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maven29

429 karma · joined November 15, 2019

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maven29··on Students invent quieter leaf blower
Can't be quieter than a rake.
maven29··on Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite
This is the schedule for upstreaming/"main-lining". Realistically, customers using these SoCs will be building on a forked linux BSP (Board Support Package) with all of these included.

To be fair, these might be server platforms and Chromebooks, nobody is buying ARM notebooks to run their favourite FEM package.

maven29··on Claude 3 beats Google Translate
People trust Google Translate to not go off-topic or "hallucinate" and there is still a lot of value in something semi-deterministic like that.

(Edit: To clarify, maintaining semantics is held sacrosanct in classical methods of machine translation)

maven29··on Fairbuds: In-ear with replaceable batteries
The USB standard has provision for analog output through the MUX, and all compliant MUX/controller chips will have implemented this.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10719/usbif-publishes-audio-o...

If this is so non-trivial, Chinese OEMs like Huawei have in fact succeeded in analog output. This is despite the fact that their receptacles are on a 50mm long flex PCB, you don't need another 2 signal layers or an extra daughterboard.

The laws of physics are the same everywhere across the world. Just because Apple is incompetent, it does not imply everyone else is.

maven29··on Fairbuds: In-ear with replaceable batteries
If only they weren't also so insistent on also obsoleting analog outputs and thus 75 years worth of headphones.

Even worse, considering that they have to include DACs for speakers anyway, they still refuse to route analog audio out to the type-c connector - just to ensure that cheap passive adapters will not impede their shameless grift.

maven29··on Apple Watch Ultra 2 Hacked
Not too keen on the anecdote either, but with the Flipper Zero script kiddies around, you can never be too sure. Just a couple of months ago, you saw headlines of low-skill pairing dialog DOS attacks.

I believe HID-over-GATT was recently introduced to iOS (only a decade late), and implementation details could potentially be relevant here.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/flipper-zero-gadget...

maven29··on Nesizm: NES emulator for Casio Prizm calculators
Both the CG50 and nspire has working Numworks ports (although very slow), if you wanted something more fancy on the same hardware.

https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon/issues/327

maven29··on Samsung debuts the first transparent MicroLED screen at CES 2024
I've personally seen transparent OLED displays in museum displays. So the market is definitely closer to that of video walls, than of 85-inch televisions made for the living room. I could see it coming to controlled conditions like supermarket freezer window panes, but not something architectural.

Sure, the signage business might not be high volume relative to consumer electronics. However, engineering entire new use-cases to target larger markets might not be worthwhile, if supply and pricing cannot meet market expectations due to yield constraints.

maven29··on Almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media – study
It would be more productive to stop prodding at the symptoms and instead consider looking into potential root causes like car dependency and commercialization or erosion of third places.

Kids aren't just staring at a glowing rectangle due to some unexplainable pharmacological effect it may possess, they just crave human connection and sense of belonging just like everyone else. Using medical terms to dehumanize them is not productive at all.

maven29··on Where Are the Sanity Checks?
What is the takeaway here? Heuristic exception raising? Exposing error bars and confidence figures? If it were that trivial, would they even have to leave it to the user to make the actual decision?
maven29··on Beeper Mini removed from Google Play?
While we're at it, let's outlaw web search as well. Clearly, those indexing bots are not paying customers.

If a niche enthusiast crowd worth of traffic will absolutely obliterate the underlying infrastructure, allow unchecked flows of spam and undermine the security posture, maybe Apple should just leave it to the telcos who might be marginally more competent.

maven29··on Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
We would have if VHS had a built-in recommender system or discovery mechanism.
maven29··on Tell HN: Firefox has madea lotof progress. Let the browser wars continue
Back in the Internet Explorer days, there used to be an extension called "IE Tab" that let users open non-compliant websites by usinv the IE engine as a webview without leaving the browser.

This might not be completely feasible under the current form of webextensions, however I wonder what would it take to work around Google's bad faith behaviour, and make firefox truly first-class.

maven29··on Three chips in and Google Tensor is on life support
I mean helping others execute semi-custom work based partly on qualcomm designs, to clarify
maven29··on Three chips in and Google Tensor is on life support
Has Qualcomm ever engaged in significant semi-custom work? (no, adjusting dvfs for a special "for galaxy" SKU or adding pluton to 8cX gen 3 doesn't count). Samsung was a semi-custom partner for Apple in the early days of the iPhone (to the extent that the M1 still has some Samsung IP in it[0]).

I heavily doubt that Qualcomm is even capable of working in such a role. In fact, the C-suite probably believes that their core competency is lawsuits and not modems, anyway.

