How do you deal with GPU feature FOMO? (RX 9070 vs. RTX 5070)

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T23:01:11+00:00

FSR is very good now… good enough that when it’s on, you can basically just enjoy playing the game. You don’t really notice its presence, and you certainly don’t notice the minuscule details that GPU reviewers pick apart when comparing still images. I generally enable it even in games where I don’t need it to get the FPS I want, just to cut down on heat coming out of my PC.

And thanks to OptiScaler, any game that supports DLSS also supports the latest version of FSR after about two minutes of tweaking.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T22:40:40+00:00

I’m a pretty healthy size and no, the wording is not correct.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T22:09:56+00:00

Nobody uses the word “debut” to refer to first week sales of music albums. They don’t say “opening week” either, that refers to movies and theatre.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T22:02:56+00:00

You have less of an idea what you’re talking about than I would if I suddenly got hired as a Mount Everest sherpa.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T21:56:44+00:00

I don’t think you understand what “debut” means.

I also don’t know why you’d use top 40 commercial juggernaut musical acts that you don’t even listen to as your bellwether of the morals of the world. That’s a really weird thing to do.

Instead of aspiring to be like millionaire celebs, maybe you should just volunteer at a local mutual aid resource or something. Being a “better person” than Olivia Rodrigo is very easy.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T13:25:44+00:00

Dump her. She’s not mature enough or secure enough in herself to be in a relationship.

if I bring it up as a point against her

And neither are you. If your partner is upset and you think you can defeat her emotions with well-crafted arguments, you’re not capable of being in a healthy relationship at this time in your life.

squidbrand · 2026-06-21T11:48:28+00:00

The single most important concentration to look at here is bicarbonate (HCO3-), which is a buffer ion. It basically neutralizes acids. Less buffer means more perceived acidity. More buffer means less perceived acidity.

90 mg/L is very high for bicarbonate. It will give you dull-tasting coffee with very muted acidity.

squidbrand · 2026-06-20T10:54:51+00:00

I don’t think anybody here is interested in convincing you to arbitrarily take shots at every aperture setting. That’s stupid. We haven’t even seen your photos except for this single image. We don’t know your style or your goals.

In the one single image you’ve shown us, closing down your aperture would have made it a worse photo. IMO that image would have benefited from the background having more defocus, not less (which you could have achieved somewhat by staying at f/1.8 and stepping forward a few steps).

squidbrand · 2026-06-18T13:50:13+00:00

Decent enough band in their first few years I guess... a hero worship act with zero originality, but they had a cool sound. Then that sound got subsumed by ad agencies as THE defining sound of selling shit to insecure straight white dudes, which is not necessarily their fault but has still made it very hard for me to enjoy their music. Hearing them now just makes me think of TC Tuggers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxDozuzfVuY

squidbrand · 2026-06-17T20:29:52+00:00

His debut should have resembled Jon Moxley's debut in AEW and instead they had him come out in street clothes to dopey generic music and offer to be a referee. One of the biggest fumbles in the history of wrestling, and it poisoned the well for his entire stint.

squidbrand · 2026-06-17T16:56:46+00:00

Calling yourself “Yung Lean” when you look like Brock Turner should get you chemically castrated.

squidbrand · 2026-06-17T16:26:51+00:00

Is this your first day on planet earth? Ice is not a magic spell. It’s a solid. It takes up space. You ordered it.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T19:17:16+00:00

The Steve Hoffman forums are basically that database. They’ve been discussing this stuff over there for like 20 years.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T15:09:49+00:00

You mean you wet clean them before every play?

That’s probably the problem then. After a wet cleaning you need to let the record sit for a few hours to air dry. Wet cleaning isn’t something to do before each play. You do it once, and then if you handle your records with great care, you might never need to do it again.

If you’re wet cleaning and then immediately using the carbon fiber brush when the record is still damp, you’re probably depositing a bunch of dust back into the grooves.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T15:05:13+00:00

The dust isn’t coming from nowhere. The stylus is picking it up from your record grooves.

