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At least a lot of those are common words that allow some level of meaning inference with a little bit of adjacent knowledge, like cache and queue make sense with the barest of explanations because their everyday definitions are still applicable. Many of these terms aren’t entirely opaque until you drill down into specific niches.
Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.
I don’t ever use their “smart” functionality (that’s what my Apple TV is for) but I’ve never had any issues with the Google TV (Android) build that Sony ships. It doesn’t nag me about being kept offline, is reasonably fast, and doesn’t even show its home screen unless I specifically summon it, so it checks my boxes.
Nope. A lot of people use Photoshop for vector screen-destined graphics, because even though it's raster-dominant, it's reasonably capable of vector too. Illustrator is vector-dominant, but as noted, it's aimed mainly at print-destined vector graphics.
Not really. Freeform is more of a whiteboarding/brainstorming app. It might be ok for rough wireframes but isn't suitable for high fidelity mockups, asset creation, etc.
Vector screen-destined assets. Illustrator is print-centric and awkward for the use case, and while Photoshop is technically capable of it that's not what it's made for (also, Adobe CC is just way too bloated for its own good). Figma is oriented around mockups and not as good for assets.
There are also platforms which are less vibe-friendly, and old style mockups can still be useful when nailing down a design system across platforms.
I'm on the fence on this idea. I think it depends on how well it's doing financially, basically to what extent has Figma eaten its lunch.
I never boarded the Figma train because I prefer the UI of Sketch, as well as its local-first approach and how its file format is publicly documented so I actually own my data. I do worry about it going under though, and if Apple buying it up is the only way for that to happen so be it.
If nothing else it'd keep it out of Adobe's hands which is worth a lot on its own.
When it comes to housing I think the key thing is stability.
Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it.
At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased.
Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.
As a somewhat naive layman in all of this, for a while now in my mind it's been fairly obvious that the methods of the current big western players in the space weren't sustainable and the cat would be forever out of the bag sooner or later.
Open weights are also just one aspect of this. Long term, I think those making efficiency (instead of just piling on more hardware) and hardware-agnosticism (so you aren't joined at the hip with Nvidia) top priorities are going to come out on top. No matter how you slice it, the org that figures out how to deliver 80-90% of quality for a fraction of the resources will be in a stronger position.
Fully agree.
I think this is true of a lot of software, really. Very few people need more out of their office suite than what’s available in MS Office 2000 for example, which is somewhat validated in the sheer popularity of GSuite (with e.g. Docs being little more than WordPad/TextEdit with collaboration bolted on).
In general I also think that fixed-feature projects are a woefully underexplored space in the FOSS scene, which is a shame because they’re structurally more sustainable than projects that endlessly add new features.
That might be part of it, but the effect I’m describing includes the shading changing shape. So for example if a bust on a pillar is sitting in a corner, as the camera pans around the bust, AO behind the bust shifts to “wrap” around the edges of the bust which looks strange because no shadow in the real world acts like that.
The thing that’s always bugged me about SSAO is the “jitter” visible when the player character or camera moves, which I would imagine is due to it being calculated in screen space. In some cases it’s so distracting it breaks immersion.
Given that accuracy isn’t the goal anyway I’ve often wondered if it wouldn’t be better in many cases to apply a sort of pre-calculated AO that uses a relatively small atlas of shading textures rendered on flat surfaces as decals (disclaimer: I am not a graphics programmer). It’d apply only to angular surfaces (so for example human faces wouldn’t be included) but I’d say that 80-90% of the benefit of AO lies in things like corners of rooms anyway — it’s really just manmade objects that look bad without AO, organic shapes don’t suffer nearly as badly.
I spent a lot of time in a… not-quite-legitimate version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.
And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.
Usually when sites get reloaded after sitting for a while due to “too much memory” it means the site has a memory leak (or several) that it’s owner has chosen to not address.
Annoying regardless, but arguably Safari is doing the right thing here.
IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.
That’s what one would expect, but in some parts of the US it’s not uncommon to see dilapidated houses with a shiny tricked out F-150 that’s never worked a day in its life sitting out in the parking lot…
I think for some it’s an identity thing more than anything else.
Nothing looks like a decent replacement for OnePlus for phones, but it doesn’t look like they’ve tackled tablets yet which is unfortunate. Though I never bought one, OnePlus’ tablets have long been on my radar because they’re one of the few Android tablets that use a sensible, more squarish aspect ratio (similar to that of iPads) instead of the awkwardly tall/skinny 16:9/16:10 shape popular in the industry.
That improves the situation a little, but the user still doesn’t have an easy way to migrate the app to other browsers on the same machine or to new machines. With a self-contained binary you just copy the executable wherever and you’re done.
The other issue is that web browsers are dynamic environments (much more so than operating systems) and sometimes break/change things. Users who’ve frozen PWA updates don’t have any access to critical fixes. A lot of devs just wouldn’t support frozen versions.
