GamingChairModel

@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube devs be like⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there’s a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.

  No, it doesn’t need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, everything that can be expressed as letters is in the Library of Babel. Finding anything meaningful in that library, though, is gonna take longer than just writing it yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just mean does it keep offline copies of the most recently synced versions, when you’re not connected to the internet? And does it propagate local changes whenever you’re back online?

  Dropbox does that seamlessly on Linux and Mac (I don’t have Windows). It’s not just transferring files to and from a place in the cloud, but a seamless sync of a local folder whenever you’re online, with access and use while you’re offline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does it do offline sync?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  iCloud doesn’t have Linux, Android, or Windows clients. It’s basically a non-starter for file sharing between users not on an Apple platform.

  I don’t like the way Google Drive integrates into the OS file browsing on MacOS, and it doesn’t support Linux officially. Plus it does weird stuff with the Google Photos files, which count against your space but aren’t visible in the file system.

  OneDrive doesn’t support Linux either.

  I just wish Dropbox had a competitive pricing tier somewhere below their 2TB for $12/month. I’d 100% be using them at $5/month for like 250 GB.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s first Mac mini redesign in 14 years looks like a big aluminum Apple TV⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So with the case/mobo/power supply at $259, the CPU/GPU at $329, you’ve got $11 left to work with to buy RAM and SSD, in order to be competitive with the base model Mac Mini.

  That’s what I mean. If you’re gonna come close to competing with the entry level price of the Mac Mini (to say nothing of frequent sales/offers/coupons that Best Buy, Amazon, B&H, and Costco run), you’ll have to sacrifice and use a significantly lower-tier CPU. Maybe you’d rather have more RAM/storage and are OK with that lower performing CPU, and twice the power consumption (around 65W rather than 30W), but at that point you’re basically comparing a different machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s first Mac mini redesign in 14 years looks like a big aluminum Apple TV⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, let’s put together a mini PC with a ryzen 9700X for under $600. What case, power supply, motherboard, RAM, and SSD are we gonna get? How’s it compare on power, sound, form factor?

  It’s an apples to oranges comparison, and at a certain point you’re comparing different things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s first Mac mini redesign in 14 years looks like a big aluminum Apple TV⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was last comparing laptops a few years back I was seriously leaning towards the Framework AMD. It was clearly a tradeoff between Apple’s displays, trackpad, lid hinges, CPU/GPU benchmarks, and battery life, versus much more built in memory and storage, a tall display form factor, and better Linux support. Price was kinda a wash, as I was just comparing what I could get for $1500 at the time. I ended up with an Apple again, in the end. I’m keeping an eye on progress with the Asahi project, though, and might switch OSes soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s first Mac mini redesign in 14 years looks like a big aluminum Apple TV⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For the Mac Mini? The Apple Silicon line has always been a really good value for the CPU, compared to similar performance from Intel and AMD. The upcharge on RAM and storage basically made it break even somewhere around 1 or 2 upgrades, if you were looking for a comparable CPU/GPU.

  For my purposes the M1 Mac Mini was cheaper than anything I was looking at for a low power/quiet home server, back in 2021, through some random Costco coupon for $80 off the base $599 configuration. A little more CPU than I needed, and a little less RAM than I would’ve preferred, but it was fine.

  Plus having official Mac hardware allows me to run a Bluebubbles server and hack Backblaze pricing (unlimited data backup for any external storage you can hook up to a Mac), so that was a nice little bonus compared to running a Linux server.

  On their laptops, they’re kinda cost competitive if you’re looking for high dpi laptop screens, and there’s just not really a good comparison for that CPU/GPU performance for power. If you don’t need or want those things then Macs aren’t a good value, but if you are looking for those things the other computer manufacturers aren’t going to be offering better value.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple teases “week of announcements” about the Mac starting on Monday⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  uh that was Siri’s fault

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s a great guy, but sometimes a little hard to follow if you’re only taking part in one conversation at a time when he’s talking in two and listening to a third because he expects you to be on the ball in your own discussion when he jumps in to drop a tidbit or ask a question like a chess master playing 4 games in the park at once

  If it’s like simultaneous chess, why isn’t the single thread sufficient context for everything that happens in that thread? It just sounds like the guy you’re describing has low cognitive empathy and doesn’t understand other people’s minds. At that point you’re just describing a neurodivergent person who may or may not be a genius in certain domains, while being a moron in this one domain that you’ve described.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Ever Happened to Netscape?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Netscape 4.0 was simply slower than IE 4.0. Back then, when a browser was a program that would actually push the limits of the hardware, that was a big deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Ever Happened to Netscape?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now that splash screen, with its pixelated gradient of the 256 color palette brings back some nostalgic memories.

