Once, a long time ago, roughly 2002 or so, I went and had cancer. I was 11, and the tumor was a rare guy that sprouted from the back of my neck and out of my right nostril, leaving me a medical anomaly with a lot of time on their hands. And so, during the chemo and radiation and surgeries, I escaped, and found solace in the Redwall series. I devoured every book. I was in love. And so, one day, a nice elderly couple came to visit me, stating that they were from the local make a wish branch. They said I had one wish, anything I wanted within reason. Most kids wished to go to Disneyland. One kid I knew wished for all of the current gen consoles (so ps2, GameCube, and Xbox lol) and a stack of games. Other kids had house renovations, or what have you. Some wished to meet a celebrity, like Jim Carrey, but typically others would too, so everyone would have to share a conference room while he gave each table 10 minutes of his time. Suffice to say, I did not know what to choose. Over the course of 2 weeks, I thought and I read, and at one point my mom sat me down and said, “Kid, do something cool, something neat, something no one else would do. Do something different.”
And so, when the elderly couple came back, they asked me what my wish was. I help up a copy of Salamandastron, pointed to Brian’s name at the top, and said “I want to meet this guy.”
Lo and behold, a year later I had my wish granted, and I was flown down to LA (I live in Canada) to catch him along a book tour stop. I spent a couple of days there, and on day 3, I was brought to the Four Seasons for breakfast. It was a glittering palace of marble and golden decadence. I was seated to a large oak table in a private room, and in he came, along with his wife, Liz. She talked to my sister and mother so that I could have Brian’s attention to myself, and he came and sat next to me, and handed me a backpack full of merch. We then got to talking. I had ordered a stack of blueberry pancakes, but I did not touch a single one, so elated was I. We talked about Greek mythology, and geography, and religion. He regaled me with tall tales and the complaints of an old man’s ailing body. He was kind, and warm, and seemingly quite happy to entertain the wish of a cancer kid. He gave me one of the best days of my life. After breakfast he brought us in his limo to the UCLA, where he was due to be on a panel. He had to take time for a book signing first though, but he marched me to the front with him and autographed my stack of paperbacks. I felt like royalty. Finally, we sat in the audience of an auditorium, and he spoke on a panel of writers. It was soon his turn to take to the podium, and he thundered down as the powerful orator that he was, giving creative inspiration and telling us all to make sure we never squander our gifts. Near the end he stopped to say, “I write about warriors in my books, and like to think that I know what being one entails. And I’d like to say, this boy, right here, he is a true warrior.” A spotlight was suddenly cast down upon me, and I was bid to stand up as I received a round of applause. I can only say that it felt like he knighted me that day, as if he was a king pointing on my shoulders with a pen, rather than a sword. He stands as a revered figure in my life, as his words have given me strength, and after his death I had “bellator verus,” or true warrior, tattooed onto me as a daily reminder of his legacy.
I grew up to try to get my English degree, but had that cut short with cancer 2. I realized I wanted a family instead, so I found my wife, and we have a young son together. I am writing my novel. One day, when kiddo is old enough, I will read him Redwall, and he will learn about being a warrior.

I am looking to get into pc gaming, been a long term console gamer. I am specifically looking for a powerful prebuilt, so don’t just say “don’t buy a prebuilt”. i’m willing to pay more if it means less chance of me screwing the assembly up with my naturally shaky hands. So here’s the thing: the P3 Prime is basically one of the best prebuilt pcs on the market atm, but being such a beefy pc with a 4090 and such, i’m wanting to make sure my potential monitor wouldn’t bottleneck the pc. I would want a monitor pretty close to me, and i’ve decided the best size for what i’m looking for is somewhere around the 27” mark. At that size, I don’t know if 4k would even be substantial enough to be worth it. I was thinking 1440p, but even with an OLED, hdr supporting, 1440p monitor with a high refresh rate (i was thinking 240 or so), would the fact of it being a 1440p monitor basically make the Player 3 Prime completely overkill? I’m not planning on doing anything too crazy with my future pc, ill be playing games of course, hopefully at a high stable framerate on high settings, but is the NZXT p3 prime worth it at all in my situation do you think, or nah? I obviously can’t spend that much money on a whim so i really need to know before i drop money on something as important as a pc. So what i’m trying to say is, would the pc i’ve mentioned be just a great high end option for my situation, or would it be completely overkill and i could be saving money for the same level of performance i would realistically be needing? all ill be doing is gaming and maybe content creation/streaming down the road, so i dont know if something like the player 3 prime is the right choice at all. I need help finding the right pc/ right monito just the right advice in this situation. Much help appreciated, love you all, see ya later! I’ll make sure to let you know what i do once I figure this out!

I don't understand too much about the nuts and bolts of how computers work so please forgive me if this is a dumb question.
I was looking at these articles talking about how transistors are becoming too small and computing is coming up against a wall. But from a pure power perspective, can computers just get bigger? Instead of a smaller transistor for example, just have more room for the same size? Or would the larger size be problematic? Maybe in something so precise the travel time of the electrons can start to become a factor?
It can't be as simple as "This is approximately how big we have to make everything because that's about how big it's always been" can it?

I am looking to get into pc gaming, been a long term console gamer. I am specifically looking for a powerful prebuilt, so don’t just say “don’t buy a prebuilt”. i’m willing to pay more if it means less chance of me screwing the assembly up with my naturally shaky hands.
So here’s the thing: the P3 Prime is basically one of the best prebuilt pcs on the market atm, but being such a beefy pc with a 4090 and such, i’m wanting to make sure my potential monitor wouldn’t bottleneck the pc. I would want a monitor pretty close to me, and i’ve decided the best size for what i’m looking for is somewhere around the 27” mark. At that size, I don’t know if 4k would even be substantial enough to be worth it.
