Matisyahu's Blog

Ever have one of those weeks where you feel as though the week feels as though it has dragged on for a lot longer than it should. Final day of the week tomorrow and I’ll feel all the better once it is all over and I can have a good rest – customer service may not being physically exhausting but it sure as hell mentally exhausting hearing the same people lacking in self awareness using me as an emotional sound board because they decided it is my fault that they didn’t educate themselves before making a decision.

Tonight I felt like a treat so I ordered some mexican food – I always feel good after having some mexican food with the fresh salads that you don’t feel bloated after having dinner yet feeling satisfied. I’m waiting for that to get delivered which will be nice to have while watching Real Time with Bill Maher (it’s more about the guests than Bill Maher although like a broken clock he is correct two times a day). I then went for a 11.6km walk and when I came back it felt pretty good – the feeling of accomplishing something for the day after being inside tapping away at the keyboard.

One video I was watching on YouTube was in regards to the avalanche of ‘tech dude bros’ on YouTube engaging in the same sort of pseudoscience that you see gym bros, ‘wellness influencers’, and audiophile types engage where they convince themselves that a $3000 speaker cable has a noticeable improvement in sound output or some supplement has boosted their recovery. If you jump to 40:40 in the following video (link) regarding the whole pseudoscience regarding people tweaking but having no idea what they’re doing which is right up there with people who muck around with their installation of Windows then act surprised when the whole system becomes unstable.

Now, don’t get me wrong, many years ago back when my parents had a Pentium 75 I overclocked the CPU to 100MHz then pulled it back to 90MHz because it was unstable – back then I was trying to get BeOS to work at a reasonable level of responsiveness (I had sufficient memory, the CPU speed held it back). The one thing to keep in mind back then that the overclocking had noticeable benefits where as these days, as noted by many in the comment section of the above video, the CPUs being shipped are already very close to their maximum performance when they leave the factory. Could one win the silicon lottery and get one that one can overclock without hitting stability issues? sure but that is the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that if there is any sort of extra headroom then that CPU would have been put in a higher category to be able to sell at a higher price. It is always funny to see when lay people convince themselves that they know something that engineers don’t know – like the almond mum who convinces themselves that they know more about health than someone who has had formal training and years of experience in that field.

On Sunday I’m going to have another look at GMKtec – I’m looking at getting the AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 –EVO-X2 AI Mini PC. The dollar is fluctuating so I may as well lockin the price when I can and then head down to my local store to pick up a monitor and keyboard.