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Comment Re:Can anyone here back this up? (Score 2) 75

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

Comment Re:But WHERE? (Score 3, Funny) 75

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

Comment Re:Great. Another App-dependent widget. (Score 1) 46

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

Comment Re:Why does it matter? (Score 1) 33

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 2) 103

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 5, Informative) 103

Jobs committed suicide-by-woo. He didn't "turn away from traditional therapy because it can't keep up with rapidly advancing metastasis", he turned away from treatment for a perfectly treatable form of cancer for nine months to try things like a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies, and that killed him.

Steve Jobs had islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It's much less aggressive than normal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The five-year survival rate is 95% with surgical intervention. Jobs was specifically told that he had one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers "that can be cured", and there was no evidence at the time of his diagnosis that it had spread. Jobs instead turned to woo. Eight months later, there was signs on CT scans that his cancer had grown and possibly spread, and then he finally underwent surgery, it was confirmed that there were now secondary tumors on his liver. His odds of a five-year survival at this point were now 23%. And he did not roll that 23%.

Jobs himself regretted his decision to delay conventional medical intervention.

Comment Re: He might still be alive (Score 1) 103

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

Comment Re: Your mouse is a microphone (Score 1) 40

I did some proof of concept tests with both Pointer Lock and PointerEvents, but both failed because you don't get *any* data if you're not moving the mouse, and only get (heavily rounded) datapoints when you do move the mouse. You'd need raw access to data coming from the mouse, before even the mouse driver, to do what they did.

You *might* be able to pull off a statistical attack, collecting noise in the fluctuations of movement positions and timing in the data you receive when the mouse *is* moving. But I can't see how that could possibly have the fidelity to recover audio, except for *maybe* really deep bass. And again, it'd only apply for when the mouse is actually moving.

Neat attack, but not really practical in the browser.

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