blep-arsh

I've asked my bank's support agent about an issue with an app, it also didn't stumble producing a thorough and convincing answer. Entirely wrong, though. Using an LLM to reverse engineer the app turned out to be a much more productive approach.

You might be confusing "conviction" with sociopathy

CrowdSupply isn't geoblocking visitors as far as I know.

I very much appreciate it when people use wired headphones with a decent mic for calls. Speech clarity is just so much better even with Earpods compared to tws earplugs.

I also prefer open-back over-the-ears and there just aren't many wireless options for that.

Some games are reliable enough. I found out the DRAM in my PC was going bad when Factorio started behaving weird. Did a memory test to confirm. Yep, bitflips.

/r/subredditsimulator was entertaining enough way before LLMs.

Shanling uses a custom OS although it feels very primitive compared to iPods (e.g. the iPod Nano had VoiceOver for touch navigation). So I'm not really a fan of these dedicated single-function players; modern media player apps can be fast and convenient (more so than a clickwheel, honestly), and Android devices can still have dedicated control buttons. If only these devices weren't so bulky...

I've had some experience with both Meshtastic and Reticulum, and Meshtastic software was mostly unusable for me even with 3-node networks. E.g. a node sends a message and gets a successful delivery notification from the receiver but the receiver fails to display the message to the user. Reticulum was mostly working fine. Haven't tried MeshCore yet.

I'm always amused by these occasional "you still don't have any viruses" popup notifications from Defender. Well, good to know, thank you very much, I guess.

I don't generally use tiny fonts and I hopefully don't sit unreasonably close to the screen yet fringing is very apparent to me (even on window borders, i.e. it's not a font rendering quirk in my case). Just another anecdotal data point.

There are specialized computation kernels compiled for NPUs. A high-level program (that uses ONNX or CoreML, for example) can decide whether to run the computation using CPU code, a GPU kernel, or an NPU kernel or maybe use multiple devices in parallel for different parts of the task, but the low-level code is compiled separately for each kind of hardware. So it's somewhat abstracted and automated by wrapper libraries but still up to the program ultimately.

Forums also didn't have personalized content recommendation engines... usually, I think

I also have a splitter which lets you power an USB device from a separate power supply (i.e. D+/D- lines are connected to a host and +5V comes from a separate plug, ground is shared though). And optical TOSLINK is a nice option where available.

I have a similar FiiO gadget and it makes less sense for me than a direct wired connection to the phone. It's a relatively bulky device that needs to be charged way too often, also it reduces voice call quality (like any other BT Classic device).

One can't be a real infosec influencer unless one blocks every IP range of every hostile nation-state looking to steal valuable research and fill the website with malware

And people who are financially interested in letting users side-load apps (malicious or otherwise) are good at what they do. I mean, even Russian banks that are banned from the Apple App Store are still finding ways to distribute iPhone apps.

I have a stereo system with a DSP which I've spent quite a bit of time adjusting with tools like REW. I do care. I'm obviously adjusting my expectations because the laptop is indeed small but it really does sound great and I prefer it to typically boomy resonating bass-heavy tuning of small speakers. It's also very good at stereo separation, can even do behind-the-listener flyby from a Dolby Atmos test file.

Laptop OLEDs aren't usually the best wrt color accuracy and uniformity. I've tried two. One had green splotches across the screen, the other just displays a certain range of gray shades with a green tint (so e.g. a black-to-white gradient test image has a green band in the middle). And there's always a static noise pattern of sorts due to non-uniform pixel brightness.

Yes, I've bought a chinese ("Acasis" brand) TB4 hub which has three TB4 downstream ports and an USB 3.x hub with three downstream 10 Gbps USB-C ports. There are also weird combos like one downstream TB3 + three downstream USB-C 3.x. Still not great, but it's better than a single downstream port.

Apple-Apple Bluetooth speech codec is a variation of AAC, I believe. AAC-LD if I remember correctly. But still, having microphones in one's ears is suboptimal. There's a lot of processing required even though the codec is no longer completely awful.

On an unrelated note, I tried doing calls with a stereo mic setup but participants were actually uncomfortable with the ASMR-like effect of the audio.

I can deal with all the warts but I'm not really having a blast.

Depends on the product. Notion, for example, has a "press Space to AI" prompt in the editor. I think it can only be disabled for enterprise accounts.

Force-feeding 100s of different AI features (90% of which are useless at best) to users is what's wrong with the approach.

I've been looking at https://github.com/xanguera/BeamformIt but haven't had time to give it a go yet

I was going to suggest embedding the native WebView ActiveX control (which I did in the past with great success) but it turns out the WebView has been updated and wants end users to download and install the Chromium-based runtime library nowadays.

I ended up making an MS account to store the license info but I just use it once per install to log in/activate then create a "real" local account. Hopefully this still works.

If I remember correctly: iOS is preventing apps from running any generated code that's not signed ahead of time (it's allowed for browsers specifically for JIT but not for IDEs, I believe); spawning processes and loading new dylibs is also forbidden so it's still very inconvenient.

I'm not an expert on the matter but Apple went with 1.0 for full SDR brightness, so you have to query for the maximum display brightness and explicitly use RGB values > 1.0 for HDR. This particular approach might not be a good idea for TVs but this kind of mapping seems easy to reason about and just makes a lot of sense to me. And since this does limit brightness for non-HDR-aware apps and content people figured out they can cover the screen with a multiplying overlay to boost the brightness up to the max.

Not every computer is a part of managed corporate inventory. And some suppliers will happily ignore any issues their updates are causing. E.g. forced Windows feature updates can just disable a computer by throwing out essential but unsigned drivers.