I was thinking 1440p, but even with an OLED, hdr supporting, 1440p monitor with a high refresh rate (i was thinking 240 or so), would the fact of it being a 1440p monitor basically make the Player 3 Prime completely overkill? I’m not planning on doing anything too crazy with my future pc, ill be playing games of course, hopefully at a high stable framerate on high settings, but is the NZXT p3 prime worth it at all in my situation do you think, or nah? I obviously can’t spend that much money on a whim so i really need to know before i drop money on something as important as a pc.
So what i’m trying to say is, would the pc i’ve mentioned be just a great high end option for my situation, or would it be completely overkill and i could be saving money for the same level of performance i would realistically be needing? all ill be doing is gaming and maybe content creation/streaming down the road, so i dont know if something like the player 3 prime is the right choice at all. I need help finding the right pc/ right monito just the right advice in this situation. Much help appreciated, love you all, see ya later! I’ll make sure to let you know what i do once I figure this out!

I am looking to get into pc gaming, been a long term console gamer. I am specifically looking for a powerful prebuilt, so don’t just say “don’t buy a prebuilt”. i’m willing to pay more if it means less chance of me screwing the assembly up with my naturally shaky hands. So here’s the thing: the P3 Prime is basically one of the best prebuilt pcs on the market atm, but being such a beefy pc with a 4090 and such, i’m wanting to make sure my potential monitor wouldn’t bottleneck the pc. I would want a monitor pretty close to me, and i’ve decided the best size for what i’m looking for is somewhere around the 27” mark. At that size, I don’t know if 4k would even be substantial enough to be worth it. I was thinking 1440p, but even with an OLED, hdr supporting, 1440p monitor with a high refresh rate (i was thinking 240 or so), would the fact of it being a 1440p monitor basically make the Player 3 Prime completely overkill? I’m not planning on doing anything too crazy with my future pc, ill be playing games of course, hopefully at a high stable framerate on high settings, but is the NZXT p3 prime worth it at all in my situation do you think, or nah? I obviously can’t spend that much money on a whim so i really need to know before i drop money on something as important as a pc. So what i’m trying to say is, would the pc i’ve mentioned be just a great high end option for my situation, or would it be completely overkill and i could be saving money for the same level of performance i would realistically be needing? all ill be doing is gaming and maybe content creation/streaming down the road, so i dont know if something like the player 3 prime is the right choice at all. I need help finding the right pc/ right monito just the right advice in this situation. Much help appreciated, love you all, see ya later! I’ll make sure to let you know what i do once I figure this out!

(Disclaimer: this is essentially my life story, so I understand if you don't want to sit and read a full novel of some depressing fuck's cry for help, but I couldn't find a way to condense it, sorry.)
Life is shit right now. It's taken a long time for me to admit it, but there's just no more beating around the bush anymore. I'm trapped in a profound sadness that refuses to loosen it's hold on me, and I don't know what to do. I don't want to end it all, I never have, but I've just been through so much that it's hard to believe things could ever get better.
I'm 24(M), and 4 years ago I lost both of my parents, 10 months ago my girlfriend of 6 and a half years broke up with me, and just a few weeks ago the company I had been planning to work for over half my life shut its doors for good. Now I'm sat with no clear path forward and a brother trying to take what little I have left, and I just don't know how to move on.
I lost my dad on February 29th, 2020. He had been in and out of the hospital for the past couple months for constipation, didn't think much of it, he was 68 after all. One night I come in to visit him in the hospital and I walk in on a surgeon explaining something to him and my mother. It turns out that results from the latest test had come in and a polyp had burst in his large intestine, he was quickly developing sepsis and if they didn't operate soon he wouldn't see the sunrise. A few minutes to sort his thoughts and make some calls to my aunts for advice and he decided that the surgeon who talked to us was more than welcome to operate since he offered, it just so happened he was one of the highest rated gastro-intestinal surgeons in Texas (don't know if I got the name of the surgeon right, my bad). So they prep him for surgery and as they wheal him off to put him under he grabs onto my hand, with tears in his eyes, and says "Take care of your mother." He had a look in his eyes, he didn't think he'd get to open them again. But sure enough a few anxiety-inducing hours later the surgeon comes back out and lets us know that everything went off without a hitch, they managed to remove the blockage and clean everything up without issue. Dad spent the next week in recovery at that hospital, but I only managed to visit him there once. I hate hospitals, but I love my dad, so when I saw him in there, all strapped up with hoses poking in and out of him, I put a smile on and rubbed his feet like I always did (he broke both his legs and shattered an ankle years ago, the man was lucky to walk to begin with, so you'd better believe I'd help in any way I could). That's the last picture ever taken of me and my dad, with him strapped to a hospital bed and me giving him a foot massage. The next time I saw him he had been discharged without me knowing, so I headed back home to our rural town late one night when he said I could visit. I'd had a lot to think about then, I'd always thought I had so much more time with Dad, that I'd only have to say goodbye when I was good and ready and he had seen us through our biggest moments. By then I wasn't so sure, so I sat with him on that Friday night and just talked, for as long as I could. I told him the little things I'd been hanging on to for far too long, the kinds of things that didn't matter in the slightest but you'd never tell your parents because you're too embarrassed. I told him about how I bumped into someone at a stoplight right after high school, but I convinced the other guy not to get insurance involved because I didn't want him to know and end up costing him more money, so I just used all of my savings and my graduation gift to pay the guy off after he replaced his rear bumper. All dad had to say about that was "you should have gotten insurance involved, that's what it's for." We laughed, and he thanked me for telling him, said it proved that I was the man he always wanted me to be. We talked about a lot, I tried to hug him tight, but since the surgery was on his gut they couldn't just stitch him up. He was so bloated before the surgery that he looked pregnant, so the skin around his gut was delicate and they had to bandage him up and put this weird circulator on him to keep it clean. Either way, I hugged him as best I could, told him I loved him, that he should take it easy, and that I'd talk to him soon. I remember looking through the door as I walked away, he was just laid up in bed watching TV. I gave him a peace sign as I walk off, he always did the same, whether we were looking or not. That was 9:30 PM. At 6 the next morning I woke to my mom calling me in tears, she said dad was gone. They had spoken after I left, talked about what we discussed, and he said he couldn't get comfortable in bed so he'd moved over to the recliner in the living room. He didn't wake up. Later on when we finally got the reports back they said he had passed peacefully in his sleep due to a heart attack. Dad had heart problems before, he had a quadruple bypass when I was about 8 and a stint placed in later on due to a murmur in his heart, and ever since he'd been taking meds. There were so many little details that stuck with me from that day. He was wearing a pair of socks I gave him when I came back on the 29th. The night before he said he didn't think he'd wake back up after the surgery, but he did, which meant God wasn't done with him yet. I still remember the sound of my mom's sobs from behind the wall of my bed, my brother and I stayed with her for the first week afterwards.
