Conspiracy theories just need to be theories of conspiracy. It carries an implication of implausibility only because of popular perception. e.g. TV and movies like to show a "conspiracy theorist" as a person struggling with paranoia who has outlandish theories and no credibility.

Real, mundane conspiracies are numerous, and there are probably some outlandish ones, too. Every proven conspiracy must have started with someone's theory, if not an unprompted admission, so it's not always wrong to theorize. It's just silly to dedicate more than a little brain space*time to theories you've got no evidence for or hope of proving, conspiracy or otherwise.

You are correct about the dictionary definition of the word, but in popular parlance the phrase "conspiracy theory" has a massive negative connotation. I have literally never in my life seen someone use the phrase without intending to imply "crazy/unprovable/etc".

As a sort of recursive aside, the particular strength of the modern connotations of conspiracy theory are supposed to be a result of CIA propaganda produced to help cover up mkUltra.

The common parlance is very problematic. Anyone can see it is in fact a conspiracy theory, but if it's true, you're not supposed to call it that? How would you know?

Using conspiracy theory as a derogaratory term is a form of doublespeak that shield the conspirators and their conspiracies.

I, for one, will not stop calling conspiracy theories conspiracy theories, regardless whether they are true. Actually, especially when they are true.

Further, the naked word "conspiracy" is itself trending towards this meaning.

"It's not a conspiracy if it is not illegal." By definition.

Garden-variety corruption doesn't need a conspiracy. The US is today the world leader in high-level, fully legal corruption. It took many decades to get there, but it will take even longer to choke it off, if we ever do.

We even elected an out-and-out con man to the presidency. Russia wishes it could be so corrupt, but just doesn't have the money for it. China does, but its corruption is mostly still technically illegal.

A lot of garden variety corruption such as this is actually illegal in the US.

However, you can also form a conspiracy to commit a legal act if it’s got some negative stigma your trying to avoid. For example students may conspire to lower the bar when graded on a bell curve.

A conspiracy theory is any suggestion that two or more people have conspired together to do something. It’s recently become a synonym for “anything I believe to be false”, but that’s not really what it means at all.

I really dislike the use of "conspiracy theory" as a thought stopper. Conspiracies and other underhanded behavior absolutely does exist. The FBI has an entire conspiracy division dedicated to organized crime.

The conspiracy theories that people usually mean by that term are the silly ridiculous ones like Qanon, outlandish "secret space program" stuff, we didn't land on the moon, etc.

I don't think that this is the reason this time.

I have a Ryzen 5950x system and like many other owners I suffer from poor stability. My machine crashes several times a week with CPU errors.

This seems to be the result of poor BIOSes from AMD and their partners, more so than fab faults - reddit is full of people who still have issues after their 3rd RMA.

I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if I was Dell.

Very often, when Windows crashes due to hardware shenanigans, it writes a minidump into c:/Windows/Minidump folder. You can use WinDbg to see what happened. Sometimes the problem is faulty RAM or similar random fails, nothing interesting there, but more often the problem is specific piece of hardware, the minidump then tells which driver has crashed and what it was doing when it happened.

Counter anecdote, but I run the Ryzen 9 5950X on dedicated servers with Ubuntu 20.04, and they are as stable as they should be.

Funny, never had an issue with mine. Bad stick of ram caused a few issues, but when it was replaced all’s been well.

I have a 5950X as well and it's only mostly stable. I've been running at stock with just PBO enabled and it's mostly fine. It's not so unstable I regret building it since it almost always only reboots and logs a WHEA error when I'm not using it for some reason.

For sudden reboot issues, could be some power protections tripping? For me that showed up as shutdowns (that require turning the PSU off for a minute), but maybe depending on various components and could result in reboots as well?

PBO seems to result in some wild power spikes that don't ever happen with manual static OC. Try raising various overcurrent limits, that worked for me.

Not sure, it only happens though (9.9/10) when the system is idle so it could still be power delivery related but in the other direction.

I have a 5800X and I hadn’t even heard of it. But the supply chain thing seems plausible — it’s still hard to get your hands on Zen 3.

Wow. Hope it gets fixed soon. I’d be livid about this even if I only used the machine in the off hours.

I installed the new beta BIOS update a week ago and since then my machine is been ROCK solid.

Interestingly, my fan is running harder now; whilst CPU usage is low but spiking on 1-2 cores. It never did that before; so maybe the problem was caused by a thermal bug in the bios.

It tends to crash when idle, and the machine is such an enormous improvement over anything Intel have made that I'm happy overall.

The issues with the BIOS will be solved and I'm not an overclocker.

Must be Windows since I never had problems with my Pop!_OS installation

lucky me never had issues with my 5950x (windows, x570 taichi). That being said, TDP 105w is bs.

That is not the issue, the issue is that AMD advertise 2700x and 5950x with the same TDP, so at the very least that should means that they both work fine when using the same cooling solution, which is not the case. Using my previous cooler 5950x was throttling at 100 Celsius.

TDP is just now a marketing term. We all know that the real value is when the CPU is boosted.