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philistine

5,806 karma · joined September 22, 2018

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philistine··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
The biggest tell of the A-series' chip concessions are the ports. A first for Apple, only one USB-C port is Thunderbolt, the other one is USB 2.0 speed. Apple made a computer with a chip made for devices with one port.
philistine··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
I moved to the Mac App Store version of OneDrive specifically because of the constant issues with the background processes it insists it must have running at all times.

The MAS version has only one of those and it works.

philistine··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
> Still, I think .pkg package style installers are the most intuitive process for non-techies, especially those coming from windows where MSI and install wizard style exes are common.

Nope. It's an app that is simply the .app bundle, skipping the whole historical footnote of a .dmg completely. Once you first run it, it asks if you want to move it to Applications, and promptly restarts from its new location.

philistine··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Je suis gaucher, et j'ai fait le choix idiot quand j'étais jeune de mettre ma souris à gauche. C'est un choix très étrange, mais ça fait en sorte que je n'ai jamais eu à me troubler des touches supplémentaires à droite. Sont juste là, accessible, et pas dans mon chemin. Mon clavier est de pleine taille sans enjeu ergonomique pour moi.
philistine··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Get an Apple Watch. It massively cuts the amount of required unlocks.
philistine··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Very cool looking, but there is an ocean of mechanical keyboards already available with the US keyboard layout. I would explore making ISO international versions. That market is underserved. Because I wanted a mechanical keyboard with a CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 layout with Mac modifiers, I had to design my own layout in SVG for a Max Keyboards custom job. Keep in mind, I did not want to design my own, but I had to!
philistine··on TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
> It's probably a good idea to rather strictly partition your conversations to stick to a single topic.

You assume that UI is sacrosanct and the same everywhere. Those LLM providers are already offering to mingle all your conversations together. Gemini from Google for example defaults to memory from every conversation, and it's safe to assume the option to disable it will be eventually removed.

philistine··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
> The blog post is for a different audience.

No one? Like literally, I don't understand a thing of what the blog post is saying. It's vague to the point of meaning nothing. Every piece of text I've seen that explains CloudflareOS is clear except the blog post.

philistine··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
Your discourse assumes two things: piracy will maintain the archival part without fail and that universal access is the natural end goal. None are true.

Counting on piracy means we will lose stuff. By definition, piracy has adversaries whose job it is to stop it. We cannot count on pirates never to lose any single cultural artifact because their existence is adversarial. Archives and libraries do something legal, they keep culture alive for future generations. Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff. The point of libraries and archives is not to give you web access to every rom with a single click, it's to preserve culture. Access is a bonus, not the point. That's why most of a museum's collection is in their vault. What Archive.org is doing is with their collection is a compromise, and is actually criticized by many other archives who see their adversarial stance with copyright owners as detrimental to the mission of preservation.

philistine··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones

Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.

philistine··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.
philistine··on Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
I presume Chrome on Mac still reports OS X as its OS, even when running a newer version. It is such a ridiculous idea not to put that together.
philistine··on 1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed
It’s a common fear. People constantly mention it on HN every time the advice to keep a TV off the internet is mentioned. Yet we have never seen proof by anyone, not once, that it has happened. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
philistine··on Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
Apple has long term contracts for every part that goes in the most complex supply chain on the planet. Do you think they call their suppliers every morning asking for 2 million chips?

Their price increases were a mixture of absorbing some of the increase and passing what they won't on us.

philistine··on Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL
as a mac user who does suffer from the insanity of compiled for Mac, but never tested on a Mac, thank you.
philistine··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
The thing is Apple designs its own ARM cores. They don't use the vibrant ecosystem of ARM for all the important parts of the CPU; they compete with it on their own and manage to win. They only pay a small amount per device for an architecture licence that's very generous for Apple, in large part because Apple was an initial seed investor and first customer of ARM.

If all the current investments in ARM don't suffice to beat Apple's own efforts, I don't see how they could ever need to use RiscV's community to achieve their goals.

As long as ARM keeps the architecture up-to-date and the fees minimal, Apple's staying.

philistine··on I'm a USB-C Maximalist
Those two resistors cost money. It's not incompetence. It's a deliberate choice.
philistine··on An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop
That’s why I love the Nova.app model. You pay for a year of releases, but if you unsubscribe you keep the latest version when your subscription was active.

It’s the best/worst of both worlds!

philistine··on Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church
I was asked to do that in my hometown with a girl I had never met before. It’s not only tourists, and it’s not only in foreign places.

BTW, that girl had to be 5% handsy with me to sell the lie, and when I met her real boyfriend that same night, he pretended to be royally pissed for five seconds and I was so scared. He laughed it off. Good guy.

philistine··on Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church
Yes, invented much later, but the expression of a different power structure that those types of Romans felt was not present. But to our modern eyes it was. Hell, the mere fact the centre of power was in Constantinople and not Rome is proof enough that they were distinct.
philistine··on ChatGPT Work
The best of Microsoft's naming schemes, now coming to your LLM chatbot.
philistine··on Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips
Apple now designs its own modems, and its TSMC that fabs them. OP is asking if Broadcom might start fabbing those modems. This is not the case here, but you seem to ignore the fact Apple is a modem designer now.
philistine··on Resetting Xbox
It’s not literally the map of the game: it’s about what the player can do.

A square means total freedom. A star means freedom to choose guarded experiences with internal choices.

philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Microsoft's executives lacked time to be hands-on with every acquisition. They were very involved in the decision process at the big studios, and the favoured children, but left the smaller studios without enough input.
philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Game Pass' finances ignored the one true thing about streaming services: they weren't going after the people buying DVDs, they were going after the people paying for cable.

Cable subscribers did not exist in gaming, and so Game Pass is stuck stealing Xbox's own customers. It just doesn't add up.

philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Nintendo finally implemented a modern update system that installs the new version in a new volume, reboots you into that volume, and deletes the old one once booted.

It's why it's so fast. The work happened before you pressed update.

philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Nope. There are no new levels on 3DS.
philistine··on Resetting Xbox
The previously unreleased Starfox 2 is not a retelling, it is a proper story sequel. That is the one game where you're wrong, every single other game is a remake, with Starfox Zero the most tenuous one, but still a reimagining. They've remade the same story five times.
philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Metroid has more duds than hits. Metroid Prime 4 is par for the course for the franchise.
philistine··on Resetting Xbox
Pokopia and Tomodatchi only look like sandboxes at first glance. They are far more directed. They're not a perfect square with you in the middle. They're a star shape with you in the middle.
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