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billti

1,285 karma · joined March 18, 2015

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billti··on iPhone Duo
Yeah. It's more Jony Ive who will be rolling in his Bentley.
billti··on iPhone Duo
I was hoping I didn't. But after watching the event, I kinda do.

I have to hand it to them, they added some really nice touches to the OS for the new form factor. Seems almost like the best of an iPhone and a iPad Mini.

Still not sure I want something that bulky, and maybe I'll wait a few months to see the reviews and how the hinge and screen fold hold up. But tempted for sure...

billti··on VMs can't boot with Network Mode set to Bridged on Apple M5 Pro machines
I couldn't get bridged networking to work with my M5 machine and VMs running on Parallels. This thread here would seem to indicate it's a known issue (with no updates or resolution :/ ) - https://forum.parallels.com/threads/m5-macbook-air-windows-1...
billti··on DaVinci Resolve 21
The release announcement on the forum at https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2369... lists what is new. AI is obviously a lot of the focus when it comes to talking about the product, (and in the current environment that is no surprise), but is still only a small portion of what is new in this release.
billti··on DaVinci Resolve 21
I'm no expert (relatively new to the field myself), but I was trying to put together some simple videos with animations in Final Cut Pro and decided to try DaVinci Resolve, and I'm glad I did. The Fusion stuff bundled into it is incredibly powerful for animations.

It does take some getting used to, but the amount of tutorial content on YouTube is another reason I'm happy I made the switch. A lot of really good stuff on there. (Search on 'DaVinci Resolve Fusion' to see some examples of it in action if you want to get a feel).

billti··on DaVinci Resolve 21
I think it actually released today. I keep an eye on the forums to see the updates - https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2369...

(Can confirm - I just opened it on my laptop (I had the latest beta installed) and it prompted me to download the release version)

billti··on Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
That's why I think the Optimus thing might make sense from a 'market cap' perspective. Tesla is great at innovation and ramping global manufacturing for new tech. Ten years ago, that was EVs. But now EVs are becoming a commodity and every other car company is catching up.

I do think 'self driving' is still their 'moat' when it comes to EVs. I use it every day, and nothing else comes close. But other than that, building EVs is becoming a cut-throat slim-margin business. I don't think that's where Elon, or Tesla employees, want to spend their energy.

billti··on Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Does Elon over-hype nearly everything he gets involved with? Clearly yes.

Does he also deliver on some mind-boggling timelines? Well Tesla went from delivering its first cars in 2008 to having the best selling car in the world in 2023, and SpaceX went from not having successfully launched a rocket to delivering about 80% of the world's space payload in roughly the same timeframe. So I'd say that's clearly a 'yes', too.

billti··on Training an LLM in Swift, Part 1: Taking matrix mult from Gflop/s to Tflop/s
I keep this link in my favorites and refer to it every now and again. Still one of the best write-ups I've seen on just have vast the difference is between a naive and well tuned kernel

https://siboehm.com/articles/22/CUDA-MMM

billti··on Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
> the product is mediocre at best

I'm not a Tesla fanboy, last year was the first time I bought one (new Model Y), but it is by far the best car I've ever owned, and the FSD blew my mind with how much better it was than I expected.

My wife hates Elon, and has a new hybrid Mitsubishi, but she still drives my Model Y all the time because it's just so much better to drive.

What are you basing the 'mediocre' opinion on?

billti··on Why Objective-C
I've been playing around with low-level Metal a bunch lately, any many of their docs and samples seem still be mostly in Objective-C/C++ and not Swift, so have been forcing myself to get into it.

At first I had the usual revulsion to the syntax, but after a few days getting used to it, I actually don't mind it at all now. (I still wouldn't say it's "elegant", but I can live with it).

Being Metal shader code is basically C++ anyway, and C++ is a language I'm familiar with, having a couple of .mm files to hold the Objective-C++ for API bridging and working in regular .cpp (and .h) files for the rest is pretty straight forward compared to having to learn Swift. (Especially with all the complaints I've heard about its complexity, including from Chris Lattner himself lately, which aligns with some of the other comments here).

Though to be fair, "Swift seems overly complex so use C++ instead" seems like a tough argument to make with a straight face ;-p

billti··on xAI joins SpaceX
> Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year

Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)

billti··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.

That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.

billti··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
This is the most disappointing aspect of the slide in quality for me.

I working in software and "build features" for a living, and over the years I've come to prioritize reliability, performance, and an intuitive experience over all else. No matter how good the feature set is, if it crashes, is painfully slow, or I can't figure out how to use it, then I don't want it.

