I would start with a heat shield and see if that helps. I Had a similar issue where my AC evaporator is 6 inches from an exhaust header. I added a heat shield on the evaporator housing and it helped with AC temp.

Last time there was a discussion about arm pillows I bought one of them. https://medcline.com/products/shoulder-relief-pillow

I don’t use it as they depict but I do use some of the pillows.

I started with a $15 double edge safety razor that I used for years. I bought the $70 Henson razor because I wanted a better shave, but the results are about the same as the $15 razor I started with. The Henson razor glides better so I can get the same quality shave with less time. I can also shave twice (one across the grain once against) if I want a better shave, but it still isn’t the smooth shave I was hoping for. The henson razor came with 100 blades, but you can also get 100 blades for $10 on amazon.

They also cut the fabric multiple layers high with a giant stamping tool. The more layers of fabric they cut at once the more variance there is between top layer and bottom layer but the cheaper the process is. Higher quality cheap brands will advertise that they only cut x amount vs what the competitors cut so they have less variation.

There have been a few videos by hardware reviewers to address the sample size concern. Gamers Nexus tested 3 different CPU models with 20+ CPUs each and found that the biggest variance from lowest to highest performance was under 4% while performance variance in most cases was about 2%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUeZQ3pky-w

The way CPU manufacturing and binning are done means that cpus in particular will have very minor differences within the same model number.

I agree you don’t need a high end NVMe and most modern NVMe drives will be sufficient. I was more so trying to point out that drives have gotten a lot faster than sata ssd speeds. I don’t have strong recommendations for a specific drive but from a quick look at budget drives the Team Group MP44L 500GB is about 5000MB/s and about half the price at $44. It is still a 10x speed increase over the 850 evo. Some upgrade to NVMe would be highly worthwhile for gaming.

I was a bit mistaken the cache issue is for sustained writes not on sustained reading as I previously mentioned. The MP44L cache is large enough that you would probably never run into an issue with it unless you are re-imaging an entire disk. For drive performance I rely on Tom’s Hardware. For cache issues I specifically refer to their sustained write tests. The main thing to avoid is drives with a small cache as shown by the severe throttling of the Solidigm P41 Plus on that sustained write chart.

The Noctua NH-U12S is a classic and there is nothing wrong with it, but if you are wanting a more budget option the Thermalright Peerless Assassin can get you better performance for less than half the cost $34. for performance comparison I referred to the gamersnexus cpu cooler chart

For basic gaming you can probably just use your current drives but you will want to upgrade if you plan on playing newer games since they can be 50GB+ now. Modern games really want an SSD and I would strongly recommend an NVMe drive. For reference the 850 evo has a sequential read speed of 500MB/s and the SK Hynix Platinum P41 NVMe drive I recently upgraded to is 7000MB/s or 14x faster read speed. This can make a difference in loading speeds and also with pop-in during gaming. The SK Hynix Platinum P41 is $83 for the 500GB model on amazon. Most of the newer NVMe drives will have similar read performance, but some drives have issues with cache saturation when reading larger files that you should research before making a decision.

The RX 6700 XT is a strong choice for the $330 level. The RX 6750 XT is a bit more performance for a bit more money but both are great value. For comparison the performance is somewhere between a 3070 and a 3070Ti according to Tom’s Hardware

I’m not as familiar with AMD + Linux so I will let those more familiar with that combination weigh in.

Its mostly just increased reporting. Tech companies overhired when when they were doing well during lockdowns and are laying people off now that the increased revenue didn’t hold indefinitely.

https://layoffs.fyi/ has been tracking layoffs in the tech sector since covid and the charts show how much more layoffs there were in 2023 (particularly January and February). It seems like the biggest change is that now every time there is a layoff it gets more news coverage.

I didn’t understand the hate Sucker Punch got until I found out that the theatrical release was cut down to a PG-13 movie. To make it PG-13 they had to cut the core themes from the movie since they were not PG-13 appropriate.

I had only watched the unrated directors cut and never saw the theatrical version so any time I talked about this movie people had no idea what I was talking about. The story and supporting scenes were completely gutted and that’s why people say the movie didn’t have a good story - it was removed.