smoldesu

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2 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

I think you've read too far into this. Ray tracing is not a useful real-world primitive for extracting information from most scenes. Sure, "everything is shiny", but most surfaces are diffuse and don't contain useful visual information besides the object they illuminate. Many supposedly "pure" reflections like mirrors and glass are actually subtle caustics that introduce too much nuance to account for.

Also, "pipe" isn't considered harmful terminology (yet) just FYI. I was confused seeing the "|" mononym in it's place.

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Making a competitive alternative to iMessage is a game of whack-a-mole that you will always lose, too. Apple would never give a third-party the same level of control they have to integrate with iOS.

So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.

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It's probably my favorite part of HN, at this point. The reaction from people the other day when Google/Apple admit to cooperating with FIVE-EYES was priceless.

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Well, you can't pass legislation to shut down the school shootings factory or invade climate change's homeland. However, Europe has shown us that tying your economy's profitability to a basis of digital standards can easily compel more open behavior.

Given that Apple is quite literally the Largest Company, they're somewhere on that list. Maybe not next to abortions and climate change, but Apple antitrust is an inevitability unless they get smaller or the economy gets bigger.

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How is it fascinating? Apple exerts pressure on customers to buy their products, and then further pressures to keep them integrated with Apple's ecosystem. Here, a customer gave in to the first pressure and is disappointed by the artificial friction Apple uses to upsell their customers.

So... are we shocked that iPhone customers don't de-facto agree with everything Apple does? Or the fact that OP would be willing to criticize something they paid for and supposedly identify with?

It's really not fascinating at all. It reads like a perfectly level-headed and candid criticism of an ecosystem by someone who isn't invested in the success of one particular company. It's almost too lucid for HN.

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I will say that to their market cap. Such an insane capitalization on digital sales can only be achieved by extinguishing the alternatives your platform can host. It's a regressive featureset that can (apparently) only be reversed through legislative demands a-la Digital Market Act.

Many, many companies have had huge market caps while funding anti-humanist or exploitative processes. Given Apple's scale you almost have to assume that they're abusing something lucrative.

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Honestly it doesn't feel any different for me on MacOS. Both OSes push first-party music and cloud services, both OSes beg you to use their browser, both OSes show news with their own built-in ad networks. At this point for Windows 11 and MacOS 13, I'm shocked how little these OSes have meaningfully changed since the early 2000s. Both companies feel like they're taking a detour around user empowerment to focus on Selling Moar Services™.

While we're looking at things from a retro-idealist lens, even Android and iOS seem unnecessarily bloated. It feels like the vast majority of every FAANG's engineering effort goes into crippling the user nowadays.

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With no disrespect to Steve, we might have to settle on a better standard of computation than one that was designed to reinforce a trillion-dollar business model.

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The hard part isn't so much writing the code as it is testing the code. The WINE server is decades old, porting API calls to another kernel isn't an entirely new or novel process. Getting all the software to work right is an ongoing process though, and it requires careful deliberation over what works and what doesn't. WINE code is still being refined to this day in response to new titles and old bugfixes.

So, I won't preclude the idea of AI helping, but I think human effort is still the bottleneck for projects like this. Even if AI could write perfect code 100% of the time, testing and troubleshooting would probably still be the larger timesink.

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I have multiple flakes and a lotta CUDA drivers. In fairness though, this is after a few months of no manual GC. I think nix-collect-garbage could bring it down to ~120-150gb.

It's totally worth the stability, but maybe not the best choice for the storage-constrained.

EDIT: According to nix-tree my current generation is only 45gb right now.

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Be warned; your hard drive may file for a divorce after a few years of daily-driving NixOS. It is both a blessing and a curse:

  $ smol@computer ~> du -hcs /nix/store/
  257G    /nix/store/

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  Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

  Remote: Yes

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  Technologies: Linux/UNIX administration, DevOps, Docker, Rust

  Résumé/CV: Available upon request.

  Email: [email protected]

3 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

> It looks like the M1 which shipped in the 13" MacBook Air massively outperforms the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U[^1] on Geekbench 5 single core: 1710 vs. 707.

> Am I missing something?

Yes, a fair fight. Pick a laptop with the same core count as M1 and preferably another 5nm laptop chip for a truly "fair" comparison. Like the 5800u, if you fancy. Or ignore that and continue to insist faster and cheaper laptops don't exist.

