bbatha

I wrote a longer post a few months ago.[1] The tl;dr is a) computer aided design and manufacturing b) aspherical elements c) fluorite glass d) retro focus wide angle designs and e) improved coatings. Mirrorless lenses also beat slr lenses because they are much closer to the film plane — of course rangefinders and other classic designs never had this problem to begin with. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962652

Edit: this is just for prosumer style cameras. If you look at phone sized optics that’s a whole other ballgame.

Depends on how you define quality. While medium and large format photography are extremely high resolution that’s not the only factor. Space age lenses were significantly lower resolution than the film. Modern mirrorless lenses are starting to come close to being able to out resolve film but still aren’t there. Meaning that you get more functional resolution out of modern digital. Digital also beats the pants off film for dynamic range and low light. That said the noise (grain) and dynamic range fall off in film are more pleasing than digital to most eyes. So it’s not all about technical specs.

> The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each.

If your build allows the extra money for an LSI or real raid controller is well worth it. The no-name PCI-e sata cards are flakey and very slow. Putting an LSI in my NAS was a literal 10x performance boost, particularly with zfs which tends to have all of the drives active at once.

Kodak managed the film and camera market about as well as they could. The mismanagement was a failure to diversify. The total digital camera market excluding cell phones, would be a fraction of Kodak's film business back in the film era. The film and camera story is a popular one but is fundamentally wrong. The shrinkage of the camera/film market was inevitable. You can look at Fujifilm who does sell cameras and basically owns the remaining film market with instax, however neither of those sustain the business they are effectively a chemical and medical manufacturer who dabbles in photography now.

Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.

I'm also a fast listener. I find audio quality is the main differentiator in my ability to listen quickly or not. A podcast recorded at high quality I can listen to at 3-4x (with silence trimmed) comfortably, the second someone calls in from their phone I'm getting every 4th word and often need to go down to 2x or less. Mumbly accents are also a driver of quality but not as much, then again I rarely have trouble understanding difficult accents IRL and almost never use subtitles on TV shows/youtube to better understand the speaker. Your mileage may vary.

I understand 4-6x speakers fairly well but don't enjoy listening at that pace. If I lose focus for a couple of seconds I effectively miss a paragraph of context and my brain can't fill in the missing details.

> I wonder if how much value there is in skipping LLVM in favor of having a JIT optimized linked in instead. For release builds it would get you a reasonable proxy if it optimized decently while still retaining better debugability.

Rust is in the process of building out the cranelift backend. Cranelift was originally built to be a JIT compiler. The hope is that this can become the debug build compiler.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift

Everything fusion reactor design needs similar gains in some part of the stack outside of the fusion parts to make it a viable power source: tokamaks need magnets to be orders of magnitude better, the lining for the reactors needs to last for much longer, the whole steam conversion mess, etc.

Also shout out to Keynote which is the best presentation software. PowerPoint is so clunky in comparison. Nice features like making image backgrounds transparent are huge wins.

Pages is also pretty nice. Its definitely enough for home usage, and if my colleagues could read the pages files natively I would find it completely sufficient for professional use. I find it does layout much better than MS Office. Which honestly is a much bigger concern for home users: professional users will just switch to professional layout tools when they need it, but Sam doesn't need that cost/complexity for some bake sale fliers.

Numbers can also be nicer for home use cases, but is a bit weird if you're used to excel. And unlike pages or keynote quickly hits upper limits on complexity. I would never use numbers in a professional setting.

To add on to the sibling. Specialized models, including fine tuned ones, continually have their lunch eaten by general models within 3-6 months. This time round is mixture of experts that’ll do it, next year it’ll be something else. Tuned models are expensive to produce and are benchmark kings but less do less well in the real world qualitative experience. The juice just ain’t worth the squeeze most of the time.

Meta does have some specialized models though, llamaguard was released for llama 2 and 3.

> ok to do things like issue trump token by setting regulations

That would make sense if the Trump admin were actually regulating crypto but they're tearing that up as well.[1] Why would Trump regulate his own scam coins? Finally regulation isn't a magic wand that stops behavior, it stops it with the threat of punishment after the event. So no this doesn't make sense.

1: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5170036-trump-sec-cryp...

You'll want some kind of shotgun mic. The rode videomic2 is a good budget option. It has a standard 3/8" thread you can use with a desk boom.

I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.

I did not say Tesla has good privacy. I said all cars have terrible privacy track records ICE or EV. Tesla may be the worst but the insurance rates scandal of last summer means they’re all unacceptable.

