Monday, August 31, 2026

Please stop recommending the Fractal Design Define PC cases (Define R5, Define 7 XL, etc)

I fell for the Reddit meme and bought the Define R5 and Define 7 XL cases and now I deeply regret it.

Leaving aside the obviously minor issues, such as:

  • Skyward facing USB ports, so dust just falls right in. No dust protector.
  • Define 7 XL has fairly weak magnets holding the side panels, no screws. This means your SATA power cables can easily push open the side panels from the inside.
  • No HDD LEDs.
I recently bought a 3x3.5 inch SATA backplane which uses 2x5.25 inch bays. 

The define R5 and Define 7 XL both have 2x5.25 inch bays. Yet the 2x5.25 bay SATA backplane does not fit into the Define R5, at all (the 1x5.25 bay version fits just fine). The 2x5.25 bay backplane also cannot be installed into the Define 7 XL because the Define 7 XL has no 5.25 bay cage pre-installed at all. The Define 7 XL accessories kit comes with an extremely shortened 2x5.25 bay cage (so it's not even a full length cage), and the 2x5.25 bay SATA backplane cannot even fit into that cage at all. 

It is worth noting that the 2x5.25 bay SATA backplane DOES FIT very nicely into my HP Z240, which is a much smaller tower than the Define R5 and Define 7 XL. But it is useless, because the HP Z240 has only 4 SATA ports, one of which is occupied by the CD drive, so why would you put a 3x3.5 inch SATA backplane into a PC that can only take 3 SATA drives? The main thing is that the 3.5 inch backplane didn't even have vibration dampers, so I can't even put HDDs into it really, and I really want to put a 3.5 inch HDD in, so I'd have to put that HDD into the actual tower and not in the backplane, which means the backplane can really only take two drives, which makes it completely pointless and cost-ineffective since I can get two 1x3.5 inch for cheaper.

Sunday, August 23, 2026

Man, Claude fucking sucks

Recently I was looking at buying a server rack. I asked Claude which shelves I should get for the rack. There are shallower shelves and deeper shelves and I was looking at a rack which had adjustable depth. 

Claude told me that there was no point in getting a shallower shelf because even though the rack's depth was adjustable, it would always use the same amount of floor area regardless of how the depth was adjusted. Claude said that I should just get a deeper shelf because it would use the same amount of floor area as the shallower rack shelf.

I told Claude to stop fucking trolling. Claude apologized and went and looked up the listing for the rack and found that the rack's depth was, indeed, adjustable, and that it was wrong to have said that the rack would use the same amount of floor area regardless of how its depth was adjusted.

On many other occasions I have noticed that Claude is unable to look up Amazon listings, its fetch URL tool would just fail, while at the same time Chatgpt and Gemini are able to successfully fetch the URL and look at the Amazon listing. 

This makes me very angry, because I am paying real money to Anthropic for my Claude subscription, whereas I am using the free versions of Chatgpt and Gemini, yet the free versions of Chatgpt and Gemini are far outperforming Claude on the most elementary of functionalities (the ability to fetch URLs).

Keep in mind all of this was done by Opus 5, so this makes me extra angry. I am paying real money for the best Anthropic model and yet it is making elementary mistakes and being clearly outperformed by the free Chatgpt and Gemini models.

Yes I am mad.