This also depends somewhat on area of study, honestly.
Having majored in music (and picked up most of my technical skills just out of a habit for tinkering), my running joke was always that none of my classes required me to count past 32.
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Having majored in music (and picked up most of my technical skills just out of a habit for tinkering), my running joke was always that none of my classes required me to count past 32.
Maybe this is just a shallow read of it, but it feels like sort of a similar dichotomy to that between Apple's rhetoric about objectionable content on app stores and... well, its inclusion of a web browser.
There's also the time he suggested that setting basic standards for ISPs amounted to "Obamacare for the Internet"[2], a patently ridiculous statement clearly designed to pander to a base that thinks any government is too much government. (Crenshaw has made similar comments, claiming that "They want to do it by classifying the Internet under a law from 1934"[3] - referring to the Communications Act, literally the one that established the FCC and gave them the power to regulate the aforementioned phone lines. It was also superseded by the Telecommunications Act, passed in 1996, but who's counting?)
There's also that whole thing where he's spent the last several months pretending that he didn't spread lies about the 2020 election that led directly to a terrorist attack, but now I'm getting off topic.
Except not entirely, because there's also the time three days later that he called Donald Trump's Twitter ban "Big Tech's PURGE, censorship & abuse of power"[4] as if it weren't already well-documented that the only reason it didn't happen sooner - given his numerous violations of their ToS up to and including calls to violence - was his status as a head of state.[5][6] (I would link to examples of some of those violations, but... you know...) Which, specifically, also flies in the face of the same laissez-faire capitalism bit that he would throw around over topics like Net Neutrality - since, if he really believed that, a more logically consistent position would be that Twitter is a private company and is allowed to make its own policies.
In a broader sense, the GOP spent the entire Reagan administration maligning the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional office whose literal job was to educate lawmakers so that they have more knowledge about these topics than Ted Cruz displays in public, before eventually defunding it in the mid-90s - an act which directly contributed to a Congress which has issues like this, or like "Senator, we run ads,"[7] or like that time AOC apparently had to explain to colleagues what Twitch even is while they were attempting to legislate about it.[8]
[1] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/941489723901665280
[2] https://twitter.com/SenTedCruz/status/531834493922189313
[3] https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/111600513626921779...
[4] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1347919674101657602
[5] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
[6] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/bot-banned-from-...
[7] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/10/17222062/m...
In effect, we had net neutrality in all but name until the Internet started to move to other, more vertically-integrated forms of infrastructure like DSL and cable.
I would really love to see a Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or some other disingenuous right-wing hack try to argue that, had it not already been illegal to do so, AT&T wouldn't have done the exact same things to AOL that Verizon and Comcast have gotten caught doing to Netflix.
(EDIT: At least, it would amuse me in theory. In practice, my blood would probably start boiling about 30 seconds in.)
Better yet - they boot from USB now (and even NVMe if you're using a CM4).
Sure, I could find something that would give me more familiar bindings at the system level, but I'd then also have to (hope that it's even possible to) also deal with all of the downstream apps that then have to use different ones, because the globals in macOS have superseded whatever they'd be using on other systems.
It's like dealing with English grammar. Swap Cmd for Ctrl and Ctrl(?) for Alt, except when you're switching tabs or windows and it's the exact opposite, or when whatever operation you need is bound to Option for some reason.
Sailfish has a runtime for Android apps, but under the hood it's closer to other mobile Linux projects, and to that end the hardware compatibility is less like Lineage or /e/ and more like UBPorts.
Android's handling of the Linux kernel, until this current version cycle, has involved several forks per device -- patches from Google (the Android Common Kernel), then patches from chipset vendors, then patches from device vendors -- with closed binary drivers inserted at various points in this process. [0] Treble has been exposing generic hardware interfaces to system images since version 8, but the drivers themselves haven't had that kind of uniformity re: how they interface with the kernel itself.
There are projects that will adapt them to run GNU-based systems -- to use UBPorts as an example again, it actually does exist as a GSI -- but since the modifications needed to get them to run depend on a custom kernel, they're still device-specific.
Meanwhile, Android devices are required to run Google's entire test suite using a generic build of AOSP, so while GSI compatibility isn't perfect, the minimum baseline is effectively just the ability to unlock your bootloader.
[0] Generally. In some cases -- most Huawei devices, non-US Samsung models -- the device vendor is the chipset vendor. But that doesn't mean their chipset IP is any more open than, say, Qualcomm's, nor does necessarily alter that of other components like camera sensors.
It's also not even necessarily them. Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with.
My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some rather extreme takes on... well, several different incidents) did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points.
I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a person for this exact reason.