I’m calling out Tesla has having the hyper modern non functional interfaces shoddy build quality and other EV specific problems. The classic manufacturers have all released functional EVs that check OPs boxes.

Plex has a configurable bit rate limit on the server side for streaming. The default is too low for a lot of 4k media. Just set it to something stupid high.

VMS has had posix compatibility since the 90s. You can install gnu tools on it as well.

This basically describes Tesla only. Drive a different brand and you get a very similar experience to a gas powered car. Unfortunately a terrible track record on privacy is par for the course in all vehicles in 2025.

> In theory node has async stack traces now, but I have yet to see this work through `setTimeout` and friends. It's very common to lose parts of the stack.

You need to use the actual `await` syntax to get an async stack trace in node. Callbacks and raw promise work can't be seen by the async stack trace implementation which hooks into `await` points.

In this article Nate said his version would be up in a week or so.

Miele makes wall combi ovens that are standard sized. Well they lose some cooking volume for the steam components.

More current needs thicker wires. The average US outlet is wired for 120v15amp. 20 amp circuits are somewhat common, though 20amp receptacles are not. Certainly not enough for commodity appliances to rely on.

Going to more than 20amp requires a multiphase circuit which are much more expensive and the plugs are unwieldy and not designed to be plugged and unplugged frequently.

Optics were not a solved problem in the 30s they wouldn’t be until the 80s at least for camera lenses. 30s camera lenses were optimized for black and white and very poorly corrected for chromatic aberrations. Well corrected color lenses wouldn’t become common until the 50s. Optics bigger apertures than f4 were expensive and often had severe aberrations. Coatings which prevent internal reflections didn’t mature until the late 60s/early 70s. Up to this point lenses had concentrated on a few well known good optical formulas. In particular high quality zoom and ultra wides were tremendously expensive r&d efforts with bespoke manufacturing[1]. This local maxima wouldn’t be breached until computer aided design and manufacturing processes became the norm leading to aspherical, extra dispersion elements and much higher element counts becoming common. By this point camera lens development has become much more iterative many lenses from the 90s and 2000s are 70s/80s optics with slight coating updates with a plastic auto focus housing.

1: see the achromatic Takumar with quartz elements that was produced in a very limited run for scientific laboratories. And aspherical low aperture lenses like the leica noctilux which required hand grinding the aspherical element.

Ill plug the "Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman in case anyone in the thread hasn't read it. Its the classic text on design. You will never think about doors the same again.

Because the injection is basically the only sustained weight loss mechanism that works on the population level. If a fast works for you knock yourself out. But fasts also come with risks like dehydration and malnourshiment.

It’s primarily a weapons program. Yes the focus isn’t on new nukes, but rather it’s based on stockpile stewardship. Source I worked at LANL

Intel still has a decent use for compiling math heavy code for intel processors — so it gets a decent amount of use in HPC applications. It has some of the best vectorization passes but they only work with actual intel cpus. So it’s starting to get less traction as AMD takes the performance crown and as vectorized math moves to the gpu.

They say that the NACs adapter will be free to existing customers, but have not made any details aside from "2025" available yet.

> The 1 gig per TB figure is ONLY for when using the ZFS dedup feature, which the ZFS dedup feature is widely regarded as a bad idea except in VERY specific use cases. 99.9% of ZFS users should not and will not use dedup and therefore they do not need ridiculous piles of ram.

You also really don't need a 1GB for RAM unless you have a very high write volume. YMMV but my experience is that its closer to 1GB for 10TB.

You might want to check in again. Generics have been in go for a couple of years now. There are loads of generic data structure libraries now. The most recent release of go included a way to generic structures with `for range` loops. Which unblocks the ecosystem from writing iterator helper libraries.

Rust uses the `?` operator to convert between error types which allows for users and libraries to hook in to the error before its returned.

There are a number of helper libraries that provide an extended type erased error type to attach a real stack trace to the error, such as `anyhow`. These helper libraries also provide ways to attach extra metadata to the error so you can do things like `returns_a_result().context("couldn't do it")?` so you can quickly annotate the error. The standard library is support for this through a `context.Value` like api on the Error trait. The std lib `Error` trait also has functions for find the cause of the error and traverse a collected chain of errors, very similar to go's `errors.Cause` api.

Rust also has a number of libraries for making specific error types like `thiserror` which can help generate error enums with the implementations required to carry backtraces, context and causes.

Or are forced to because they want to use generics or lambdas.