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Comment by xgbi | Hacker News Reader

You can create an entire VFX short film with an high end pc. You can simulate fluid mechanics and invent a new revolutionary propulsion system for aircrafts with an high end Pc. You can train a NN to recognize perilous situation from webcam footage and distribute the weights freely on GitHub With a HPC. There are Miriam of things you can do with a powerful computer.

This law is stupid, a single EV recharge consumes 100x more than a HPC every single second.

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Do the majority of gaming PC owners spend most of their time doing those tasks though? I think if the answer were yes, we would be discussing VFX and ML workstations, not "gaming" PCs.

If we can legislate less environmentally harmful ways of doing commerce, why can't we legislate less environmentally harmful forms of entertainment? This is simply the logical conclusion of that line of reasoning.

Workstation hardware can be used for desktop gaming and any PC can be used for workstation tasks. There's no good reason to treat them differently under the law when the specifics of how they're different are very arbitrary.

They're marketed as gaming PCs. Why shouldn't they be regulated according to their intended purpose?

Marketing is marketing, any PCs intended purpose is whatever the owner chooses to use it for. I play games on a xeon machine with ECC sometimes. The distinctions between workstations and "gaming" PCs are arbitrary and superficial and no one should be misled into thinking otherwise.

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