> The M1 MacBook Air scored >29hrs on the battery rundown test

> Am I missing something?

Presumably the part in any of my previous comment where I mentioned battery life.

> The same reviews refer to the Ideapad having a "mediocre" screen.

> Am I missing something?

It's a $400 laptop and your only critera was that it had to be faster and cheaper. If you actually wanted to talk about displays then yes, your original comment was missing some key details. I wouldn't be surprised if your next reach was to claim MacOS is an "infinite value add" and end our comparison on that basis alone.

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> Now find me a laptop with commensurate performance at the same price point from that time.

Sure: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Laptop-Memory-Windows/...

> Apple has in fact publicly resisted repeated attempts from state and federal authorities to have it insert backdoors into iOS

They have also in fact been part of NSA surveillance programs for over a decade. It's nice that Android gets out ahead of these things by offering pure Open Source images.

1. Can you explain to me why "the marketers" are adopting the same strategy for Vision Pro's launch as they have for every other flagship Apple launch in the last decade?

Because lying works!

2. Can you explain why a company with an estimated NPS in range(+65,+80) even _needs_ the best marketers in the world?

Why wouldn't they? They're the largest company in the world, forced to compete in one of the most competitive advertising markets in the world. Publishing things that keeps those customers happy takes work, and Apple clearly does lots of "work" in that sense.

3. Can you explain why you seem to believe that it is the job of Apple's marketing team to "normalise" something ex post facto? Isn't it a well understood axiom of Apple's philosophy that until the technology is mature (in this case: thin / light) enough to create a resonant user experience, they will not enter a market?

Well, that's kinda what they did with the iPhone and the Apple Watch and even the iPad: https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ

I don't know what their end-goal is, but they seem to be perfectly aware that Apple products are not 'the norm' in many places.

4. Can you find me that mythical laptop computer to compete with MacBook Air?

See above. There are hundreds but anything with a Ryzen 5 or 7 from 2019-onward should smoke the M1, if only for lacking a big.LITTLE core architecture. Beating the M1 in CPU or GPU performance is... not difficult. Beating it's idle draw will be what people struggle with.

5. Can you see a trend looking back at the top 3 smartphones in Consumer Reports' surveys over the last decade?

Not when I look at the global chart, no.

3 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Hard disagree. Current headsets are perfectly fine for the well established use-cases like gaming and stereo/3D video. The problem is, as always, going to be shoehorning real features into a goofy form-factor. We've been down this avenue before with Hololens and it was very clear that enterprise customers aren't really interested in developing bespoke AR workflows. Even with perfect passthrough vision there wasn't any tangible benefit to the tech outside very narrow military applications (and who knows where those contracts went).

So now we're here. If Apple delivers on their promise of a very nice Oculus Quest sorta thing with iPhone apps and AppleTV+, I can't imagine people using it more than their Oculus Quest, iPhone or AppleTV.

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People who are priced out of an iPhone Pro are not going to take out a loan to pay for a headset they'll use like a game console. If they're not replacing their iPhone with it, there's no point in buying it. It's a product that inherently relies on an ecosystem (albeit a strong one) to survive. Much like the iPad and the Apple Watch, if the iPhone and it's app ecosystem didn't exist it would be DOA.

So... assuming you're right, who is this headset for? People inside the ecosystem, who want to spend more money on Apple products but don't need it for anything particularly useful? I wager more iPhone users will own Quest headsets than Apple-branded ones by 2025.

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> is like saying that Android manufactures can sell more $50 unsubsidized phones than Apple.

Is that a wrong statement? Do they not effectively stop Apple from penetrating every non-US market in the world?

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Having replied to a text, checked my emails and responded to people on HN all from my first-gen Oculus Quest, I'm not really sure what you're talking about here. Do you not find a web browser sufficient for those tasks? Is there something inherent to the Quest ecosystem that should be stopping me here?

3 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Yep. You left out the part where Palm ate Apple's lunch for 15 years, to the point that Apple was forced to abandon the Newton platform in order to compete. Spot-on recounting otherwise though.

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Meta has neither of those things and still managed to sell 15-20 million Quest units. If Apple is projecting less than a million units sold this year, they're going to have a hard time catching up to Meta's install-base, let alone their MAU count.