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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I have to disagree on one point – that iOS home screens somehow look more orderly because they’re full of icons arranged in a strict top-left-to-bottom-right fashion. It doesn’t look any less cluttered than an overly full Windows desktop.

    I found desktops that limit themselves to core functionality and maybe a nice wallpaper to be better looking and more usable since the days of Windows 95 and that hasn’t changed since.

    That “strict grid of icons” look certainly is uniform across iDevices and that’s what appeals to Apple but I never found it to be particularly attractive.


  • I watched it with friends and one of us fell asleep during the first few minutes. We all ended up envying her because we fall solidly in the “nothing about this movie works for us” camp. It’s rather telling that we started making Look Around You jokes after the basement scene.

    But yeah, it’s interesting about how polarizing this movie is not for its content or message but for how it’s made. For some people it really seems to hit a nerve, for others it’s an extremely badly shot movie about a ghost with severe ADHD alternating between gluing things to walls and tormenting chatbot approximations of human children.





  • CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU (“general purpose GPU” aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.

    Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn’t competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.

    Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don’t want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.

    That’s anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it’s anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.










  • I dunno. People said the same about 3DTV and that never took off even when more affordable models became available.

    I don’t think VR/AR has a killer app so far. There are some neat things it can do but nothing that makes people chomp at the bit to get their hands hands on it.

    VR gaming is nice but most gamers don’t consider it sufficiently better to a regular monitor to buy a VR rig. For screen replacement it gets worse because the constraints are even harder - smaller budgets, weaker host hardware, lower expectations that are already exceeded by traditional screens.

    Apple might pull it off but they have one hell of a battle ahead of them.