A kid in our high school went on national news and said he could procure weed in the school in less than 3 minutes. He then proved it. Made national headlines and became a big topic in parliament.

Of course they went looking for the stoner, found him, and then asked him to source the source of what made him stoned. Kinda self-explanatory but the news didn’t seem to think so.

Oh, and in primary school, I think I was “the incident”. I hacked the schools computer network and made all PCs boot into a message that read “Teachers are dumb”. It really wasn’t very sophisticated, at all, but shut the computers down for a week while they had “experts” in to clean them up.

When I told the expert that having the PCs optionally boot from floppy and this allowed me full access to all the PCs, including the control server through which they distributed autoexec.bat updates to them all … well he sold me like I was some kind of sophisticated wiz-kid that needed containment. I got a life time ban from the computer labs. The kid that squeeled on was ostracised by everyone else (I had made up with him quite quickly, I knew I shouldn’t have told him and sort of blamed myself).

I’d just search for the specific CPU and “plex” and “transcoding” and see what comes up. I’ve not heard many success stories of AMD CPU transcoding, despite them having good hardware support. Stand ready to be corrected.

Save more than you need.

Run fiscal history simulations (several programs do this for you). If I had invested this money in 1900, how would this have fared? If I had invested this money in 1901, how would this have fared. Etc.

Accept that you can’t plan for everything except your own resilience. You may have to adjust your spend if things are looking harder than you had planned for. You’ll be fine. At least that’s what I tell myself.

My fiscal plan has me running out in 0% of historical scenarios, which is belt and braces. Still need to save a lot before I can retire according to that fiscal plan.

Yes they do. Not sure if 48 counts as older than you, but I’ve definitely seen economic cycles and peace/war cycles come and go. This too shall pass.

I run EXOS drives in the under-stair cupboard. They’re noisy but they’re not that bad.

There’s definitely a chance my knowledge is no longer current but I would 100% verify that for your operating system of choice (which I presume is Linux), your AMD CPU can deliver hardware transcoding under Plex. I’ve not heard of AMD CPUs handling this under Linux at least. Ready to be corrected.

You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box. The Intel route is often easiest here, and I say this as a die hard AMD fan.

Are you intent on building your own box?

I’m only asking because TerraMaster does the F6-424 (or F4-424) series which has 6 bays (or 4), a decent CPU (1235U) with hardware transcoding support, space for two 4x4 NVME m.2 SSDs, which runs silently and will just work as an appliance, even though it is a full PC. You can then install unraid or truenas on it, or heck bareback Linux and do it yourself. There are decent alternatives to putting something together yourself.

Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.

I’d agree that the average game dev is on Unity or unreal and won’t be hand optimizing any inner loops.

But there are a surprising amount of studios still on their own tech and there the low-level engineers definitely do (I’ve worked in the industry and have seen it first hand - and done it myself).

It also tends to be at the start of a console’s life span before the compiler and linker is mature up against the hardware.

Many games are still hand optimised in assembly, at least the inner loops.

BURN HIM AT THE STAKE!!!

It doesn’t (yet, Trump has sort of said they could buy it). The OP was talking about a British F-35B that had a technical issue and got stranded due to a missing part to fix it.