But the Switch, being a dedicated system for this, doesn't have to put nearly as much work into the implementation. You can easily just throw it into a dock and leave it there indefinitely, because you don't need it for anything else. While you can cast a phone wirelessly, the setup will depend largely on your ecosystem and/or accessory vendors. And even then, the entire thing is typically mirrored - which not only leaves the rest of your device otherwise unusable, but also raises further cases to handle around notifications (or worse, calls) while you're actually gaming on it.
These issues would make single-player gaming annoying enough, and local multiplayer effectively becomes a nonstarter. (Never mind that one you introduce that as a requirement you also introduce the need to set up additional controllers a nontrivial amount of the time, and fast pair support within the Bluetooth spec is just as messy.)
For phones to really be able to cover these things without introducing tradeoffs that just don't exist with a dedicated device, we'd need OS- and hardware- level support for running a secondary display, wirelessly, without also introducing lag in the process.
Effectively, we're comparing them to the wrong platform. Because while the internals most directly line up with those of the Switch, the interface design they'd need in order to really make the experience work is arguably a lot closer to that of the Wii U.
[0] Note that, for the sake of this discussion, on Android's side I'm referring strictly to what's available in AOSP. I'm aware of, say, DeX, but the app ecosystem as a whole doesn't tend to have great support for vendor-specific implementations, and the stock desktop mode is still a. experimental, b. wired.
I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using?
My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious here. But at least at first glance, it kind of baffles me that so many of them are using seemingly arbitrary hash algorithms to calculate proof of work, when they could instead be tied to distributed projects -- folding@home, for instance -- and measuring actual work.
Made in Abyss? You mean the show that spent its entire broadcast run locked behind two paywalls?
Re:Creators is another one that went criminally underrated thanks to the travesty that was Anime Strike.
It's really only a demo, since I primarily built it to have a MERN-stack site for my portfolio and to track my own cardio during the plague, rather than ever really intending it to be as a service. It actually also turned out to be less useful on the tracking, because I found myself falling down rabbit holes about building a usable tool for tracking cardio -- as opposed to consistently doing the cardio I wanted to track, or bothering to keep the API stable enough to track it when I did. (Up until then, most of my experiences with Express and MongoDB in particular had been in existing codebases, so for the first few iterations I was more concerned with getting everything configured and deployed.)
Other sticking points, since in this case "usable" was defined as being able to visibly log data from real gameplay sessions, included setting up basic JWT auth (enough for myself and a demo account), and the trial-and-error calamity that was sanitizing ~1300 game files from my song library in order to scrape metadata from them and import it into my db. Additionally it's been through several attempts to refresh the visual design, just since that's not really a personal strong suit.
Aside from this leading to the same problem as XKCD's automation strip[0], it also became a whole side adventure into another project I had been putting off -- streamlining this and all of my other deployments -- because when I tried to share an early iteration, the host I was testing for this (Vercel) had been flagged by LinkedIn's spam filters. Getting around this involved finally deploying the whole thing to a custom domain and setting up the appropriate routing, which meant moving several projects off GitHub Pages. Vercel, it turned out, also had a hard limitation on custom domains, with theirs being that the only apparent way to use one was to register it through them. I eventually ended up moving all of them to Netlify, setting up dedicated subdomains for each (so that I also didn't have to worry about managing things like the multiple view layers used across different projects) and deploy branches (for storing any config files, etc. that are specific to a host) while I was at it.
By the time I actually solved all of these, I was also caught up in a mouse hunt in the space where I work/sleep/DDR instead.
I do intend to pick it back up at some point, once I'm fully convinced I won't need to keep deep-cleaning my pad. In all, though, it's arguably been more productive for the various side effects than it was for its actual purpose. One particularly fun one, at least, was the excuse it gave me to toy with Deno - which I used to handle converting and sanitizing my game files, scraping their data, and seeding my database with them. The built-in fetch client is particularly useful here, but truthfully I was also just happy not having to touch Babel again for this.
If anyone's interested in toying with it, here's the Github link for the API code.[1] Add -react to the end for the UI or -scripts for the various Deno tools.
Sure, the power balance just shifted substantially, but it still doesn't change the fact that a significant chunk of its leadership (majority party or otherwise) can't be bothered to understand how search rankings work, or how Facebook makes money.
And this extends at least as far back as the 90s, when Congress shuttered the Office of Technology Assessment, whose literal job was to educate them on these exact sorts of issues.
Because don't get me wrong, the internals are a factor -- the ARM/x86 gap was significantly wider in the Tegra X1's day, it was already multiple years old when the Switch shipped, and being the only console on ARM can't have helped with attracting third parties. But as a Switch owner who has played a lot of Smash on the thing, what's really holding it back as a dedicated console is that it has a lot of nagging quality of life issues -- things like the inability to get a good first-party D-Pad, and their persistently baffling refusal to ship Ethernet despite it being standard on every competing platform since the original XBox. Their solution for the latter when they announced the details for Smash Ultimate was to say "lol hope you've got an adapter!" Which also makes the netplay worse at scale by ensuring that even more players are going to just resort to WiFi instead. (Not that the game's netcode can't also be outperformed by an emulator that people are using to play its 20-year-old predecessor.) These issues are one thing for a phone, but there's a completely separate bar for a device that's literally built for this.