I was always aware that I had a great life, but I had never lost anything so major, never had something so horrid and life-changing happen to me. One moment I was getting used to my new classes for the semester in college, and the next thing I knew my life had flipped ass over teakettle and the world was imploding. The combination of the pandemic hitting right as I experienced the worse loss of my life, in the middle of my second year of college, certainly didn't help either. To be honest, it's still a blur. I don't remember much of those months, only that the days blurred together as I barely perceived time passing. The semester ended, and one day when my brother are checking on Mom, she suddenly rushed out the door with a sack of vodka bottles in tow, got in her car, and drove off to work. We had worried she may have fallen off again, but had been hoping against hope she wouldn't. Mom had been alcohol my entire life, I won't get into it, but when we went to her work and my brother drove her home, we had to carry her upstairs ourselves after she fell into a potted plant with vomit on her shirt. Not too long after we staged an intervention and had her checked back into rehab. At the end of her first month she would decide if she'd stay for a second and third, and despite the pleas of my brother and I, she wouldn't listen. We said we were done with her. We had given her all the love and support we could, but if that wasn't going to work then we'd resort to our only other option and cut her out. When she checked out of rehab I drove her home. I thought I could try one last time to talk some sense into her, that maybe she'd listen to reason. In the end she just ignored me, so I said everything I could think to say. If it was going to be the last time I got to talk to her, then I'd make use of that ride home and tell her everything I could think of. Just like Dad. I dropped her off at the family home, gave her a hug, told her I loved her, and watched as she got smaller in the mirror as I drove away. About a week later on July 9th, I got a call from my brother and my Aunt, her little sister. She was gone. They found her in a CVS parking lot in her car, upside down. She had been there for hours. We don't know exactly what happened. She may have had a seizure. All we know is that the reports came back with "complications due to alcohol abuse and fatty liver."
After that, the estate fell to my brother and I as the sole inheritors. I'm thankful for everyone that came out of the woodworks to help us. Our aunts helped with the will and all of the proceedings that came after. A lot had to be done, and a 20 year old still in college (me) and a 24 year old fresh out of college (my brother), were not the ones capable to taking care of it all. It took months to sort it all out. Hell, some of it never got resolved because we just never knew what to do. What matters is that we had the time and space to grieve, and so I did.
It turns out I've always had depressive tendencies, but at this point I had fully developed an Anxiety and Depressive disorder. It came to a head one Summer day when I just couldn't take it anymore. I'd always wrestled with the concept of Death, that after everything that happens in your life it all just ends, nothing, just an end to all, void, nothingness. I hated it. It stills sends me into panic attacks to this day, and has since I was a child. That Summer day I hit rock bottom, and I couldn't think of anything else, because what else could matter if it was all going to end anyway? Why should I care? I'm not going to care when I'm gone, so why care now? It's not like I'll be around to regret leaving if I chose to end it all. These were the thoughts that flooded my mind, and they wouldn't go away. I took a walk. I went through my neighborhood, cut through the trees at the cul-de-sac near the bottom of the hill, and came to a path that led to a nearly dry creak. the water was barely flowing, but I was sweaty and I wanted to sit. So there I sat and contemplated it all. The absolute inconsequentiality of life and all its meaninglessness. I looked down and saw a rock, picked it up, and thought to myself just how long it would take to bash my brains out and end it all right there. Sure it would hurt, but only for so long, then it would be gone, and I'd stop hurting. I don't know how long I really sat there looking at that rock, but eventually a family of four came walking down the path and I had to get up to get out of their way since I was sitting in the middle of the path. I dropped the rock, let them pass, and walked back home. after that I called my friends, got the name and number for their doctor, and booked an appointment later that week. Ever since then I've been medicated and I'm better for it. I don't believe in those thoughts anymore, but it scares me that I got to a point that I nearly listened to them. I've back to that creek bed since, and it's actually very pretty right after a storm, when all the trees are still dripping with rainwater.
