HappyDaoDude

The market will remain irrational far longer than even the most pessimistic takes.

Absolutely! A few times I have seen the full grandeur of this on the west coast of Tasmania. Highly recommend. Also neat seeing all those satellites flying about after sunset.

Your memories are spot on. ;)

It is the closest we have to a freedom respecting device. The baseband processor is still a closed blob but it is a lot better than pretty much everything else out there. Maybe Pinephone eventually will get there as well.

There was that moment when a friend had a Dual G5 PowerMac only to have it trampled in performance by the new Core Duo Mac Mini. That was when we knew Apple had made the right move. I called the G5 tower (Steve's shame), you could just tell that every time those fans kicked into top gear that there was a sense of shame that that thing even shipped.

The M1 felt like that all over again. I didn't really get that feeling during the 68K to PPC era but that also wasn't handled as gracefully.

You could not critic either direction too heavily. Do you want a fresh technology base or legacy support? There is no wrong answer.

Get on it sooner rather than later. Many CRT's were thrown out when they were considered obsolete and the ones remaining are dying from age.

That is a very fair call! The overall champion of physical storage is still stone.

The most surprising thing, to me, was for once I got the timing spot on! Usually when I predict things like this I am way off on the timing but this is right on pace. In that sense it is like an economist predicting a crash, one of the twenty will be right.

The question is now, how many years until they start moving features behind the paywall like limits on how many people in a message chat? Or view limits (aka twitter/x) I suspect 3-5 years.

It is hard to tell what we will leave. Depending on how our civilization declines, if it just the typical path of resource overshoot and decline I do wonder how much of what we are creating today will last. Digital technology is efficient but lacks resilience. Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years.

The things that make it through these periods are the stuff that is seen as useful to the folks in between. This is why we get a lot of religion, the odd bits of sciences stuff, a lot on growing food and snips of history if lucky. Heck for the might of the Roman empire, we only have 25 seconds of sheet music remaining. It is also funny how little we know about some of the Emperors. Things like, they had children, we do not know their names or if they survived childhood. The gaps are huge.

The things that survive are the things other think are worth surviving. Hygiene practices yes! Tiktok... no.

Not OP and a bit of an aside but, funnily enough the leap from BotW to TotK actually was the first time in a while that I felt like Nintendo didn't really bring that kind of refinement and innovation. It wasn't not a bad game, not by a long shot, but it lacked that usually tight gameplay and experience that you come to expect. This is in large part the open world as it felt like they used scale rather than refinement to get those across the line.

That is an understatement. The amount of refinement they have done now on various games is starting to feel like it is beyond just pure iteration but is a result of intuition that cannot be taught.

Seeing what folks in the demoscene can do nowadays with such limited hardware makes modern software feel all the more puzzling. I mean, yes demoscene stuff isn't concerned about ease of development, security or integration. But it does leave you yearning, think about the possibilities of modern hardware if treated with care.

Usually that hesitance is because a lot of amatuer stuff has been made using Unity. But when in the right hands, it can feel like it is its own thing but it is easy to be hesitant after shoveling through so much trash.

Along these lines - For all the rubbish Nintendo does, they do know how to ship complete games. Games that if never patched, just work.

That is a fair call. The game visual updating slow is not a huge issue but if the input cursor is slow, it is very apparent.

Considering something like Simcity 2000/3000. Visual update is probably in single digits FPS most of the time, but the input cursor is very smooth.

To shoot from the hip on this one. It sounds like it could be limited by a single thread. Clock rates between mid and high end CPU's are significantly different but core count is. Thus if a single thread is holding up the works, that would explain the stagnant performance profile despite potential overall performance.

It seems like Lithium isn't so much quality limited by supply speed. At least for the moment.

There is some concerns in terms of total materials for stuff like Cobalt/Nickel but even then, my gut feeling is that those issues are more fear mongering rather than a real issue.

My initial issues with Musk was that he tended to push ideas and time frames WAY beyond what was reasonable.

Tesla / Space X are already amazing in almost ever respect, it doesn't need all the silly hype machine on top of it. Yes, it is neat to think about Mars bases eventually but that should be a stretch goal not pushed as "It is 4 years away!".