  It’s funny because we can see pixelated stuff today mostly in shitty jpeg artifacts, but those follow the jpeg algorithm for how to best conserve file size within their compression scheme, so they look different. This splash screen seemingly has every pixel meticulously chosen so that it’s in the right place, and working with only the limits of the color space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the start, of course. One could always play good cop, bad cop: “I have to do this to comply with the law, sorry, there’s nothing else I can do.” What Linus has done here is play bad cop, bad cop: “the law says I have to obey sanctions, and by the way I support the sanctions and this move anyway.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel & Samsung Are Reportedly Inking A "Foundry Alliance", Sharing Production Facilities Along With Process Tech⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually have fairly high hopes for Intel’s 18A and the upcoming technology changes presenting competition for TSMC (including others like Samsung and the Japanese startup Rapidus). And even if it turns into a 3-way race among Asian companies, the three nations are different enough that there’s at least some strength in diversity.

  TSMC’s dominance in the last decade I think can be traced to their clear advantage in producing finFETs at scale better than anyone else. As we move on from the finFET paradigm and move towards GAA and backside power delivery, there are a few opportunities to leapfrog TSMC. And in fact, TSMC is making such good money on their 3nm and 4nm processes that their roadmap to GAAFETs and backside power is slower than Intel’s and Samsung’s, seemingly to squeeze the very last bit out of finFETs before moving on.

  If there’s meaningful competition in the space, we might see lower prices, which could lead to greater innovation from their customers.

  Do I think it will happen? I’m not sure. But I’m hopeful, and wouldn’t be surprised if the next few process nodes show big shakeups in the race.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel & Samsung Are Reportedly Inking A "Foundry Alliance", Sharing Production Facilities Along With Process Tech⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Intel canceled their 20A after bad results, and shifted focus to 18A.

  It’s even to the point that their own Arrow Lake chips are going to be fabbed by TSMC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a big Windows 10 problem, and only one year to solve it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!

  At least there was a technical reason there, that Microsoft was merging the two separate codebases for consumer Windows and enterprise Windows, and building on the better NT codebase than the 95->98->ME codebase.

  And XP was actually way better for the main thing that we were going to be using computers for going forward: networked with the actual internet.

  Windows 11? Can’t see any paradigm shift in how the operating system itself is supposed to work, at least not on anything that actually makes a difference in a favorable way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel & Samsung Are Reportedly Inking A "Foundry Alliance", Sharing Production Facilities Along With Process Tech⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did Intel ever get its foundry business off the ground? I remember some announcements in the last year or two, and then some rumors of yields not being good enough for the customers to move forward, and now some rumors of Intel thinking of spinning off the business. This partnership might be a watered down version of those plans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Another example here is the Matrix protocol, specifically designed from the ground up to be open and distributed. In reality, the only option for full-featured stable server software is the one maintained by the project itself, and there aren’t a lot of third party clients available.

  Openness itself is a good goal, but the complexity itself can pose a barrier openness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Intel has only been behind for the last 7 years or so, because they were several years delayed in rolling out their 10nm node. Before 14nm, Intel was always about about 3 years ahead of TSMC. Intel got leapfrogged at that stage because it struggled to implement the finFET technology that is necessary for progressing beyond 14nm.

  The forward progress of semiconductor manufacturing tech isn’t an inevitable march towards improvement. Each generation presents new challenges, and some of them are quite significant.

  In the near future, the challenge is in certain three dimensional gate structures more complicated than finFET (known as Gate All Around FETs) and in backside power delivery. TSMC has decided to delay introducing those techniques because of the complexity and challenges while they squeeze out a few more generations, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll hit a wall where Samsung and/or Intel leapfrog them again. Or maybe Samsung or Intel hit a wall and fall even further behind. Either way, we’re not yet at a stage where we know what things look like beyond 2nm, so there’s still active competition for that future market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, there’s still competition. Samsung and Intel are trying, but are just significantly behind. So leading the competition by this wide of a margin means that you can charge more, and customers decide whether they want to pay way more money for a better product now, whether they’re going to wait for the price to drop, or whether they’ll stick with an older, cheaper node.

  And a lot of that will depend on the degree to which their customers can pass on increased costs to their own customers. During this current AI bubble, maybe some of those can. Will those manufacturing desktop CPUs or mobile SoCs be as willing to spend? Maybe not as much.

