None of Telegram, WhatsApp, FB Messenger or iMessage represent open communication from a respectable source. Granted that I won't send a "green text" either since I have no interest in disclosing the phone number for my personal cell number.

But Telegram is owned by some sketchy Russians and I'm not touching anything that requires Meta or Apple terms of service. If those things are the price to communicate with someone, I don't need to communicate.

Email works great for everyone though.

AMD and nVidia are fully aware that cameras produce 422 output. They just don't care. Apple silicon and high end Qualcomm and maybe(?) MediaTek SoCs support hardware transcoding to a more traditional editing format, but since most PC hardware does not, a common workaround is to record a camera's HDMI out with an external device such as an Atomos Ninja, which can transcode to a more editing-friendly format. Preserving the 10-bit color space is incredibly valuable, and it's an absolute travesty that PCs with $2000 video cards can't handle the task as well as five year old iphones or $120 Arc GPUs.

My workstation has video cards with nVidia and Intel chipsets, a QDR Infiniband HBA, a 4xu.2 HBA and a couple extra 1xm.2 to PCIe adapters. I don't think I've ever hit the LIMIT of any of the PCIe 4.0 connectors on my motherboard, but I'm certainly happy that I have enough lanes to have that much I/O available to me.

(The Intel GPU is present because it offers hardware video compression support that nVidia and AMD don't provide; Infiniband is far and away the cheapest way to get a fast connection to my file server)

Iris XE (found in 12th gen+ Intel CPUs with integrated graphics) and Alchemist discrete cards do in fact support AV1 encoding in hardware. My Thinkpad engages its iGPU for AV1 encoding in Resolve rather than bothering the discrete nVidia GPU it also has with that task.

AV1 encoding just isn't fast on anything.

My video editing workstation is an older Threadripper. I have an Intel A750 installed JUST for hardware encoding support in DaVinci Resolve Studio. There aren't even any displays hooked up to the stupid thing.

You don't understand the issue I am describing. HEVC is supported, but not the 422 color space that most cameras use. If you plan to do color grading in an editing application or would prefer to maintain color fidelity from the raw video files, it is in your best interest to keep 422 color. Most GPUs only handle the incomplete 420 color space in hardware, and therefore don't help for editing or color grading functions at the time when their help would be most useful. Throw some 8k Clog3 data at DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere on even a desktop with an RTX4090 in it and see how wrong I am.

Every non-cine mirrorless Camera made in the last four or five years natively outputs HEVC 422. If you're lucky, your camera's implementation of that can be easily transcoded to a more editable format (e.g ProRes 422), or you have an external recorder such as an Atomos Ninja to capture ProRes in the first place.

(Cine cameras generally output HEVC 444, I think, an even more rarified format, but if you're working with that, you have the budget to address that problem, too)

Only Intel Iris Xe/Alchemist GPUs supports HEVC 422 encoding and decoding in hardware (and Apple Silicon, but I don't care about that). AMD and nVidia do not. To get a GPU assist on encoding, you either need to transcode down to HEVC 420 and lose a lot of color grading capability or max your CPU for long-ass renders.

To me, it makes A LOT more sense that GPUs prioritize the very common and useful format common to prosumer cameras than worry about the fractionally better compression Youtube and Twitter like.

It takes longer to encode than H.265, even with an Arc GPU and 48 threads to throw at it. It looks fine for 4k content at similar to H.265 at similar bitrates. The files are somewhat smaller. I generally thought it wasn't worth the effort to mess vs already well supported HEVC format.

My understanding of WD comes from a mid-level manager who retired in 2022, but he led me to believe that large acquisitions under its umbrella have kept their own management and facilities in place.

Maybe Western Digital raided SanDisk of some patents and important employees so that it can spin up its own solid state business while SanDisk's assets still have relatively high value?

I've had relatively good luck over my life with SanDisk memory cards.

I have had statistically improbable but nonetheless significantly worse experiences with WD-branded drives (other than those that came from the former IBM/Hitachi business unit, which apparently never merged with mainstream WD).

I would vastly prefer that my Sandisk disks not have WDness all over them.

I started my career as a programmer building software for Windows CE and PalmOS. I rather liked Windows Mobile because I could print and get a tolerable web experience basically the moment I powered it on. It had functional file management, something iOS still can't manage.

I have a 3960X about 1m from where I sleep. I tried using an AIO water cooling setup but found the pump to be louder than a Be Quiet! HSF that actually worked better for cooling anyway.

A lot of water cooling setups aren't designed to deal with the larger dies or different hot spots found on Threadrippers, so they're less than ideal in just about every way compared to high end air cooling.

Some home user DO use their home computers for more intensive applications.
My main PC and my main notebook were both purchased to be capable video editing rigs, for example. That's a space where everything really WILL run better with proper hardware, even if that leads to oddball configs like putting an Intel Arc GPU in an AMD Threadripper system just because Resolve Studio does some tasks better with the Intel GPU than with a current RTXwhatever.

Just because most people don't do anything all that interesting doesn't mean that no one needs anything different.

DaVinci Resolve Studio is a professional grade video editor that's increasingly popular as an alternative to Premier, which, for Windows users, is widely seen as unstable.

Resolve runs on Linux as well as Macs and Windows. It's notable for ease of color grading and being able to invoke one or multiple GPUs during editing workflows, often in a more substantial way that Premier can. Both Premier and Resolve have a certain amount of interesting AI functionality, but Resolve Studio is a $350 one time purchase, not-Studio Resolve is completely free and Premier is something like $60/month from now until the end of time.

Video editing is a place where Linux definitely has a legitimate use case.

I always see people advocating for using Rpi devices as smart home controllers, but the base unit plus all the transceivers needed pushes the price up substantially from just a $50 Pi.

Hubitat makes the Elevation, which is a $100 smart home controller the size of a pack of smokes that is more or less a do-everything smart home controller. It doesn't rely on internet connectivity and it has automation controls that let it do some neat stuff by for example monitoring when a particular MAC address is joined to your WLAN.

The Philips hub as is does seem to work offline right now. IIRC it's either Zigbee or Zwave-based, and plenty of things can actually run those, with or without the Philips hub. I do think it's pretty cool to set every light in my house to one lighting theme. I also like being able to transition from 5000K (daylight) to 3600K (tungsten yellow) over the course of a day. These things are small luxuries, yes, but I like having them.

Not even my employer has my cell number. They have the number for a land line I had in 1998. My co-workers give out their personal cell numbers. They get support calls and text messages 24/7. And you can't un-fuck that chicken. They've lost all personal boundary between work and home life.

I have SMS shut off that the carrier level (my work phone line can be texted authentication codes). My voicemail box is full. I don't even use my phone as a camera. I have cameras for that. My phone is at this point a 5G email terminal/system monitor and occasionally the tool I use to capture video while I'm shooting with my (real) cameras.