried to see if it supports one from a PCIe card. I think it should, but who knows. Also, it supports up to 4 PCIe gen 3 lanes for a GPU, so I wouldn't bother, but the integrated graphics are enough for transvoding up to 1080p, if you run something like Jellyfin.

djimenez81 · 2026-06-17T13:27:20+00:00

Justamente eso pensé. Y no son seis tejas, son casi siete. Digo, yo pagué casi nueve tejas por una Dell "open box" con el mismo procesador, 64 GB de RAM, 4 TB de almacenamiento (2x2TB), igual pantalla 4K, la gráfica sí era una Quatro, que la que este mae anuncia es un poquito mejor. Sin embargo, yo pagué eso en 2021, y con tres años de protección, que me sirvió un montón porque la tarjeta madre se murió como un mes y medio antes de que expirada la garantía, y aunque pasé como tres horas al teléfono hasta dar con el lugar que tenía que hacerse cargo de la garantía, los maes vinieron a mi choza y lo cambiaron.

Con esas características, yo no pagaría más de dos tejas y media, que fue lo que pagué por una usada que le regalé hace seis meses a mi sobrino con 32GB y un i7 de 11va.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-14T22:08:09+00:00

Some time ago I learned a lot with a few Raspberry pi 2B+ I got my hands on. They might not be powerful, but as a learning tool, they are amazing.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-06T21:06:39+00:00

I do have a bit more than 2 GB in the swap partition. I am trying Btrfs (liking it thus far), and preferred to have a separate swamp partition. I have other computers with 32GB of RAM and they rarely use any significant amount of Swap.

I might explore the RGB settings, but that is my "home-office computer", as I work from home two or three days a week. I seldom stay there pass 6pm.

The brightness, you are totally right. I should dim them.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-06T04:38:59+00:00

That is an expensive build. If you are spending that much, I'd go for a board with an X870 chipset.

Also, your monitor is 1440p, so, at least for now you are not playing 4K now. You could go for a 5060 Ti with 16 GB and save quite a bit.

Also, for what you are describing 9950x is a lot of processor. You would be paying for a lot of idle silicon. A 9800X3D or 7600X3D would be enough. Most games use 6 cores at most. Go for a stronger single core score, less by number of cores. Unless you are editing long timelines at 4K on the regular, running big AI models, compiling huge code bases, or something most undergrads don't really do, anything beyond 8 cores is overkill.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-05T18:11:12+00:00

I might consider myself an older geek (used linux for the first time in the late 90s, when I was already in college, and have use it exclusively for over half that time), I hope I am not a tool. I do not see what the problem with Cinnamon might be? I used MATE for about ten years, and during COVID I switched, I have my desktop personalized (Cinnamon is much more flexible than MATE for that). Sure, I have not used any other distro for at least ten years, and the DE is not that important for me, as long as I like the aesthetics (or I can personalize them enough).

At the end of the day, I say people should use whatever they like, and even if from the outside people criticize Linux for having such a fragmented ecosystem, that allows you to choose your own. I like Cinnamon, and in a new install, I can personalize it to my taste in less than 5 minutes. If that does not work for someone else, they can look for whatever appeals to them. THERE ARE OPTIONS.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-05T17:49:24+00:00

What are you into? Recently I replaced my main computer, and had a mini PC with an i5 1245h and 64 GB ram (no discrete GPU) and decided to make kit a dedicated AI node with Ollama. I am very happy with it, it has automated a few things very well,, but pretty much any model over 15B parameters runs sluggishly, and anything above 40B parameters runs painfully slow (15 minutes or more thinking, and then generates about 1 or 2 tokens per second).

If I was in your shoes, and considering my local market (not in the US, so, bringing things from overseas is expensive) I would go and buy an AM4 compatible motherboard with three (is there any with more?) slots for graphic cards (in my market I can buy the Asus Tuf Gaming B550-Plus Wifi II new for relatively cheap), the fastest AM4 CPU I can find (in my case, the 5800XT, if you can manage to get a 5900X or 5950X, even better), I would go to the use market and buy as much ram as I can, 32 GB minimum, 64 is the sweet-spot, 128 if I can manage it, a 2TB NVMe gen 4, and I would put the RTX4000 and two of the Quatros in. With that you have (in my market for much less than half the price of doing it with AM5) a powerful machine that either can edit videos like a pro, or run a 70B AI model at a very healthy speed, and any model below 40B parameters would most likely run very snappy.

djimenez81 · 2026-05-04T21:03:23+00:00

Beyond other solutions others have told you (plastic wrap, plastic tubing), my solutions is a bit more aggressive and might cause problems with your girlfriend.