  Or, if the AI hype machine crashes, so will the hardware demand, at which point TSMC might see reduced demand for their latest and greatest node.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Minitel launched in 1982, well after work had begun on interconnections between different computer networks, using the predecessor protocols to TCP/IP and what would become the addressing/domain name system. Minitel launched on protocols that were ultimately incompatible with the rest of the Internet, and didn’t have an easy way to actually get joined in.

  Minitel was more of an alternative internet than it was the inspiration for the migration of the internet to becoming a HTTP/www-centered network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Barcelona is turning subway trains into power stations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t read it as magical energy created out of nothing, but I do read it as “free” energy that would exist whether this regeneration system is used or not, that would otherwise be lost as heat.

  With or without regenerative braking, the train system is still going to accelerate stopped trains up to operational speed, then slow them down to a stop, at regular intervals throughout the whole train system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid enshitification of my keyboard and mouse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  stop looking at those as “features of the keyboard and mouse that I purchased”

  Seriously.

  Maybe I’m an old timer but my idea of extra features on a mouse or keyboard are simply more inputs: more mouse buttons or wheels, more keys on a keyboard (like media keys). At most that just requires additional hardware, but nothing my OS can’t handle on its own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because Amazon requires the seller not undercut its Amazon store through other outlets, including their own website. If you are a seller and you want to take advantage of Amazon Prime, then you have to make sure your Amazon price is the cheapest price available on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That article has basically been validated over time. At the time it was written, the argument was that monopoly is bad for consumers even if it makes prices cheaper, and that consolidation of producer market power needs to be understood as consumer harm in itself, even if prices or services paradoxically become better for consumers.

  It’s no longer a paradox today, though. Amazon has raised prices and reduced the quality of service by a considerable margin, and uses its market power to prevent the competition from undercutting them, rather than competing fairly on the merits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The retail side of their operations serves as basically a really big customer of AWS services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless you are fine pairing solar panels with natural gas as we currently do

  Yes, I am, especially since you seem to be intentionally ignoring wind+solar. It’s much cheaper to have a system that is solar+wind+nat gas, and that particular system can handle all the peaking and base needs today, cheaper than nuclear can. So nuclear is more expensive today than that type of combined generation.

  In 10 years, when a new nuclear plant designed today might come on line, we’ll probably have enough grid scale storage and demand-shifting technology that we can easily make it through the typical 24-hour cycle, including 10-14 hours of night in most places depending on time of year. Based on the progress we’ve seen between 2019 and 2024, and the projects currently being designed and constructed today, we can expect grid scale storage to plummet in price and dramatically increase in capacity (both in terms of real-time power capacity measured in watts and in terms of total energy storage capacity measured in watt-hours).

  In 20 years, we might have sufficient advanced geothermal to where we can have dispatchable carbon-free electricity, plus sufficient large-scale storage and transmission that we’d have the capacity to power entire states even when the weather is bad for solar/wind in that particular place, through overcapacity from elsewhere.

  In 30 years, we might have fusion.

  With that in mind, are you ready to sign an 80-year mortgage locking in today’s nuclear prices? The economics just don’t work out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  With nuclear, you’re talking about spending money today in year zero to get a nuclear plant built between years 5-10, and operation from years 11-85.

  With solar or wind, you’re talking about spending money today to get generation online in year 1, and then another totally separate decision in year 25, then another in year 50, and then another in year 75.

  So the comparison isn’t just 2025 nuclear technology versus 2025 solar technology. It’s also 2025 nuclear versus 2075 solar tech. When comparing that entire 75-year lifespan, you’re competing with technology that hasn’t been invented yet.

  Let’s take Commanche Peak, a nuclear plant in Texas that went online in 1990. At that time, solar panels cost about $10 per watt in 2022 dollars. By 2022, the price was down to $0.26 per watt. But Commanche Peak is going to keep operating, and trying to compete with the latest and greatest, for the entire 70+ year lifespan of the nuclear plant. If 1990 nuclear plants aren’t competitive with 2024 solar panels, why do we believe that 2030 nuclear plants will be competitive with 2060 solar panels or wind turbines?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that math works out, even when looking over the entire 70+ year life cycle of a nuclear reactor. When it costs $35 billion to build two 1MW reactors, even if it will last 70 years, the construction cost being amortized over every year or every megawatt hour generated is still really expensive, especially when accounting for interest.

  And it bakes in that huge cost irreversibly up front, so any future improvements will only make the existing plant less competitive. Wind and solar and geothermal and maybe even fusion will get cheaper over time, but a nuclear plant with most of its costs up front can’t. 70 years is a long time to commit to something.