Apple used to have that focus, but seems to have lost it of late.

billti··on Meta plans to cut around 10% of employees in Reality Labs business
> Andrew Bosworth ... has called a meeting for Wednesday ... Mr. Bosworth said the meeting was the “most important” of the year

That's a bold claim on Jan 12th!

billti··on Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
Or the even more frustrating:

Me: "Hey Siri, play <well known hit song from a studio album that sold 100m copies"

Siri: "OK, here's <correct song but a live version nobody ever listens to, or some equally obscure remix>"

Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?

billti··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.
billti··on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
It was disappointing to see one of the most advertised Apple “AI” features was “Genmoji”, which falls squarely in the “gimmick” category for me.
billti··on AMD GPU Debugger
I didn't even notice who I was replying to at first - so let me start by saying thank you for Ghostty. I spend a great deal of my day in it, and it's a beautifully put together piece of software. I appreciate the work you do and admire your attitude to software and life in general. Enjoy your windfall, ignore the haters, and my best wishes to you and your family with the upcoming addition.

The project I'm mostly working on uses the wgpu crate, https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu, which may be of interest if writing cross-platform GPU code. (Though obviously if using Rust, not Zig). With it my project easily runs on Windows (via DX12), Linux (via Vulkan), macOS (via Metal), and directly on the web via Wasm/WebGPU. It is a "lowest common denominator", but good enough for most use-cases.

That said, ever with simple shaders I had to implement some workarounds for Xcode issues (e.g. https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/8111). But still vastly preferable to other debugging approaches and has been indispensable in tracking down a few bugs.

billti··on AMD GPU Debugger
It's a full featured and beautifully designed experience, and when it works it's amazing. However it regularly freezes of hangs for me, and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to 'force quit' Xcode or it's just outright crashed. Also, for anything non-trivial it often refuses to profile and I have to try to write a minimal repro to get it to capture anything.

I am writing compute shaders though, where one command buffer can run for seconds repeatedly processing over a 1GB buffer, and it seems the tools are heavily geared towards graphics work where the workload per frame is much lighter. (Will all the AI focus, hopefully they'll start addressing this use-case more).

billti··on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
This reminds me of the whole Lerna debacle a few years back.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/open-source-devs-reverse-dec...

That aside, even if something like this was “legally enforceable”, it adds enough friction, risk, and uncertainty to downstream consumers compared to a “vanilla” open source license that I expect most folks would choose an alternative to the “bespoke” license project where they could. Fine if you don’t care about getting usage, but that defeats much of the value that open source brings.

billti··on CUDA Ontology
> Also, code that compiles with older CUDA toolkit versions may not compile with newer CUDA toolkit versions. Newer hardware may require a CUDA toolkit version that is newer than what the project maintainer intended.

This is the part I find confusing, especially as NVIDIA doesn't make it easy to find and download the old toolkits. Is this effectively saying that just choosing the right --arch and --code flags isn't enough to support older versions? But that as it statically links in the runtime library (by default) that newer toolkits may produce code that just won't run on older drivers? In other words, is it true that to support old hardware you need to download and use old CUDA Toolkits, regardless of nvcc flags? (And to support newer hardware you may need to compile with newer toolkits).

That's how I read it, which seems unfortunate.

billti··on GHC now runs in the browser
That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-coding

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas

billti··on iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max
Horses for courses. Better camera (for those special moments while the kids are young) and better battery life are two big ones for me, so I'll likely upgrade. (Kind of digging the orange color too).

It's not the dullest refresh, and they always sell plenty. I'm sure this will be no exception.

billti··on Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos
That's what I do. Works great. Yes a couple of extra clicks is annoying, and apps are often "Hey how about you go into settings and let me access all your photos for a better experience!", but I'm happy with 2 or 3 extra clicks the few times a month I share a photo in order to limit access.
billti··on I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead
Yeah. Anki (and flashcards in general) are great for helping you remember something _you_ learned (from a book, video, class, etc.). Not for transferring knowledge someone else learned.

Writing my own cards as I'm learning is the only way I've found it effective.

billti··on Grok 4 Launch [video]
Isn't that kinda why we have collaboration and get in room with colleagues to discuss ideas? i.e., thinking about different ideas, getting different perspectives, considering trade-offs in various approaches, etc. results in a better solution than just letting one person go off and try to solve it with their thoughts alone.

Not sure if that's a good parallel, but seems plausible.

billti··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.

I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.

billti··on U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter
> While the U.S. often has a goods trade deficit, it maintains a surplus in services, including finance, education, and technology

Maybe a naive question, but are only goods considered? I had always assumed the 'deficit' was "money in minus money out", and thus selling services, etc. would be included in it.

billti··on Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment
I have no 'recently' to compare to, as I'd never been in a Tesla before. I was dubious because of all the "this year for sure" history, but after test driving one, I bought the new Model Y, and it now pretty much drives me to work and back every day with little to no intervention.

Knowing how prone to exaggeration Elon is, my bar was low. But it blew me away honestly. After nearly 30 years working in software and with some background in machine learning and computer vision and generally just trying to make software that works reliably, it's a pretty jaw dropping experience.

Would I take a nap in the back seat and let it drive? No. But does it allow me to sit there focused on a technical podcast or an audiobook so I feel like I'm getting back an hour or two a day instead of worrying about driving? Absolutely.

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