>A software cursor is manually drawn by the graphics stack, which saves what was under it, draws the cursor, and then whenever it needs to be moved, writes the original data back, saves the data at the new position, and then draws the cursor there.
AFAIK this hasn't been true for a long time on most platforms, certainly on macOS. The desktop image is composited on the GPU by assembling the underlying windows with appropriate effects like shadows and scrolling/scaling. A software cursor is just another overlay which may also have a transparent shadow.
Actually preserving what was under the cursor and putting it back is the sort of thing you wouldn't do anymore, because that's a cache which requires babysitting based on everything that's underneath and around it.
e.g. On macOS there's full screen zooming for accessibility, and if you wiggle the mouse, the cursor grows in size briefly (maybe even too big for hardware cursor to support).
In 2011 the iPhone was ~4 years old and iPads were ascendant as the only tablet game in town. Google was still playing catch up with Android as a knock-off, having just debuted Android Honeycomb.
The actual topics are:
- the Apple campus that is still unique today
- a rectification of an urban legend about Jobs and Knuth
- a clip showing Jobs was prescient in the late 90s about personalized cloud tech
Dismissing the focus on Jobs as a cult of personality is a mistake, he was simply very influential, and so was Apple at this time.
Meanwhile LLMs are the antithesis of the Jobsian style: just cramming pirated data into a model and reselling it as fake intelligence without real source attribution.
My "oh shit" moment with AI was when an industry where licensing was the cornerstone of projects and employment contracts decided to just adopt pirated code without any source attribution.
The other one was when a CTO boss sent me an AI proposal to review and the experience was like being gaslit by a con artist.
Many professional developers have started acting like the kind of employee that previously would've been fired after 3 months.
Woke lost, because it infected companies, universities and other organizations. It prompted entitled idiots like cited above to go into projects started by others, assume eminent domain, and attempt to take it over with slander and defamation. Always with the same script, pretending to defend while engaged in an unprovoked and drawn out attack.
See the cases of:
- The Ada Initiative
- DongleGate
- James Damore
- Bret Weinstein and Evergreen state (there's even a documentary by Mike Nayna about this)
Just to name a few.
Hyperventilating over the phrase "woke mind virus" or calling Musk a nazi a few dozen more times will not work.
You're the square, and your favored ideology lost.
We now even have BlueSky serving as the verifiable echo chamber of the idiots, and it's absolutely hilarious how they just can't stop attacking each other over there.
Calling for sources while questioning one of the most visible forms of social activism of the last decade is pure gaslighting btw.
Asm.js was never needed as a legacy mechanism, as it was just a compilation target for native code. There was nothing that it needed to remain backwards compatible with, all asm.js code was new code.
Hm so not only is it possible to manipulate scores on HN with weird scripts, but mods only noticed this when users pointed it out in this instance, with no automation or logging there to detect something like this?
Do you suppose motivated individuals might have used something like this to bury wrongthink at a time when mods insisted such a thing wasn't happening, and even if it was, it was happening to all tribes equally so really it wasn't a big deal?
It's not that AI can't convince a novice that what comes out is passible.
It's that experts in a field generally agree that what comes out is insidiously hollow garbage.
This isn't a "semi-religious" belief. It's linear token soup and diffusion bakes running headfirst into actual expertise, second and third order effects, refined skill and taste, and so on.
If you actually want to see civilization advance, you cannot rely on machines that merely mash up existing intellectual output while pretending to have expertise.
We already had that in the form of art school avant-gardism. AI is just style transfer of that, with corporate sycophancy and valley hyperbole as a veneer.
After making one of the least worst rich editors out there on the web, they needed to keep their developers and designers busy (while not having time to fix privacy bugs).
Like every other AI tool it mainly seems to exist to produce productivity porn. Summarize the meetings nobody could be bothered to summarize. Write the docs nobody can be bothered to read or write. Communicate as an end, not a means, because the company your work for has transitioned into the dead-weight phase.
This article's timeline is mostly accurate, but contains a few inaccuracies:
- Unified toolbar and titlebar dates from much earlier... it was 10.4, not 10.7.
- The brushed metal look was supposed to be applied to "appliance-like" apps as opposed to "document-like" apps... But Apple was never able to stick to that rule themselves.
There are a few design ideas that always turn out to be bad when implemented, but which designers seem to have to learn the hard way. Transparency is the biggest one, but I guess so is excessive rounding now.
>Despite the quick spread of agentic coding, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human neuroplasticity were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.
Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective satire for that reason.
It couldn't be that there is something essential and elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first chance they got.
There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just coding, and vibe coding.
The degree to which people defend poor scholarship and writing on HN these days is frankly pathetic.
There is nothing about that intro that is offensive. Reading comprehension ought to tell you that "pun intended" is a joke to make the bitter pill that OP wrote garbage easier to swallow.
Homework assignment: make a bode plot of the convolution filters [1 1 1] vs [1 2 1].
Which one turns +1, -1, +1, -1, .. into all zeroes?
You ought to know this because the fourier transform of [1 0 1] is a cosine of amplitude 2 on the complex unit circle e^(i*omega), which means the DC quefrency needs to be 2 to get the zeroes to end up at nyquist.
The frequency response H(z) (= H(e^i*omega)) of [1 1 1] on the other hand will have its minimum somewhere in the middle.
Also here's a post that will teach you how to sight read the frequency response of symmetric FIR filters off the coefficients:
https://acko.net/blog/stable-fiddusion/
>Before you get your pitchforks out and call me an AI luddite, I use LLMs pretty extensively for work.
Chicken.
Seriously, the degree to which supposed engineering professionals have jumped on a tool that lets them outsource their work and their thinking to a bot astounds me. Have they no shame?
Sorry but this post is the blind leading the blind, pun intended. Allow me to explain, I have a DSP degree.
The reason the filters used in the post are easily reversible is because none of them are binomial (i.e. the discrete equivalent of a gaussian blur). A binomial blur uses the coefficients of a row of Pascal's triangle, and thus is what you get when you repeatedly average each pixel with its neighbor (in 1D).
When you do, the information at the Nyquist frequency is removed entirely, because a signal of the form "-1, +1, -1, +1, ..." ends up blurred _exactly_ into "0, 0, 0, 0...".
All the other blur filters, in particular the moving average, are just poorly conceived. They filter out the middle frequencies the most, not the highest ones. It's equivalent to doing a bandpass filter and then subtracting that from the original image.
Here's an interactive notebook that explains this in the context of time series. One important point is that the "look" that people associate with "scientific data series" is actually an artifact of moving averages. If a proper filter is used, the blurryness of the signal is evident.
https://observablehq.com/d/a51954c61a72e1ef
AFAIK this hasn't been true for a long time on most platforms, certainly on macOS. The desktop image is composited on the GPU by assembling the underlying windows with appropriate effects like shadows and scrolling/scaling. A software cursor is just another overlay which may also have a transparent shadow.
Actually preserving what was under the cursor and putting it back is the sort of thing you wouldn't do anymore, because that's a cache which requires babysitting based on everything that's underneath and around it.
e.g. On macOS there's full screen zooming for accessibility, and if you wiggle the mouse, the cursor grows in size briefly (maybe even too big for hardware cursor to support).