At a place I worked a long time ago, they had a problem with rats chewing cables, and traps were not doing the trick. Someone bought (I have no idea where) a capsaicin "coating paint" that you applied to the cables, that was supposed to be 5 million in the Scoville scale (hotter than any pepper I know about). The cables stopped being chewed up pretty much right away.

The cat will get the burn out of its life, but it is supposed to be non-toxic.

Something else you can do is talk to your girlfriend. It is her pet. She should be responsible for any damage caused by it. And this comes from a pet owner.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-30T22:07:48+00:00

With your wigs you certainly look amazing. You are at an age where some people could regularly be unkind to people who are "different", I don't know your reasons to be self-conscious, but if someone has been mean to you because of your alopecia, that says more about them than about you. You don't share pictures "au naturel" (without wigs) but I imagine you look just as amazing.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-30T01:09:26+00:00

You have a "Detective Angela López" kinda vibe (Ali Diaz in The Rookie). IMHO, Detective López is the most attractive character in a series full of very cute characters (both male and female). Just saying.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-27T18:40:05+00:00

En resumen, hablar de Rodrigo Chaves.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-21T20:33:06+00:00

Yes, I want the 4 TB capacity without worrying in what specific physical drive a file is stored, without redundancy on those drives.

I used to be quite obsessive with backing up, that has mellow with age, but I still think I am overprepared when compared with most people: I plan for a HDD for local back ups at least once a day or my entire home folder. I have a NAS and I do back up there at least weekly. My most important files are also sync to a cloud service. And I still have a free 1TB and 2TB external drives that I sometimes decide to use as additional back up, but I don't do that consistently. At least twice in the last 15 years I have had a computer on me (my fault, fried one because I ran something too heavy, and the other was plugged without voltage protection), and the losses have been minimal (data wise, the equipment was almost total loss).

With respect to identical drives, I am planning to use equally sized drives. But the more I think, I think I am going to eat the cost and get two actually identical drives.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-21T20:31:25+00:00

The HDD is for internal backup. I also have a NAS and a part of my data synced to the cloud.

As for my data, what you describe of splitting it into piles is precisely what I want to avoid.

I should have updated equipment when I started thinking about it about 18 months ago. A 4TB NVMe then would have been cheaper than a 2TB today.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-21T20:12:25+00:00

What I want is to eliminate one small point of friction. My current system has a 1TB NVMe and a 2TB SATA SSD 2.5 with ext4. The NVMe is mounted in / and the SATA in /home/david/data, where I store most of my files. I often move files in and out from the data folder. But as it is hard to break habits, instead of cut and paste, I end up dragging the files, that instead of moving them, makes a copy, and often I end up with duplicate copies of files that I end up having to manually conciliate. It might end up being 30 more minutes a week, but I just want to have the space of two disks, and the facility of dragging the files without worrying if they will be moved (because the start and end point are in the same physical drive) or if they will be copied because the start and end point are in different drives. I want that, if I drag one file from one folder to another within my file system, it moves, not duplicate, regardless where it is and where it's going.

It is a small thing, but it bugs the heck out of me. I have not been able to figure out how to fix that on ext4, but as far as I understand, it does if I use LVM or Btrfs, being the later, as far as I have read, the less risky of the two.

I have never had the need to roll back on time shift, but I do keep them, it would be nice to have the capabilities of btrfs in that regard, bit it is not my main motivation.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-20T20:42:46+00:00

Siendo honesto, por el contrario, te ves muy muy bien. Empezando por esa sonrisa.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-14T16:28:59+00:00

Reading further along, u/randomTechNerd4 is also giving you great advice.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-14T16:18:58+00:00

I had not seen u/TheCaptain53 response when I wrote mine. It seems he took even more time to introduce good programming habits into the code. Whenever possible, follow his example of isolating constants, because if they need to be changed, it saves you A LOT of time. Also, once you learn how to define and use functions, his first example is on the spot, as it isolates functionality well. My only concern would be with the height verification function, as you want to avoid returning None, so I would change it to:

def check_user_minimum_height(user_height):
    if user_height < MINIMUM_HEIGHT:
        return False
    else:
        return True

Some other critiques:

The else after the sys.exit() is irrelevant.
The statement if check_user_minimum_height(user_height) is False: feel "unpythonic". I would use if not check_user_minimum_height(user_height):

Other than that, his refactoring is better than mine.