Fast-forward a few years and it's May 2023, I struggled and I stumbled, but I felt like I had made progress. I felt far from past it, but I was moving on. I graduated with a Bachelor's in Science for Art and Entertainment Technologies. I didn't know exactly what I'd do with it, but I felt like I could figure it out with the city I was in. I went up to celebrate my girlfriend's graduation a few weeks later up in Missouri, we had been together for six and a half years. We met in high school in the same friend group, stuck through college in a long-distance relationship, and I thought we would go all the way. Over that summer after we both graduated she had to take one last internship to finish up her degree. I visited when I had the chance, but over the course of the summer I worked to make sure the house lived in would be ready for her, ready for two people to live in together once we finally started our lives together. She spent another two and a half months in Missouri, and the day she got back on July 29th she broke up with me. She had her dad drive her down the night before, and she spent that night with me after the long trip. The next morning after waking up and having breakfast, she sat me down and said she didn't think we should be together anymore. It was something she decided on over the Summer, she said she'd been thinking about it for a bit and finally had a gut feeling that we should split up. There wasn't anyone else, she actually explained that it was the opposite. She had lived her entire life with barely any privacy. As the middle child of 6 children she rarely, if ever, got a moment to herself. She only ever had one room to herself, but even then it was in a smaller house with 4 other people, and no locks on her door. When she left for college she had to share a dorm with her roommate, and when she came back for the Winter and Summer breaks she stayed with me (I also have a housemate, so even then the privacy wasn't perfect). Over the course of that last Summer she finally had a room all to herself, a single dorm for 2 and a half months. During her internship it was the exact same, she worked in an archive, which are quiet on a bad day and silent as the grave every other day. Couple that with the fact that she only ever work with one other person (her supervisor), and that's if they worked with anyone else there at all, for 40 hours a week. She told me that summer gave her the alone time she never had the chance to take before, and spent a lot of it thinking, spending all the time she never got before to be alone with her thoughts. A couple weeks before she came back she had come to the conclusion that she didn't want to be in a relationship anymore. She gave me a lot of reasons for want to split up, that being one of them. The biggest reason, one she said she couldn't ignore, was that she thought we were becoming two very different people. She said she didn't think we would work if we stayed together, that the way she saw us going, it just wasn't going to work out. She told me she still loved me, but when I asked if it was in the same way as before, she could only shake her head. I still regret asking that. She left with her sister later that day, and came back with her family the next to pack up all her things and leave. When she was busy inside, I took a moment to talk to them and ask if I did anything wrong, they all said no. They said she was just the most independent person they all knew, and that I had nothing to be sorry for. It didn't help. When they were done she gave me one last moment with her, one last tear-stained kiss goodbye, but when she turned in the driveway to hand me back the extra key to the house, I broke down. I stood by the door just long enough to watch their car fade from view as they drove away, then I went back inside and collapsed into a void of sorrow and self-pity.
That was 10 months ago. I'd like to say I've made progress, but some days it's hard to believe that. In the time since I've spent a lot of time on myself, learning who I was and what I wanted to be. The main sticking point I had with her reasoning was that she was so certain we were going to end up two completely different people, but I didn't even know who I wanted to be. If I didn't know who I was, let alone who I was going to be, how could she be so definitively certain? A lot of time and self-reflection brought up a plethora of questions I'd never thought to ask myself. With a rural backwoods public Texas education, it turns out that a lot of mental health issues can fall between the cracks. I found out that I'm on the Autism Spectrum (I get my full Psych Eval later this week, so that's nice), I learned that I'm demisexual, and also that I get extremely, soul-crushingly lonely when I'm single. All my best friends had to move out of state last February (it's a long story but I can explain if necessary), so when we split up I had next to no one to fall back on nearby. I had acquaintances and others I could call, but the people I loved the most were a 13 hour drive away. I made the trip when I could, but it just wasn't the same. It's ironic though, I found a therapy service through a podcast she introduced me to. I've been seeing a reliable and caring therapist for 9 and a half of the past 10 months, so I'm grateful for that. I've come to learn that even if the crushing loneliness hurts the most, finding a new relationship isn't the right step forward. I spent long enough trying to make that happen, now I know it can't fix anything, nor should it.
For a while I was starting to feel things turning around. Not so much getting better, but it was a start. Then It got to February, and along with it another tide of problems. My brother has always been the one to party, since he was in high school and all throughout college he was the one that got the drinks and people together. When we became independent he was the one that got on my ass about not wasting our inheritance and only using it when absolutely necessary. It's ironic then, that he was the one to call me in late Feb telling me he'd blown through it all and gone bankrupt. For this next part I need to provide some context, so I'm sorry if it drags on. I never planned on moving out of the family home, but mom and dad had waited long enough and wanted me out, so mom agreed to find a place for me to stay and provide housing until I graduated college. She was a realtor for a big real estate company for over 25 years, and it just so happened that the last neighborhood she sold from had a model home the company wanted to get rid of. She pulled some strings and in the end she got it for a steal, like half the market price for a house in the area, with a monthly payment similar to most apartments in the same city. I'm well aware of how privileged I was and still am to this day, I don't want people to think I don't recognize the luck I've been given. However, when our parents passed the entirety of the estate was split 50/50 between my brother and I. Meaning that the house that I lived in at the time, and still have for the past 4 and a half years, is only half mine. This never really sat well with me, so when I eventually brought it up with my brother and asked about becoming the sole owner of my house, he agreed that it was the right call. The problem, is that he told me that he hand over his half for half of what the house would be sold for at maximum market price. He didn't want what we'd paid for, he didn't want half of what it was bought at, nor did he want any reasonable price, he wanted the most amount of money he could get for a home that wasn't his, nor was ever meant to be his (I want y'all to know that I already feel like the most privileged asshole ever having typed all this out, sorry for sounding like a shithead). Somewhere along the way, he got it in his head that I had already agreed to pay what he wanted me to for his half, and when he called me late Feb and asked for money, he got upset with me when I told him that I didn't want to. He got angry and started talking about how I owed him for my house, how I already agreed to pay him and that he'd count whatever I gave him as the start to my payment for the property I've lived on for nearly 5 fucking years. I panicked, and though I regret it, I caved and gave him far too much money (more than I'm willing to admit), in hopes he'd leave me alone. Unfortunately over the past 4 months he's only gotten worse.