Starship is an incredible achievement already and I suspect it will come together quicker than we anticipate (less than a decade, probably in the next 2-3 years) but Musk had always promoted time lines and ambitions that were silly. Like point to point public rocket travel by 2030. The thing cannot land yet and they are already thinking 50 steps ahead with a stated date. That doesn't detract from Space X's achievements but it does cast a shadow over them as a whole.

The world is forever a better place with this in it. Fight me!

That is a fair call. If that is the case, robably best to just leave it.

Those gravitational boosts are vital.

The closest in speed so far would be 'New Horizons'. But even then NH is going at 14.5KM/sec compared with Voyagers 18KM/sec. There are no probes currently that would catch up to Voyager.

That is true now, but maybe once the probes go completely dead with no chance of revival and there is no risk of tampering?

It is like restaurants they say their ingredients are "fresh". If you have to specifically call it out, there is something wrong.

I said it on here before. I used to be the king of macaroni code. Tiny pieces of spaghetti code - fast running that barely made sense. The technical debt stacked up really quickly but it ran damn fast and got the job done. Kind of stuff that would make people say "How the heck does that work? That is fast though!".

It is a problem of being self taught on projects that only I would use, you would learn some very bad habits. Would also mean making code that you would look back on a few months later and have no idea what you were doing.

If it was for anything other than video games pre-online era, I fear the kind of damage it could have done. It was putting pixels on screen, not running online data bases or via monetary systems.

To that I say, I like the Ps2's/Gamecube memory systems that kind of didn't give a damn how many pointers you threw at it. I would also like to say I learned not to do this, I did not. I just don't code any more.

At launch definitely was a decent little performer. That said, the 386 was probably launched shortly afterwards as well. The funny thing is that it wasn't until almost the mass adoption of high speed 386's and the 486 in the early 90's that we finally saw a lot of stuff that over took things the Amiga and SNES for that matter. A big part of that was VGA graphics via the VESA bus. The ISA bus did a lot to hold back video out put on these systems. Graphics was almost an afterthought by comparison.

I mean things like Commander Keen were considered really decent for side scrolling graphics on PC but would be seen as trivial on a system like the Amiga and maybe even the NES using early 80's tech. It was a long time until the PC could scroll graphics as smoothly as the NES could with Super Mario in 1985. Custom ASIC designs just had to so leverage back then. It is something we are moving back into nowadays with chiplet designs and SoC's in general. Just look at the processor blow outs on something like the M1/M2 to see this.

Spot on. Their laptops are so close to being great but there was always a little catch that made them just a hop and skip away from being all they could be.

They could be wonderful design but manufactured with some less than stellar materials. Things like that.

For 2D stuff definitely, but that was because of some neat dedicated graphics processor and a fixed platform for developers to target. The Amiga range in that sense was WAY beyond others in terms of audio/visuals when it came out. In that sense it was closer to the home consoles than a typical PC.

It led to the odd situation where you had PC's that had these killer CPU's but everything else about the system was holding them back. The Amiga had an average CPU (8Mhz 68K) but everything else was picking up a lot of slack.

As for this example, this is exceptionally good for the Amiga. I don't recall there being anything even remotely close to this in its time. Hackers are just gonna optimise way beyond reason and I love it.

I'm not sure if it is the codec at issue there. I have only used Discord voice chat a few times being interviewed for podcasts and the quality at times is astoundingly good. That said, those doing the interviews are using higher end audio gear that most people would so that would go a long way to improving that.

Generally when I am grabbing audio off Youtube via NewPipe, I generally use the 50kbs OPUS stream if it is just talking/lectures. I cannot tell the difference. That said I once did a FLAC to 128KBit OPUS test on myself with music convinced I would be able to tell the difference. I could not. I just don't have hearing that is sensitive to codec loss it seems.

The idea of an intermission is something that I think should be entertained. 2001 A Space Odyssey has a 10 minute intermission for instance. It can also split up potentially longer pieces.

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” - Alfred Hitchcock