But for a zoomable world map, the Mercator projection isn't too bad. Most of the time you are not opening Google Maps to see a view of the whole planet. You will zoom in to a smallish area, and within that area, the shape and relative sizes are preserved. OK, zoom level 5 in Iceland is a different magnification from zoom level 5 in Colombia. That doesn't matter much, as you just zoom to whatever level shows the area you want.

By contrast if you pick a projection like Equal Earth, it's great for a whole-planet view, but anywhere away from the central meridian is skewed. Your city map of Vancouver will show roads that run due north pointing diagonally up and to the right -- while east-west roads are still horizontal, so you can't just rotate. The fact that your zoom level shows the same magnification as someone in Madagascar viewing the same zoom level is irrelevant.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.

I thought the "high res" thing was to sell you music straight from the 48KHz master -- not jankily downscaled to 44.1KHz, clipped because of loudness wars, and then lossily compressed. Am I out of date?

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

He kind of has a point though. Many websites force a fixed column layout. You have a choice between stupidly large text size or big borders either side, if your display is landscape orientation.

Yes, I saw crisp text on my 1024x768 LCD display a quarter century ago. But you missed the next part of the sentence, "even at small sizes". As text gets smaller you reach a point where it is no longer clear. On an 8k display even the smallest sizes are pin sharp. They are a bit fuzzy on 4k (as I use at work) and would be headache-inducing mush if you tried to show such tiny text on a 1920x1080 display.

Back in the day there were hand-created bitmap fonts for crisp display at small sizes. Nowadays, for better or worse almost every application uses outline fonts, which look a bit jaggy if rendered without anti-aliasing ("font smoothing") and a bit fuzzy with it. Only on a very high DPI display is this completely unnoticeable. My laptop is 4k and I am very happy with it, but to make best use of a 32 inch screen a higher pixel density is better.

I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.

Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.

I guess the logical next step is to capture the heat output as hot water, concentrate the heat somehow (or heat the water a bit more) and use steam to drive a turbine producing electricity. Ye cannae break the laws of physics, but it should be possible for a datacentre to recoup at least part of its electricity costs this way? Essentially a steam-driven power station where the heating element is a bank of GPUs with water running over them.

It's all about theta waves. Those who have become "clear" and can harmonize the frequency of their theta are known as operating thetans.

Well I know that you can't argue over personal tastes, and many people like modal editors, but I don't think it is about "educating yourself". Perhaps the opposite is true, as this interview with vi's creator, Bill Joy, explains:

REVIEW: What would you do differently?
JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think the interesting thing is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

I never had a Surface Studio. But I always wanted one for its 4500x3000 display. Microsoft did a good job in pushing 3:2 aspect ratio and driving the PC market away from the horrible letterboxing that dominated laptops and monitors for a decade. It's a pity that panel was never sold in a standalone monitor (Huawei talked about it but the product never reached the market).

Did you try asking one chatbot to check the quotations given by the other chatbot? If you ask the AI to find something then it will do its best to please you. But if you ask it "is this quotation real" or "is there any evidence for X" then at least some of the time it can perform the useful service of saying "no, can't find it".

I upgraded my video card recently. I need four DisplayPort outputs so I picked a Nvidia RTX A2000 (old generation, not Ada). The prices on ebay.co.uk looked good value. Then I looked at the seller, and he had about a dozen of these cards for sale. I guess Bitcoin or crypto mining costs have reached some threshold where these cards no longer make money.

(The A2000 is a power-limited card drawing only 70 watts, intended for workstations, but I guess that might also make it suitable for mining.)