HerbManic

I think it is a mix of both. Grey scale reduces the vividness of everything, but also none of these apps are really designed with grey scale in mind.

Greyscale can be very cool and easy to use if built for it. Just look at Mac's before they went colour as an example.

When Covid started, our local government was very clear from the start in saying "If people think we have over reacted, then that means we have done a good job."

Alas, that doesn't always fly with the populace.

Just remember, the power grid fails in theory but works in practice.

I have said it for decades - Basic is easy, Simple is hard.

But when someone comes up with something simple but effective, it always looks so obvious in retrospect.

This thinking eventually results in The Scream Test. When the screams come as a system fails that is when they act on it.

Alas, for many parts of society there is a large amount of people that would rather be reactive than proactive. It means it is easier today but harder long term.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.

Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.

"My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"

I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.

I did the same, I do wonder if it holds up as well as my memory remembers. Probably not.

Like I remember Doom running fine on my 486 SX 25Mhz, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that great. It took a top end Pentium to really get it into smooth-ish 20fps+ territory.

I have said it for a while, Microsoft's business strategy was probably the best thing that ever happened to Free/Open software. They were ones pushing for more open systems so that they could sell DOS and Windows to other vendors. yes, it left the door open for others but they also figured they could push their software far harder than others could.

I agree with the ARM/RISCV stance that we should be cautious with what we ask. I have seen some RiscV providers in China are starting to push for a BIOS compatible boot system which is great to see, but there is no guarantee that it will be adopted or it will last for long.

The best thing you can do is try to start this by your self. Yes it is hard but once you have even a vague demonstration of an idea that can be the launch pad to getting others in the fold.

Linux started Linux by himself, then others came along if they are inspired.

I know it is hard to do at first but that hard first step is what is usually needed.

Been said many times, this is for stationary batteries and it is a great idea. If it doesn't need to move, weight and energy density become practically irrelevant. Cost and charge cycles become much bigger issues and these alternative chemistries are doing brilliantly in this front.

I have been some folks try to say there is a limit of total Lithium availability and that issue seems to be wildy overstated. We are still a bit supply constrained but not because a lack of materials just a case of rolling out mines/processing facilities. So while production is coming up to speed, it is better to priorities its use for portable storage and use other types for grid storage.

Mac Nugget. Mac-aroon. SnackBook.

I saw a talk about a year back with them arguing that things like N150 platforms are probably a better choice than Pi based machines.

Came down to, wide software support with x86, higher performance, UEFI, secure boot and storage standards like NVME slots. It was a fair argument but doesn't apply to everyone.

A lot of things wouldn't even need a RP2350. The original Arduino alone was pretty slick for a lot of cool small scale projects.

I would consider Jak 3 to be even better than that BUT the darker art direction really hid a lot of what it was doing. Shame really.

I would be more conserned with the laser motor wearing out. That is what killed my Dreamcast. The laser was fine but the motor to move it just gave up from too much use.

I find it so funny that somethings coded can crumble if a single bit is out of place, and others are like "No file there, no problem!"

Absolutely there are forks, they are what I run. But the majority of the work on the foundations still come primarily from Mozilla.

My fear is that, let's say Mozilla falls or shrinks considerably. It would take only a few complex but rationalised technologies from Google via chrome for Firefox and it's derivatives to fall behind. It already feels like they are constantly chasing instead of innovating and it wouldn't take much for them to fall behind on even that.

Personally, when they killed of the Servo team, that was a sign of their future. It was the team that was prototyping new web technologies long before they were mainstream ready. A lot of their stuff had been deployed into the main releases to great effect. The huge performance jump when they switched to the Quantum rendering system on version 68+ was a lot of their work. Then a few years back Mozilla just killed it off. It basically said they don't want to consider future technologies they are happy following. I don't see Firefox going away anytime soon but I'm not sure what shape it will be in a decade.

Just remember that Google is essentially an advertising company and that they were always going to squeeze this opening closed as soon as they could get away with it.

I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.

I always found it really funny that PC's had these absolute monsters of CPU's relative to the consoles of the time but because of the graphics setup they struggled to do smooth scrolling like Mario on the NES in 1985. But that weakness meant you could essentially do a lot more work per pixel on screen and thus allowed these ray casting/BSP tree systems.

So while it didn't have custom processors for sprites and background layers it meant there wasn't a rigid fixed function nature to what the PC could do.

By the mid-late 90's with dedicated 3D processor this wasn't an issue any more but there was a brief time in the early 90's where there was this wonderland of unique visual rendering.

The usual argument of correlation does not mean causation. I would say having the global economic system have a minor heart attack in 2007 would probably have had a larger direct economic impact.

As yes the Musk hand wave. We have done some cool things thus we get a pass on other things.

I'm sure they can manage heat issues so long as the scale of these satellites are very modest.

I am somewhat hopeful for Terafab/Space X's silicon dreams. Google has shown with their TPu chips that there is great potential for stuff like this and having their kind of capital to also provide fabs makes this very fascinating.

Forget their AI data centers in space, that seems like just something to drive up investor interest, this however looks like something that could have long legs for decades to come.

I too believed Patrick Moore representing Monstanto when he said 'Round up' was safe to drink.

One of the stranger theories I have seen is that it is based on Astrology as there is a confluence of Uranus squaring the lunar nodes... whatever that means. There is a saying supposedly attributed to JP Morgan (but not likely) "Millionaires don't use astrology but Billionaires do."

One of the more rational ideas I have seen of any kind of divination is that it provides a means of passing judgement over to a near seemingly random system. If you are reading tea leaves, doing an 'I Ching' divination, biobliomancy etc. that essentially provides a coin flip to make you go 'yes' or 'no' to an opportunity.

Pretty much. Many people ignored Brexit because they basically thought it would never get through until it crawled through with a tiny margin.

Do not get complacent, once that happens this stuff can quietly grow very fast and suddenly happen in what feels like a total blind side.

I'm not sure if they would be bailed out. The government tends to help with bank bailouts as they are essentially the hemoglobin of the economy, I see this being more like the dot-com bubble were they will just let it fall and have the bigger more entrenched player pickup the scraps for cents on the dollar.

I like Ed's sense of humor, I also like that he can distill down a lot of messy details into something more cogent, especially with the money side.

But, I also think he has missed the mark on a fair few things in terms of out comes. He may be proven right yet in terms of the general shape of things for some parts of the industry but also will have some big misses.

My general take away usually comes down to, places like OpenAI, Anthropic and Oracle have gone in a little to hard to fast and it may hurt them long term as they struggle to make it work in terms of economics. not that they can't just it will be difficult. But places like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon; they have a very long runway to endure the growing pains and make it through to a long term business that no longer burns cash.

Pretty much, we don't know what Steve would have done and even if we did, there is no guarantee that it was a good idea. When he had hits, it was brilliant but there were many stinkers as well.

I suspect if Steve was doing a new internet it would be a walled garden like the App store, so a worse internet that favors him. As Woz said, Jobs just wanted to have a business and be rich, didn't really matter what the business was. Any illusion of a greater good was always a calculated bet in getting more users.

Job's did some great things for the industry, I also call him the architect of the locked down digital jails we are inhabiting. But we shouldn't put him up as some perfect beacon of the industry.

This is one of those thing, yes that is a true statement but what do you do with that information? Would you be willing to make that call?

Looks like the trolley problem in action.