Before this time we (my brother and our Aunts) came to the conclusion that the family home we had turned into an Airbnb was no longer sustainable. While it had been profitable for a good few months in 2022, by late 2023 it had turned into a money sink. There was more and more wear and deferred maintenance popping up with each passing month that by the time 2024 rolled around we were forced to choose between selling it off or emptying the rest of our inheritance in an attempt to fix it back up with no promise that it would be worth it. It sucked to do it, I spend the first 20 years of my life in that house, but in the end we gave the go ahead and my Aunt helped us put it on the market when Feb rolled around. The housing market where it's built is extremely competitive, it's on the outskirts of a rural tourist town with a view to die for, so we didn't think it would be too much waiting around before we got an offer. That was 4 months ago, and we haven't heard a word since, even though the first estimate was 6 weeks to 6 months. The agent helping us with the house let us know that there were over 60 homes being sold in the surrounding area, with half of them at a very similar price point. I don't feel comfortable revealing exactly what the house is priced at, but to give an idea, the money I'd make off of selling it, even after being split in half and reduced by taxes, would be enough to completely pay off the mortgage on my house and then some. The kicker to all of this, is that the house isn't in perfect condition. Even considering all the detracting factors, I'd say the price we have the house listed at is more than fair for the area, but nobody wants to buy a fixer-upper at that price point, even if it is worth it. To make all these matter worse, I found out recently that my brother has STILL been holding house parties there, even though he has a perfectly good party place where he currently lives! I found out when my Aunt told me about a showing we were going to have, but my brother tried to call and tell her to postpone it because he was going to be having a party the day before the showing was scheduled. In the middle of all this, he texts me out of the blue, trying to get me to talk to him and discuss something. I'm having none of it and tell him that if he needs to get something off his chest, he can text me or leave me alone, I don't want to talk. So he ends up sending me full fucking paragraphs, going on about how he's hit rock bottom, how we have to close the joint account we've been using to pay all the shared bills and expenses, and how he's so sorry for being a shitty older brother. Near the end of it he throws in how he recently lost his girlfriend to a drunk driver and that he's in mourning. I went digging and it turns out the girl he mentioned, who did tragically pass in an accident and was heavily mourned in the community, was not in a relationship with him for the past year and a half. I didn't know this until a month later though, so this all came out of the blue in a time where I just wanted to be done with him, so now I had no clue what to think. The way he spoke and said all the right things to make me feel for him hurt, it made me want to drive over to his house and throw my arms around him and tell him that he'd be okay and he wasn't alone. Then we found out about the party, and he never stopped using the joint account for all the bullshit personal spending he'd been using for before at liquor stores and bars, so I got to see first-hand what all he was spending both of our shared funds on (this is only one account I put money into when we need to pay bills, the majority of my money is in my own personal savings account that he doesn't have any access to). In short: he made it real obvious that everything he said to us was a complete and total lie, after pleading with me and making me take on the task of cancelling half the bills we had tied to the joint account just to save him the time and effort. He manipulated me, and it was plain as day to see it.
Now I'm at a point where I just have to wait for something to happen. I can't do a damn thing to change my shitty situation with my brother and my home. I want to cut him off, become fully independent, and leave all the trauma I have with him, but I literally can't. I have to wait until the family house is sold or he tries to come after me and my livelihood. I tried my best to research my options, but there's nothing I can do with my house unless he signs over his portion to me, and he won't do that unless he gets what he wants. The only thing I've been able to think of is that I could possibly take him to court and argue that his actions caused the selling price of our family home to go down, but I don't even know if that's possible or what it would do for me. I don't want to sue my brother, I just want to be done with him. I want to scream and yell and make him understand the stress he's put me through, make him feel the pain he's caused me my entire life just for wanting him to like me. I want to make him know just how much it hurts to have put so much effort into someone that was never going to care in the first place, but more than anything, I just want to be done with him.
I did the math, and unfortunately I now know that I have a time limit for the family home to be sold. Meaning that if the home isn't sold by the new year and we have to pay the property taxes again, I'll be the one taking the full brunt of that responsibility. If that happens I will either not have enough money in my savings to cover that cost, or I'll have just enough to pay for it and have nothing left. Either way, with how much the maintenance of everything has been draining our finances, I'd have to sell my current home to pay for the costs after property taxes are dealt with. It would solve so many issues if I just sold off my house, but it would hurt so God damn much. I've put so much effort into this house to try and make it feel like a home, make it feel like my home. When the world was falling apart and I lost everything else, this one house and the memories I made here were what kept me going. There are days where it feels like it's all I've got left. The last thing I want is to lose this house. I know I'd end up fine. I'd have funds left over to take care of me after it's sold, and the family home would sell eventually, but none of that would matter. I can see how long I might have left in this house in the pages left on the calendar hanging from my wall, and all I can do is wait for the other shoe to drop to see if I'm losing this too. All I can do is sit and fester in this shitty void of depression and anguish while I wait to find out what happens. I hate it.