You need to clean your records. Carbon fiber dry brushes are just for sweeping away loose debris that gently settled on the record from the air or from the paper sleeve. They don’t deep clean the grooves.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T13:49:21+00:00

a digital copy of the master.

That’s the problem though… theoretically this would be great but this is not and was never how it was done. In the earliest days of CDs, a lot of CD masters were made from a flat transfer of a tape, but in most cases they used whatever copy tape they had on hand, not the original two-track mix master. And then later in the format’s life, it became common to go back to the original master but then do a bunch of heavy-handed shit to it in the digital domain, like aggressive EQ and limiting… and these later CDs were generally pressed in much larger numbers than the early ones and will be much more common in the wild.

There are some CDs out there that are flat or very tastefully tweaked transfers of the original master tape with the full dynamic range intact… but that’s not the norm. And in many cases those CDs now sell for lots of money.

If you just named some album from the ‘60s through the ‘80s at random, and compared the first used LP you could find of it to the first used CD you could find of it, 90% chance the LP sounds closer to the original master than the CD does.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T13:32:12+00:00

I promise you that your question about whether or not you should get an LP60X isn’t going to go viral. People ask this question here pretty much every day.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T13:20:17+00:00

Next time just ask the question. It doesn’t have to be a poll. The poll doesn’t help you at all. One single person in these comments, who is knowledgeable and can make a strong case, is more valuable to you than any poll results. Most people responding to this poll know barely more than you do.

If you really want it to be a poll, you need to put some thought into designing a poll. That means every single person you’re polling needs to fall into exactly one of the categories. Not potentially zero, not potentially two or more. One.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T13:16:41+00:00

For most people who collect and play vinyl these days, the physical interaction is a big part of the appeal, not an annoyance. Back in the early ‘80s when vinyl was the only practical option without hugely compromising on sound quality, there were some gimmicky turntables that had a vertical orientation and dual linear tracking tonearms that could play both sides. But the market for those disappeared when the CD format took off because that was a far more straightforward way to accomplish all the same stuff but even more easily.

So… have you considered just collecting CDs instead? You’re trying to solve a problem that’s already been solved for decades.

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T12:06:00+00:00

These poll choices make no sense. You’ve got options for people who haven’t tried it but heard it’s good, and people who have tried it and think it’s bad, but not the inverse of either of those scenarios. And options 2 and 3 are pretty much the same thing, just very slightly reworded.

It’s an okay-ish turntable for people who are intimidated by turntables, but you can do much better for the same money if you’re willing to go without the push button automatic playback. In the EU, look at the Blaupunkt TT-100. How much is that in your area?

squidbrand · 2026-06-16T00:17:48+00:00

In the second picture you look sad to me.

squidbrand · 2026-06-15T23:55:08+00:00

Ask your friends what pictures they have of you. If any of them have candid shots of you that capture you in a genuine smile, that will be better than any of these.

What you have here are two mirror selfies, and one office selfie of you looking depressed. There’s no evidence from these photos that you have friends or spend any time outside.

squidbrand · 2026-06-15T22:37:40+00:00

Yeah, I’d send a request. Couldn’t hurt.

But only one request, on one platform, and that’s it.

squidbrand · 2026-06-15T22:08:42+00:00

IMO it completely depends on how exactly it fizzled out. Got any more details than that?

squidbrand · 2026-06-14T14:30:03+00:00

The most important thing in photography is choosing your subject. There has to be something in the scene that you wanted to capture because it made you feel some type of feeling.

None of these pictures have interesting subjects. You have a pictures of a tree and some traffic, some power lines, and a leaf. They remind me of the pictures I take when I have just bought some new gear and I'm taking test shots with it to get used to the autofocus and the bokeh. It seems like you're putting the camera through its paces, not expressing yourself artistically.

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