grumpyprole

There is absolutely no contest between an open-back audiophile Sennheiser like HD600 or HD800 and any ANC headphone. I own both these headphones and formerly a Sony MX3. The MX3 is also beaten in sound quality by a Sennheiser Momentum 4. The default sound of the Sony was frankly awful, bloated bass (+5db) that bleeds into the midrange, almost certainly not what most artists intended. They were better with EQ, although still muddy and the built-in EQ didn't work with LDAC. So I never bought another.

The HD800 are the best pair of headphones I have ever owned. Incredible soundstage and imaging. They are probably the best anyone could ever do with dynamic drivers. I have a lot of music that I save for these headphones, never wanting to play on the go via Bluetooth. My HD600 are still going strong (having been purchased in the early 90s), thanks to a quality product and availability of spare parts. Sennheiser are a fantastic company and I hope they keep making headphones.

If it were only that simple. Often one needs to be at least a team lead to set the technical direction. As an IC, I sometimes found myself being asked to implement a solution in a form that I did not agree with.

My first CPU, the 6502, also used in the Apple II, had approx 4500 transistors!

All the above sounds great but costs money. In the UK, the ruling class have consistently cut school budgets in real terms over decades. For example, music lessons are 30 to 1, sing or bring-your-own plastic recorder. For sports day, my child wasn't in the top few of the class that got to actually run on the last patch of grass that hasn't been sold off.

Lots of performance benchmarks but no measurements for power efficiency. Granted this is not easy, but it's more of a requirement than developing more performance benchmarks IMHO. My guess is that most people would rather Chrome improve power efficiency as a priority, which is why many use Safari on the Mac instead of Chrome.

Each to his/her own. I've been programming since the 80s and still find C and C-style languages the weirdest of all.

Compiling to LLVM IR is much easier than machine code and would still be satisfying I think.

Agree that compiling to at least a bytecode is preferable. If we don't mind dealing with only expressions or reading Haskell, this one is even tinier: https://tinyurl.com/47stkzvv

+1 The HP laserjet that I bought 5 years ago turned out to be a piece of junk. The software was also awful, it would often randomly crash, reboot itself and make lots of noise. Using a Canon Maxify inkjet now, much better machine and much cheaper to run.

Irix had vector icons that could be dynamically scaled. At the time I thought it was much more futuristic than Windows.

There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.

I call it "novelty budget" and I completely agree.

Americans also mostly don't study programming language theory (PLT) (unless they are lucky enough to attend e.g. Carnegie Mellon). A lot of the focus is on algorithms - which is a great shame. The majority of programmers will be consuming/creating APIs and abstractions, not implementing algorithms. PLT would be much more helpful here.

Even better would be to try F#, it will be able to use all the .NET libraries, has Python's succinctness, but with a strong type system (and inference).

On the contrary, the "hallucinations" are often very hard to spot without expert knowledge. The output is often plausible but wrong, as shown by Knuth's questions.

> fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions

I've often used "onion", but this is much more accurate :)

Did ChatGPT generate that "What's New" article? Not exactly exciting for a human: "quality improvements to the overall Windows experience in existing feature areas"

> This performance is not a problem if the app is small or the app already redraws every frame like a video game.

Seems to me like immediate mode UIs were dismissed rather too quickly. Why not update a DAW UI like a video game? It has similar realtime requirements.

But it's a derivative in the same sense that Linux is often called a derivative of Unix.

This is FUD. Samsung promise 5 years of security updates and 4 OS updates:

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-sets-the-new-standar...

> I'm in Europe, and also believe that iPads are unbeatable when talking about price - in both nominal and price/value ratio sense

The problem with iPad is that if you want a larger screen you have to get the very expensive iPad Pro. For large screen sizes, the Android ecosystem is much better value.

Mojo compiles "Python" to heterogeneous hardware, I don't believe that has been tried before.

Yes, but also tech in general provides new and innovative ways of implementing vendor lock-in at unprecedented scales. Left unchecked, Apple could easily take much more existing commerce, finance and numerous other business, leveraging their existing platforms.

I agree that most will be fine with a monolith, I never said anything to the contrary. But let's not pretend that the limits don't exist and don't matter. They matter to my company (and we're not Facebook or Google, but we're far older and probably have more code).

Pixel users get the new android releases and the corresponding bugs first. I've never owned a Samsung phone with such serious bugs as those described in the linked article above, such as not being able to use a DAC.

> without the Samsung bloat

That's one way of spinning it. Personally I'd rather have all the Pixel users beta test Android, so I can get the bug fixed version from Samsung.

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-6-bug-tracker/

Let's imagine Facebook, we can partition the monolith by user, but you would need the entire code base (50+ million lines?) running in each process just in case a user wants to access that functionality. I'm not saying one can't build a billion dollar business using a monolith, but at some point the limit of what a single process can host might become a problem.

Sure but there's still limits such as the binary size and working memory etc

> The challenge in monoliths is that the boundary is so easily breached

The biggest challenge with monoliths is the limits of a single process and machine.

> You can’t really change what people want without enacting dystopian/fascist policies.

Yes you can, you can educate them. Decide on how to categorise the environmental impact of each car and mandate that it is labelled as such. Unless you deem such regulation as dystopian?