When I didn't think anything could get worse, just a handful of weeks ago I idly checked Facebook and saw that my ex, the love of my life, had found herself a new boyfriend. Soul-crushing couldn't begin to describe what I felt. I thought I'd made progress, thought I'd said goodbye to my desire to rekindle what we once had. I thought I'd finally started to move on, but I suppose I didn't know how wrong I could be. She had changed her profile picture to one with her and him standing together, arm in arm. She looked so God damn gorgeous. I couldn't get over the fact that she had never done that when we were together, I guess I still haven't. I'm not even mad at her, or him, or anyone, I'm just in pain. I want her to be happy, she deserves to be happy, but all I can focus on is just how much I miss her. I saw her post about how they went to the zoo and it broke me. I've checked her Facebook so many times and I know I shouldn't, I keep telling myself that it's only going to hurt, but I still do it and it always breaks me down even more. For a short time she changed her picture to a different one and removed her relationship status, so I thought they had broken up. I feel guilty for even admitting it but it made me feel hope, like we still had a chance. I didn't want to give in to that feeling and set myself up for disappointment, but I couldn't help but feel like maybe she thought of what we had and there was a chance that the knowledge of who we were now would be enough to start something new. But I was wrong. She changed it to a new picture of the two of them a few days later, and it broke me all over again. It's strange, every time I start to feel like something is working, like I'm making some kind of progress, another bombshell comes hurtling around and blindsides me. I keep trying to get back on my own two feet, and I keep getting knocked back down. I feel myself becoming more and more jaded throughout all of this, and I'm trying so hard not to let myself become that. I feel the desire to just give up building more and more as the hurdles keep tripping me up, and I hate how appealing it's started to become. I'm just trying to find out who I am GOD DAMNIT, why can't anything just go fucking right.
I haven't had the motivation to do anything, it's always been an issue in my life that I've constantly fought against. From applying to college to finishing finals, I've only ever done the work that was most important when I had no other choice and at the last possible moment. Motivation and passion; these are the two things I've struggled with the most for the past year. I always knew that if I was going to find fulfilment in life, those would have to be my two guiding lights, or I'd end up sad and disappointed no matter where I found myself. Nothing seems to help, I can have fun when I make the conscious effort, but it doesn't feel the same. Now more than ever I've been putting in so much effort just to find out where I'm meant to be and what I'm meant to do. I've done and tried so many different things just to gain a better understanding of who that guy in the mirror staring back at me really is. I know I've made progress, logically it cannot be ignored that the steps I've made to get to the point that I have in life have done something, but it's gotten just so damn hard to see, and even more so to believe. There are days where I go through all the motions, I wake up, I eat, I do the things that I used to enjoy, but all I can think about is her and the amazing times we had. I think about all the plans we had together, the plan I had to ask her to marry me, the life we planned on building together. It just doesn't stop, but I'm doing so much to try and move forward. I just don't know if it's doing anything, if I'm just spinning my wheels in place while waste away on the inside. I schedule weekends where I can get away from it all and take a trip somewhere a few hours away, because even if I could be doing something else while I'm here, even I can recognize that a change in scenery and something new could always help. Sometimes it does help, other times it just feels like a distraction, and other times it just brings me back to the trips I used to take with her and the only thing I can think about is how much fun we'd be having if we were there together.
I used to think I knew what career I wanted in life. From a very young age I only ever wanted to work for the same company that produced the shows I grew up watching online. The things they made got me through so many darker times, and made the bright ones all the better to remember. I picked up new hobbies and learned new skills just to try and have an edge when I finally worked up the courage to apply for a job. I even picked up 3D modeling in high school just to get a head start from the inspiration their shows gave me. Then everything went to shit in my life, I lost nearly all direction, and I ended up too little too late. Two weeks ago the company that I'd been following for over half my entire life shut its doors for good, and I got to see one of my life-long dreams turn ash. At least I got to be there to say goodbye. They gave a lot to me, so I'm happy I at least got the chance to let them know that before they were gone.
I want to move on, I really do. Amidst the maelstrom of everything that's happened to me, and the deluge that still is happening to me, it just feels impossible that I ever could move on. I only just made my first resume last week for the first job I've every applied to, and it's at a retail store with nothing to do with what I studied in college. I want to make progress in life. I want to live. But I feel like I haven't had a life to live for so long now, and I just don't know what to do.
I'm sorry for the novel-length text dump of exposition and self-pity, I just didn't know what else to turn to.

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

I thought I was going to be a virgin for life but I finally got over my fear. Never fingered my self, never used tampons, wouldn’t let anyone touch me. Partner made me feel like something was wrong with me instead of helping me get through this. I even had past bf who made insensitive joke about my hole being “shut, and zipped” how nothing will probably ever go in there and even asked “do u even have a hole”?
My anxiety just got worse throughout the years and started feeling like something was probably wrong with me I probably don’t even have vagina lol sounds weird now but I started believing something was probably seriously wrong…. I came with this conclusion without ever exploring myself.
Last year I needed to get Pelvic exam, but I was terrified. I was having symptoms I knew I needed it to get looked at but fear made me cancel my appointment.
I was too terrified to get my vagina checked and I knew it was time for change: so this pushed me to make a change
In January of 2024 I decided to make change and I ordered dilators. After inserting the smallest size i finally learned that things can actually go in me…I learned when I would be nervous it wouldn’t go in but when I was relaxed it went all the way in…
On the days that it wouldn’t go in, I just left it alone and didn’t force anything in. I wasn’t bothered or thinking Something was wrong with my vagina because it wouldn’t go in. I just knew I’m just anxious.