[0] https://twitter.com/calebccff/status/1472517091970494465

(Edit: I meant semi-custom SoC design/architecture not cores, like https://www.anandtech.com/show/7281/understanding-amd-semi-c... )

maven29··on Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery validated at 160 Wh/kg
Will Volume/kWh really matter if they use the battery also as a major structural component? Doesn't skateboard chassis require structural reinforcement even at the cell level?
maven29··on Google paid $8B to make its apps default on Samsung phones
LLM training is difficult to audit, and as such good-faith barriers such as robots.txt or API endpoint scraping are all easily ignored. Even ignoring the query side, and just from an indexing perspecrive, you see a considerable advantage.

LLMs (at runtime) and LLM mills (during training) have nothing to gain from restricting themselves to the open web. This is in contrast to Google, who is in the business of selling links to information and not information in itself.

maven29··on Google paid $8B to make its apps default on Samsung phones
Citations?
maven29··on Google paid $8B to make its apps default on Samsung phones
Search result quality has been declining on Google since 2019. The web is increasingly turning into closed platform unindexable silos.

These payments aren't towards being the default, it's to ensure that search itself does not get replaced by a different paradigm.

You could argue that it is not a coincidence that the likes of Siri stagnated for so long, while we saw the rise of LLMs effectively resurrecting it elsewhere.

maven29··on Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Ubuntu Unity DE used to offer this for all GTK apps through the HUD. You could hit alt and type to get to the menu item you need.

Gnome turned out to be a poorly thought-out opinionated mess, learning all the wrong lessons from Apple's work.

maven29··on Casio fx-CG50 calculator comes with Python built-in
This is a bit ironic, but have you tried the Numworks simulator app or any of its forks.

I usually have excel sheets or python/matlab scripts. However, this simulator felt self-consistent enough to develop muscle memory for quick back-of-the-envelope work.

https://github.com/UpsilonNumworks/Upsilon

https://www.numworks.com/simulator/download/

maven29··on Google faces antitrust probe in Japan for pushing search default
Taking boiler-plate legalese at face-value isn't sustainable. It's just as bad for signal-to-noise ratio as autoplaying video ads.

"We have not confirmed any illegal activities at this point" with this headline." doesn't imply anything of substance at this stage of the process.

maven29··on Matter 1.2 – New device types and improvements
https://github.com/OpenIPC/firmware

You can get onvif-compliant firmware for some of those, but battery-powered operation cannot be expected to remain practical, given what onvif focuses on.

maven29··on Tell HN: DuckDuckGo Search Results have jumped the shark
Due to trying to decouple from Microsoft?

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-track...

maven29··on Qualcomm to Bring RISC-V Based Wearable Platform to Wear OS by Google
Intel put in a lot of legwork into ensuring that x86 is a first-class citizen on android, and this has far-reaching effects.

Beyond just building against the android runtime, it is now trivial to support additional architectures at every stage of the pipeline, even for native code.

Although x86 has the advantage that all dev workstations use it for VMs, at one point Google even had a MIPS version of the playstore, not to mention how different V7 and V8a are within ARM architectures.

maven29··on Antibiotic Identified by AI
Do they diff multiple independently requested copies to anonymize the source? I still see request information in the PDFs from sci-hub.
maven29··on Some iPhone 15 Pro Max users are reporting OLED screen 'burn in'
Does this page typically include arcane electrical engineering jargon? Perhaps it could be tied to the truetone toggle?
maven29··on Some iPhone 15 Pro Max users are reporting OLED screen 'burn in'
PWM dimming is only necessary if you value color accuracy. Chinese OEMs tend to provide a choice to use DC dimming, but I do not think Apple will ever accept the burden of adding another list item to their settings pages.

Most people only notice flicker during saccades. A larger proportion of people will notice scrolling purple/blue smear, that manifests itself at extremely low source current, when you have really dark shades of grey on a dimmed screen in low brightness environments.

As an aside, burn-in and mura seem to be solved problem these days, due to display driver ICs constantly characterizing the I-V curve of individual subpixels and applying compensation using aging models. Variabilities introduced during manufacturing are also optically captured for compensation.

Additionally, there exists compensation circuits within the TFT plane for fine-adjustement of uniformity for each subpixel.

MicroLEDs are not magically immune to the issues affecting OLED. https://www.oled-info.com/measuring-and-correcting-microled-...

maven29··on Google wins reprieve from $32M verdict in Sonos patent fight
You have to consider the fact that workarounds are dime a dozen.

In any case, startups aren't exactly in a position to gamble away their endowment in a court battle, which can trivially get stretched out by their megacorp opponents until they run out of cash.

maven29··on Blackmagic Camera for iPhone
Isn't the 180 degree shutter angle more crucial than the distinction between 24 and 30?
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