In addition, it’s a lot easier to seek rent with a web app which is also likely a big factor.
I’m a dev and understand how web apps can be attractive to us, but as a user they irritate me. During my formative years, software by and large served the user over the dev, so flipping the scales entirely in my favor as a dev feels almost wrong.
I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Or as I have encountered several times over the years, it turned out to have vanished without a trace for whatever reason (author got bored, became ill, didn’t want to pay for the domain any more, etc) when I reach for it, sending me searching for an alternative in the midst of a task.
Self-contained binaries stored on my personal devices don’t do that, and one can usually find third party copies scattered across the internet long after the author stopped publishing/maintaining them.
The needs of desktop and mobile are different enough that it's extremely difficult to build a UI framework for both that doesn't seriously compromise one paradigm or the other.
I would argue it's one of the main reasons why frameworks like Flutter stuggle with widespread adoption on desktop — it was conceived primarily as mobile-oriented, and so on desktop you're stuck with half-baked third party components for essentials such as datagrids and tree views. WinUI with its mobile heritage in UWP suffers similar problems.
GTK + Adwaita tries to straddle the fence and produces a subpar experience on both sides. Desktop data density is terrible due to mobile-minded button sizes and margins (big touch targets, bloated whitespace to make inadvertant touch interactions less frequent) and desktop-oriented widgets like tree views feel out of place on mobile.
Yeah. Based on my personal experience I think some kind of hybrid of old-school imperative retained and declarative retained, both with granular reactivity is probably the correct balance for "serious" high-utility desktop applications. Declarative approaches are great for smaller components but become a nightmare for anything much more complex than a relatively simple mobile app while imperative requires a lot of extra legwork at the component level, and as I understand (which may be incorrect) immediate mode makes certain types of optimization more difficult.
Problem is, unless you happen to live in a relatively wealthy neighborhood, even if you stay put your neighbors and community probably won’t so you still won’t have much permanence.
Another mid-30s guy here, and while the the flash cards and SRS algorithm bring plenty of value, for me probably the most powerful thing that Anki enables is consistency. It's easy and low friction to have a chunk of each day carved out for whatever decks I'm happening to be working on at that point in time — regardless of the topic my routine is always the same, and eventually it feels wrong if I haven't reviewed. It effortlessly pulls itself along.
I find that very difficult to achieve with any other method of studying, with exception to content immersion in the case of language acquisition.
It also has me a bit spoiled, because now when I have no other option but to pore over typical painfully dry, unnecessarily fluffed up instructional materials I groan to myself. It's so much easier and more time-efficient to memorize a deck with the actually-important bits over a 2-3 week period.
This has traditionally been one of the points of attraction for the Mac desktop. It has a higher than average number of native applications which conform to platform conventions and are specifically designed to not stand out.
The best apps there acknowledge that they’re just one of a wide variety of tools the users reaches for regularly and avoid the hubris that comes with use of UI as brand identity. They don’t try to hog the user’s attention, vie for mindshare, or unnecessarily force the user to learn new or foreign UI patterns. They try their best to avoid saddling the user with any kind of unpleasant surprise (even if that’s just ensuring that common interactions work as expected) and they just sit quietly in the background until needed, serve the user’s purpose, and recede again.
EDIT: a lot of it comes down to small things which compound. For example, native tree views on macOS (NSOutlineView) expand/collapse entire subtrees when the user Option-clicks a disclosure arrow. This can save a ton of time and I die inside a little every time foreign toolkit apps don’t implement it.
For now smart glasses all still look strange (e.g. chunky in places normal glasses never are) which acts as a tell and displays remain at least somewhat visible. Hiding screens entirely would likely entail also blocking the light bouncing back from the user’s face in the screen areas which would look odd.
I’m not seeing how it’s bad that a company is pushing in the direction of user hardware ownership. Of course it’s self-serving, that’s what companies do, but with most of the rest of the industry increasingly leaning in the direction of eliminating powerful general purpose computers in favor of thin dumb clients with useful compute being gated by subscriptions, it’s nice to see some dissent.
AI features not being constantly shoved in my face and just selectively silently integrated where it’s most useful is preferred to what the rest of the industry has been doing, too. I think most of us are pretty sick of AI getting tacked onto things that don’t need it and then given prominent promotion and UI positioning, potentially at the cost of features we actually use.
They could be doing more, sure, but directionally this all seems fine?
The built in high rez screen sharing between Macs works well too. Through Tailscale I’ve accessed my main Mac from both the opposite coast of the US and from the other side of the Pacific and it works great.
Host resolution automatically matches that of client, image quality is great, framerate is decent, latency is minimal. The host creates virtual screens for the connection so connected screens don’t light up and the machine remains locked to anybody accessing it physically too, which is a nice privacy assurance.
Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult.
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.
What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.
As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.