However, when I was relaxed, it would go all the way in and I would be able to move it in an out fast. The times it went in taught me a lot about my vagina. How it feels like inside. How it stretches how it’s just a muscle.
I didn’t go all the way to the largest dilator. All I needed was the smallest one and after that I just jumped straight to sex. Everybody is different, but this is just what ended up working for me. I believe after my brain learned things are meant to go in the hole I finally felt very relaxed and had sex….
I know most people need to go all the way up to the largest dilator to be able to have penetration sex…. But for me it was mental more than anything and after practicing with the smallest one I was able to have sex.
The more relaxed I was the easier it was to go in and out….. Can’t wait to try more penetration sex, and get my pelvic exam which was what motivated me.
My only regret is that I didn’t try to fix it early on wish I hadn’t waited this long… but at the same time I am happy because I would’ve not want to lose my virginity to all those men that complained about me in the past. So I guess it happened at the right time.
In conclusion it was all anxiety for me. Once I trained my brain to get used to that small dilator I easily was able to move on to penetration sex…. I wouldn’t say the dilators helped me because I barely used the smallest one even. I would say my brain learned to relax and after relaxing penetration sex was actually simple

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

“So, what did you ask for?” Connor asked, talking to a skull that was dangling off a discarded spear. The handle of the spear firmly lodged into the charred ground, coating the spear shaft in the fine black dust of the soil. When the skull didn’t answer, he continued talking to himself. “See, I wanted my mom to be happy. She looked down after work, so young me thought a deal with the devil was the only way to solve that. She was happy for that day, though, so I guess things worked out. Man, you’re a good listener. None of the demons ever listen. It’s just torture this, hellfire that. But you. You get me. Do you want to be friends?”
A spurt of fire caught Connor’s skin, causing him to jump protectively in front of the skull, shielding it with his body. The torn fabrics he wore as clothing dangled, getting caught on the embers, only to be put out by his frantic pats. Before him stood the culprit of the fire, the devil himself. The hellish form was hard for the mortal mind to comprehend, being seen as a swirl of screaming faces that somehow formed a horned, chiseled red face. It was like a collage of suffering that stung Connor’s eyes if he stared for too long.
“You’re the one I need. Your sanity hasn’t broken, nor has your will been sucked from your flesh.” The devil stepped forward, his movement causing a spark of fire to drift from the ground, as if his body emitted raw heat with each step.
Connor shifted left and right, trying to block the skull from view. “You better not take Skully away, you red bastard. I’ll fight you.” Sanity may have not been the best word to use for Connor’s state. Torture quickly withered away a person’s mind, but in Connor’s case, he hadn’t been subjected to it as long as the others. So, somewhere deep in that haze of confusion and insanity, sat a human still.
The devil groaned, staring down at the human, those deep black pupils meeting Connor’s eyes. “I don’t want the skull. I want you. The angels demand I show them a soul that can be saved, someone who is showing a positive change from my ‘rehabilitation.’ I want you to be that person.”
“Can Skully come?” Connor asked, not understanding what the devil was on about. All of it sounded fascinating though, as if would be something worth doing. It had to be better than torture, anyway.
The devil didn’t answer. Instead, he grasped Connor’s throat, squeezing it until a blue orb was pushed out of Connor’s mouth, being spat onto the ground before the demon. The orb bounced against the floor; the spit dripping from it turning to steam as it rolled along the hot ground. “No, I only need this.” He tossed the now lifeless body of Connor away, collecting the soul in his palm, taking it to the agreed upon destination.
In a small fish and chip shop in England, the devil sat, holding a briefcase. The king of hell disguised in a black trench coat, with red and black sunglasses. As he waited for the angel representative, he stroked his goatee, expecting his meal to be brought out soon. When the box of greasy fish and chips hit the table, he was interrupted. Unable to even get a bite in before the angel sat across from him.
Osira patted down her skirt as she sat across from the devil. The look she gave him was that of disgust, nose wrinkled as if he stank worse than the old oil the shop used. “I hope you have something to show me this time. God seems open to the idea of removing you entirely. Hell is an outdated concept, and you’re irrelevant.” While angels were meant to be perfect, she couldn’t help but smile at the word irrelevant. Osira, getting a lot of glee after seeing how that made the devil tense, digging his powerful hand into the table after she said it.
“I’m needed now more than ever. Hell can work. Some souls can even show remorse after coming here.” He handed the briefcase over. “Look at this soul here. A poor man who gave up his soul for the simple wish of making his mother happy. With my harsh love, he’s developing into a man that can understand the error of his ways. He even still has hit wits about him. I assure you, all the rumors you’re hearing about hell are false. The people who come here are fine.”
She opened the briefcase, staring at the shining blue light that emanated from it. The light sparkling in her eyes, before she shut it, having glimpsed Connor’s life in that moment. “How many wits he has left is debatable. Although, I admit, he appears sane enough to disprove the rumors.” She hated how honest angels had to be, wishing she could lie so they could finally rid the world of the devil.
“Great, so don’t bother me for another thousand years, ok?” The devil went to grab his briefcase, only for Osira to pull it away.
“I’m keeping this one. The terms of his deal weren’t greedy, nor were they sinful. For that reason, I don’t think he needs to be held in your captivity any longer. Consider his sentence served. I would like to ask him personally about hell.”
“You can’t do that. He’s mine to tor-rehabilitate.”
“So, you think he deserves more punishment for such a small misdemeanor? It’s already been two years. Let me remind you that anything you say will be passed onto god.”
“FINE, TAKE HIM.” The devil hissed, waving his hand at her. Knowing how bad it would look if he demanded to keep the soul.