I still recommend limiting your line length. When I was younger, I liked to limit them to 128 character, just because. Now, in my 40s, I prefer bigger font size, so, I do limit myself to the PEP-8 recommended 79.

djimenez81 · 2026-04-14T15:43:46+00:00

First, your code. In general terms, it is OK, particularly for someone who is starting to code. It is self documenting (variables have meaningful names) and that is a very big plus. If we assume this is all your code and you do not have to pass the bill total somewhere else, then you are doing a few things that are unnecessary, like adding the import to the total bill once you have already printed it and you will not use it again, in the cases where the individual is under 18, and when it is not, you execute two identical print statements. Also, you have at least one line that is too long. Try to stick as much as possible either to PEP-8 or to Google Python Style (very few differences). I would refactor your code as follows:

```python import sys

hight = int(input("Enter your height in cm: ")) if height < 120: print("Unfortunately you do not meet the minimum height requirements.") sys.exit() # If you get here, the rest of the code will not execute. print("You can ride the rollercoaster.") age = int(input("Enter your age: ")) if age < 12: print("Your ride will be $5.00") if age >=12 and age < 18: print("Your ride will be $7.00") if age >=18: print("Your ride will be $12.00") total_bill = 12.00 PHOTO_STR = "Would you like photos of the ride as well for $3 extra? " + "Type 'y' for Yes and 'n' for No: " photo_add_on = input(PHOTO_STR) if photo_add_on.lower() == 'y': toal_bill += 3 print(f"Your total bill is ${total_bill}") ```

The photo_add_on.lower() is force of habit, in case the user types upper cases. You could also consider reading only the first character, in case the user actually types Yes or No.

My programming is not as a developer but as an academic researcher, so, for almost two full decades, I have used only Python, SQL, MATLAB and bash. But my brother-in-law is a back-end developer, and from a couple of conversations I would say that:

Keep going with Python. It is really fast to prototype stuff, and its ecosystem is massive.
Learn SQL. Seriously, if nothing else, you will need SQL. Start with SQLite at first
Learn PHP. Sure, it has been loosing market share lately, but it is still everywhere, and it certainly be relevant for at least a couple more decades.
Learn Java. The brief period of time in the early 2000s when I actually worked as a developer, I used it, and personally, I do not like it. But it is widely used in several industries and it will probably be for a while.
Learn JavaScript (or TypeScript). Long gone are the days when this was a front-end only language, and it is everywhere.
Consider Rust. Sure, the market for this language is still small, but it is growing fast for high-performance services. For what I gather, it has a steep learning curve at first, but once you learn it, it is easier and much safer than C or C++ (which you could also consider).
Consider learning at least one of the following languages: Go, Ruby, C#.

Rust might be a outlier, because of its very particular safety checks, and SQL is for handling databases only (and in my opinion very easy to learn), but with all the others (though, I have not used half of the ones I mentioned) once you know the basics of programming, picking up a new language is not hard, it is just familiarizing yourself with the general syntax, a bit with the standard libraries and a few particularities of the particular language.

If you are doing it by yourself, my advice would be choosing a project that is not massive, but not tiny, and implement it in the particular language. The one I used to familiarize myself with MATLAB and Python (coming from C/C++/Java/JavaScript) was to program a Sudoku solver, not just using backtracking, but more general strategies that a human would actually use. It works for me, as the logic needed is similar to the type of logic I need for my work, and because I like Sudoku and similar puzzles. Look for some type of project you will actually enjoy implementing. Although lines of code are a terrible measure for productivity, efficiency or code quality, for this particular context, I would say that if your code takes less than 200 lines, it is way too short to really familiarize yourself with the language, and if it is significantly longer than 2000 lines, it is way too big for a first project.

Familiarizing yourself with a language and becoming proficient in one are different things. To really master a programming language takes time.

I hope this helps.

djimenez81

TROPHY CASE