build the biggest beowulf cluster you can!

> How are you getting ready?

Finding out how to make the best use of the large amount of DDR3 RAM I have.

Those Chinese C612-based boards for the E5-2696v3, et al. (which support DDR3 and DDR4) seem OK with the custom BIOSen out there.

Installing linux on old hw is helpful. I got lucky and hoarded a few hundred GB of RAM before prices went up.

Install an adblocker. I'm not even kidding; it's been my secret to keeping older hardware with less (and slower) memory usable since the late '00s, and it's served me well.

That and, if you're into gaming, thank your lucky stars that there are all sorts of games from 15 years ago that are every bit as much fun now as they were then.

Just don't subscribe. Do not subscribe to cloud, do not subscribe to AI, do not subscribe to remote computing/gaming. Starve the datacenter hogs eating up your personal computing to resell it back to you on subscription.

Buy older computers, install GNU/Linux, just whatever you do #NeverSubscribe!

I would actually suggest getting into microcontrollers - there is wide variety of them & are very useful for many tasks. They are also apparently largely unaffected by the AI memory/storage price insanity as they hardly need any big amount of either.

Add some hardware on top and you can have it drive an e-ink screen, run a drone, act as a LoRa repeater with a 40 km range, etc. :)