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smith7018

1,024 karma · joined May 7, 2012

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smith7018··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
I had the first iPhone and distinctly remember telling people "I have the entire internet in my pocket at all times" and people finding it strange. I said "I never really have to log off Facebook or Digg" and my friends didn't understand what I meant.
smith7018··on PS5 Relapse Exploit
There's also a Switch emulator that's being made for the PS5 that's a port of Eden. It's called ProsperoEden and can already run some games [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXGiTuSAZ5o

smith7018··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
I read that there are rumors that they're getting rid of that tier. No idea where the rumor came from, though. This lends credence to it, I suppose.
smith7018··on Apple Mac mini review
That would be ~$1,995 today due to inflation. That's basically what the entry-level 14 inch MacBook Pro costs today. You're comparing the Pro to the Air's pricing.
smith7018··on M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review
Yeah, Apple has spent 3 years each on the 5nm and 3nm nodes with TSMC. There are some reports [1] that it will jump to 1.4nm after 2 years due to AI but there's no real proof. The source is Digitimes who are frequently wrong with their predictions and rumors.

[1] https://wccftech.com/apple-to-move-to-1-4nm-process-soon-to-...

smith7018··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
This article is about the M5 and the A18 Pro so your M3 contributions will be extremely useful!
smith7018··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
I imagine either they or others can take their discoveries and write a real driver now, though. The hard part was always the reversing the black box system.
smith7018··on OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M
Then it comes down to cost of compute. Are companies going to add a multiplier on their compute costs to reach a platform with no users? It's still the same problem.
smith7018··on OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M
That's unfortunately a rosy view of it. It might be easier to take source from one platform to another but that was never the issue; the issue is keeping it up to date with releases, testing it as often as other platforms, and handling user support tickets. The chicken and egg situation still applies here and companies aren't going to spend all the time and money on a new platform if users aren't asking for it.
smith7018··on iPod Classic 6G in QEMU
Do you remember if it was named Musika? [1] If so, that game has actually been decrypted so I could work on a recomp. There's also Phase [2] which seems like the more likely pick. Unfortunately, it was never decrypted. I modeled out the Metadata db structure that the iPod OS exposed to games that represented its iTunesDB so I should be able to support custom songs/albums in a recomp in the future. Long term, I'd love to be able to BYO API key for Spotify and expose your Spotify library to the game as your "iPod's" music. I feel like that would modernize the experience. I'll get there when work calms down and I'm no longer working 60 hour work weeks :(

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuF_i7N2M4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9scEk1_lQXc

smith7018··on iPod Classic 6G in QEMU
Great work! I'm the guy that's working on recompiling the iPod games for modern systems (I'm mentioned by the top comment in your Reddit post). Have you tried installing the games in the emulator? If so, this would be a huge step in figuring out the DRM so people can dump their own games. That would lead to more games being supported in siggifly's 5.5G emulator [1] and eventually the games can be brought to more modern platforms.

[1] https://github.com/siggifly/ipod-emulator/ I made the PR that allowed it to run dumped games fwiw

smith7018··on Asahi Linux on M3
Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.

They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.

smith7018··on Asahi Linux on M3
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.
smith7018··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.
smith7018··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
smith7018··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.
smith7018··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
iPod Classic click wheel games. Specifically Mini Golf. I've also been working on an emulator for the others and it can now boot all of the 20 decrypted games released ~20 years ago and play most of them. There's a Sims Bowling, Sims Pool, and Lost game in there which is cool from a preservation standpoint. Less cool are the SAT Prep 2008 games which have actually been surprisingly annoying to emulate due to the way the text uses blend modes.

I plan on releasing all of this at one point. It's crazy it hasn't been done in 20 years!

smith7018··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
On the flip side, I've been using Fable to statically recompile a game binary from a system that's never been emulated to modern C++ while also keeping the code clean, maintainable, and portable and it's been a dream. I'm in awe of how fast Fable is able to bring a 20 year old game that's largely been lost to the sands of time to SDL3. It finished the recomp in about 3 hours. The next day has been fully rewriting the functions to remove old hardware-specific quirks and then rewriting large swaths into multiple classes, subsystems, building tests, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to add mod support and then experiment with a random platform like making a Switch build of the game.

It's expensive but it's doing in hours what no one's done in 2 decades.

smith7018··on KOReader
Yeah, it's genuinely my favorite game of all time but to compare it to Rollercoaster Tycoon as "a technical marvel" is doing a massive disservice to Chris Sawyer.
smith7018··on The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade
I mean, it is $36 more a year but I guess that's not terrible. What will be interesting is the tax paid up front. IIRC, I paid tax on the entire device every time I renewed rather than just paying it during each month. So I always thought it wasn't the best deal because I paid tax on a device that I only ended up paying off half of before renewing and starting the process again. I could be wrong, though. I'm not the best with finances.
smith7018··on The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade
They have 12 month options for the Apple Upgrade program. I just checked how much it would cost to get an iPhone 17 PM + AppleCare+ with theft protection like I currently get from the IUP and it's $3 more a month.
smith7018··on FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers
> most of the ebook world is leaning towards smaller screen sizes

These are seriously niche devices. They're currently trendy but the Kindles of the world probably have something like 98% of the market.

smith7018··on A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
They do make biodegradable hot glue [1] but it's still not perfect. It's biodegradable and certified compostable under industrial conditions but it still has a polymer base. It's also not ideal for projects that are always in UV light.

https://www.poweradhesives.com/adhesives/tecbond-214b/

smith7018··on Qwen-Image-3.0: Rich Content, Authentic Details, Deep Knowledge
Many product/model shots actually use clips to make the clothing look like it's perfectly fitted to the body. [1] This image is actually over 15 years old at this point. I think there should be laws that prevent this because it veers into false advertising though others believe it's alright because you can theoretically tailor the clothes to fit like this.

Regardless, I'd rather see real clothing on a real person when it comes to my purchasing decisions. I buy a lot of vintage clothes online and I've noticed a dramatic uptick in AI images of models wearing the clothes. I've never once bought from those sellers because it feels disingenuous. Sometimes they have fake runways which is actual false advertising because it makes the item appear more expensive than it really is. I've also noticed that the AI models' body types are always thin even if the item is a L or XL. Needless to say, the AI isn't showing me what an XL looks like on a small model; it's showing what a small model would look like if the item fit perfectly.

[1] https://www.primermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/St...

smith7018··on Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters
Why would Apple settle? They probably want the same outcomes of the Waymo v Uber trial that forced Uber out of the market. Apple's accusations imply that every part of OpenAI's hardware effort has been tainted with Apple's trade secrets and is therefore illegitimate. They also have more money than God so they can keep the suit going as long as they want.
smith7018··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
I'm not sure where "so much less resources" comes from. Training the best model has nothing to do with having the most NVIDIA GPUs around. If that were true then xAI would have the best model. It comes down to the quality of data, research, and financial backing.
smith7018··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
Nothing says they're using Qwen for local development. They could be using it to for conversations, knowledge, or "creative writing."
smith7018··on Unlocking the PSP's Dual Core Setup
I sometimes visit hoping that their dry spell is over but alas..
smith7018··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
It's also not just a story; it's a lawsuit with evidence.
smith7018··on It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.

> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much

It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments

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