“I will do that, thank you. We will be in touch once we hear what the man has to say.” With that, the angel left, leaving the devil to stew in his frustrations, not even hungry enough to finish the food before him.
In heaven, Osira set the soul down, reforming his body around the soul. The pact between heaven and hell always made it hard for them to find out information about hell. Since angels couldn’t go to hell, the only way to get information was from either the devil or ex humans that left hell. Unfortunately, hell wasn’t a place many left or escaped from and those that did were never the same. Which is why she hoped Connor would be different.
When his eyes opened, Osira smiled. “Glad you’re awake. Now, why don’t you tell me about hell, if you can?” she said, holding his hand, hoping he held the key to shutting down hell.

So I have aphantasia. Which means i cannot visualize in my mind. I can't see anything when I am imagining only knowing what it would look like. So with that being said I feel it wouldn't really make sense for my to have visual hallucinations as I cannot create visuals in my minds eye on purpose. This is just a preface to why I believe I really saw these creatures.
The first time I saw one it was mermaid. I was swimming at a spring feeling probably the best i've ever felt in my life. I felt that way because I had a lot of realizations/awakening occur for me that weekend and I really reconnected with my faith in the universe and trusting my path and self. I was riding the most incredible high i've ever felt just by simply being in connection with the universe and my present moment. I see a friend floating in his tube and he smiles and beckons me over to him. I happily swim right over and he asks if i want to see the cave. Of course I say yes and he takes me over to it, hands me a scuba mask and has me on my way. I asked him if i could fly (cause that's just how i was feeling in that moment) and he says no but you can float! So i excitedly put the mask on my face and submerge myself into the water and take a look around. What i was seeing was unreal. but it was so real. It was all right there in front of my face. I could see the beauty in everything. I felt absolutely like nothing i've ever felt before, it is such an indescribable feeling but some may chop it up to pure bliss. I'm looking around and taking it all in, feeling like i can breathe underwater (I still almost think i was) and then I turn to see what else is there behind me and BAM right there maybe 3 feet away from me is a mermaid. It appeared to be a male with beautiful flowing blonde hair and a green tail. My jaw dropped and I audibly am like "A MERMAID?!?" and he just smiled at me and waved. Right after seeing him I get a feeling that I need to come up for air, So i swim on up and take off my mask and look around. Thinking there is no way i actually just saw what i saw i told my friend who brought me there and he just kind of smiled at me like he totally believed me and told me "it's incredible isn't it?" That completely reaffirmed everything i had just experienced. I stayed in that same area for a while and never saw that mermaid again. Looking through the water from above I couldn't see anyone down there where I had just seen him. I really believe that he revealed himself to me to show me the power I have to free myself.
Now tonight. I've been doing a lot of work since seeing that mermaid. I have been in a constant state of freeing myself from old habits, thought loops, and constraints that society has put onto me that i accepted. Today was really hard and I wanted to give in to those old patterns but I resisted. I was rewarded by getting another glimpse into the truth. My window has a clear view into my neighbors backyard. She has a light that is motion sensored and sometimes i will see it turn on and there is this cat that wanders around out there (the cat likes to wander a lot i've seen it out in the neighborhood many times). Today i saw it turn on and looked to see the cat just cause i wanted to. But i didn't see it. I kept looking around and I couldn't see it but then I see something flying close to the light. It was flying sort of like a bug but it was so big for a bug it was the size of like a pigeon and i couldn't see it too well because it disappeared as quickly as it appeared. But the glimpse i got of it I could see skin color with very light colored wings... I just know it was a fairy.
I am so blessed for these glimmers and no one can tell me they weren't real. Thank you for reading, if you can find it in you to believe you may be gifted to see them too :)

Hopefully not violating rule 7. I have been a hip pack convert for many years. Some rides I like a big pack that more or less replaces a backpack for a single day long ride. Like to fit 3L of extra water, first aid kit, food, tools, extra layer, etc. I have an old school north face from the early 00s thats huge and fits it all but its basically a single pocket. It also has zero air flow along the back and the webbing for the buckle is too thin and kind of digs into thr abdomen. Made of poly/cotton blend so gets soaked and easy to rip. I've looked at everything I could find on the market right now and it doesn't seem like anything gets over 7L or so which is not big enough or anything bigger than that doesn't have enough separated compartments.
Thus I am going to try and make my own. I make lots of diy stuff and am mildly capable with a sewing machine. I'm looking for input from the collective experience on this sub on what your perfect hip pack would be like/what do you not like about your current packs.
Things I'm thinking so far: -dedicated bear spray holster -interlocking metal belt buckle like on good avy backpacks -dedicated easy access tool storage, also similar to a ski pack -belt sliders on the pack attachment points rather than the buckle, e.g. osprey packs -possibly roll top design like the oveja Negra Royale for the main compartment but other zippered compartments/pockets attached to the outside of the main body -external hard points to tie/clip into, think that would be more utilitarian than straps attached -dedicated tube compartment to keep em safe. -straps to cinch pack down depending on volume filled -waist strap attached to pack a few inches in from the sides so when it's wide isn't trying to bend load around your back -ventilated back support, figured I would cannabilize an old pack for this. Can usually find come cheap ones at a garage sale -some kind of rigid frame behind back support -might put a port for a hydration hose but I've used frame bottles for years dont see myself rocking a hose again -water and abrasion resistant material, laminated zippers
Scouts honor im not some designer from dakine or somewhere just out fishing(which if they were smart they should probably be doing)
TLDR: want to make the world's best yet surely janky diy hip pack, requesting suggestions for features