The problem with the Switch isn't just the audience it's made for, or that because of that target it isn't keeping up with games like Cyberpunk. It's that even when you get to some of the areas where it should shine -- titles like Tetris 99, or Hollow Knight -- it's also tangibly worse at playing them than its competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with its frame rate.
> Although Nintendo hasn't been as bad about this in recent years, I vowed to never give them money again after they wiped out countless numbers of YouTube channels with walkthroughs for games they don't even publish anymore.
They're not much better now. Check out what happened to The Big House for trying to use said emulator's netplay to run a Melee tournament during a plague, and all the ensuing fallout. I'm genuinely starting to consider migrating back off Nintendo consoles over it myself.
According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1]
[0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
[1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)
There's incidentally an entry for those:
Google in particular has also abandoned support for open specs in favor of deepening the Chromecast ecosystem -- having both removed DIAL support from later versions of the Cast protocol and Miracast support from Android itself.
And that's before you get into the interop for purchases within these ecosystems, because under the DMCA you can't legally do anything about the incompatible DRM schemes, even for media that other devices are more than technically capable of playing.
Another, related issue is that the additional set of proprietary APIs on top of AOSP amounts to an Android ecosystem that's "open," but renders any implementation that they haven't blessed as a second-class citizen. This has tangibly impacted compatibility efforts by other vendors, ranging from Amazon (Fire devices) to Huawei (loss of Play Services via the ban) to Microsoft (Project Astoria) -- for reasons that, in part, involved maintaining a walled garden of complementary hardware.
To be completely fair about this one, it's not strictly that cut and dry, as the ability to leverage vendors with Play licensing has also forced widespread adoption of solutions like Treble. But over time, large sections of the OS have been abandoned in favor of proprietary Google apps, and the API incompatibility hampers the growth of alternative ecosystems, even if you're another FAANG that can bring your own cloud and develop your own hardware.
To that point - while I personally think Oracle's SCOTUS case amounts to brazen trolling, it's, uh, not great optics for that whole argument that API compatibility is fair use when Android apps across several different categories will break just because updating your EOL'd device or getting rid of manufacturer bloatware will trip SafetyNet -- or because your vendor is a competitor and your device just isn't allowlisted by SafetyNet in the first place.
With that said though -- yes, if you're into modding or general preservation there are a variety of community spins of Android, and potentially even a small scattering of other Linux-based systems depending on your device.
Now that Android requires the use of a GSI -- or generic system image -- in testing, device compatibility is also significantly better than it used to be. That said, you're still limited to those that support bootloader unlocking. (Notably, while they don't implement this internationally, if you're US-based Samsung is out.) Additionally, GSIs will still have edge cases around drivers (since they don't have to actually work on production devices), Google apps generally have to be loaded separately, and even then the act of opening your bootloader to begin with trips SafetyNet -- which breaks everything from banking apps (for the sensitive-data protections this was originally intended to cover) to Netflix (for DRM) to various games (for anti-cheat) to... Snapchat for some reason?
Where this starts to really get exciting is that, over the next year or two, that requirement for generic image compatibility will be extending to the kernel, on devices that are actually shipping to users. Treble's launch triggered a sort of second wave within the custom ROM scene, as it meant they no longer strictly needed to be ported to devices on an individual basis -- a limitation which up until now has still existed for the kernel.
Some particularly interesting details around this are that a custom kernel is required to run Halium (a GNU compatibility layer for Android devices that allows images like Ubuntu Touch to be loaded as GSIs), and that Android 11 can actually boot on a minimally-patched mainline assuming that all necessary drivers exist.
Wireguard and exFAT are a couple of notable ones that have been mainlined since 5.4, with the latter impacting basically anything that uses SD cards (as it's a required part of the SDXC spec)
I meant to ask the first time I saw it -- if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire frame consists of parts that can be either printed or just sourced off-the-shelf? I've personally had "pad build" on my backlog, and have been playing around with modifications of the Cobalt Flux design on paper ever since a failed attempt to put one on risers (apartment noise issues...), but wood- and/or metalworking have generally been barriers to actual implementation.
Maintaining it up until that point is actually also how I DIY'd my first controller (to replace a broken USB adapter), and finally learned to solder.
(It also just became less of an issue between living in a region with a few different cabinets I could drive to and the L-Tek pad releasing around a year or so later.)
Also LinkedIn has them now. Which I would argue is still better than LinkedIn's other new addition, an entirely new black hole for event invites. As if the signal-to-noise ratio for these weren't bad enough on Facebook...
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.sto...