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Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 40

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 40

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

Comment Re:Why not X1? (Score 1) 40

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 4, Insightful) 254

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

Comment Re:Shine On, Football Brain (Score 0) 55

If shining 810nm light at someone's head a few times a week really does reduce the neurological consequences of repetitive impacts, that's potentially a pretty big deal.

How about avoiding those impacts in the first place? Or would that be un-American?

In other news, scientists are looking into geoengineering to cool our planet, so we can continue to drill-baby-drill until kingdom come.

Comment Backreaction conjecture (Score 1) 88

The directional explanation reminds me of the backreaction conjecture. The basic idea is due to the inhomogeneity of the real universe: as the gravity within each concentration of matter (such as a group of galaxies) pulls it into a tighter clump, the distance between such clumps appears to increase.

I've only come across this idea because of Syksy Räsänen, who is famous in Finland for his goth looks and pro-Palestine activities. So the theory doesn't seem to be widely known.

Comment Re:We have tried on thing so far (Score 1) 170

Global warming is going gangbusters, we want to reverse it. So far we are attempting one thing only to reverse it, and that is emissions reduction.

I haven't seen any serious attempts at reducing emissions, quite the contrary. Sure, renewable electricity generation is a growing industry, but it's only a small part of the total energy budget that's growing fast. With a nation whose official motto is "drill baby drill" and an AI slop industry powered by gas turbines, it's hard to believe the story of renewables saving the world.

Instead of asking how we can power our cars with more climate-friendly sources, we should be questioning the need to drive around so much at all. If it weren't for the petrol industry, we'd probably spend our time more creatively than sitting around in traffic jams. In the early days, the automobile was a more efficient alternative to horse power, but then we ran into Jevons paradox. We're now seeing the same paradox in action with AI data centers; the computers that were supposed to save time and energy are now wasting it.

Maybe, just maybe, it is time to do a second and maybe a third thing to cool the climate? Or at very least do some research into alternatives to reducing emissions.

I'm OK with some form of climate engineering to cool the planet, but only if we're also serious about reducing emissions. Climate engineering shouldn't be an excuse that lets us continue drilling and burning our planet into ashes.

Comment Re:Audacity 1.2.6 was the peak (Score 2) 31

I run Audacity 1.2.6, and refuse to use anything newer.

I find the realtime effects in Audacity 3 pretty handy, though they're a rather limited selection. For example, I use a separate Nyquist plugin for nicer compression, which means it's not realtime. I try not to rely too much on a single piece of software, as they seem to come and go, and maintaining old versions on up-to-date distributions is not fun.

Whatever idiots took over the project and built 2.0 should have stuck to their anime and left FOSS development to people who knew how to use a PC.

Real Men (TM) use Ecasound for multitrack processing on the command line, like I did back in the 00s.

Comment Re:Missing some context (Score 1) 90

I suspect that the relationship is not linear in a case like this: cancer tends to be a big issue for otherwise healthy-ish people because a lot of varieties of it take some time to develop; either chronic exposure to whatever the carcinogen of concern is or some time after the exposure when your luck with the mechanisms that suppress abnormal cell division eventually fails, or both.

There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.

Comment Re:Preparation for the "own nothing" era (Score 2) 50

How good is their game-streaming at cutting out the various 'filler' time(loading screens, startup animations telling you that Nvidia is the way it's meant to be played) and does it have some sort of 'suspend' state to handle cases where you would pause a game if it either doesn't have save on demand anywhere or takes a little while to load from save?

I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.

Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.

Comment Re:good bye (Score 1) 50

Given that they already purchased Activision Blizzard King, including the "King" part of it, they clearly already have a considerable interest in casual players.

What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.

It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.

Comment This should make for some rough benchmarks... (Score 1) 48

I have no particular reason to assume that Nvidia is lying about what this software does; but unless they've stumbled on a veritable miracle it's going to mostly be a mechanism for running largely separate models of whatever size your hardware allows; not anything close to what the datacenter comparison implies.

There's a reason why Nvidia sells most of their higher end models intended for parallel use with NVLink between the chips inside the chassis and a lot of either infiniband or RDMA-capable ethernet between multiple chassis; as well as shoving a considerable amount of RAM per GPU onto those parts. And it's because latency and bandwidth matter a lot.

As it is people seek out the unified memory parts, Apple's or strix halo, or nvidia's little GB10, because the GPU having to go to main memory over a mere x16 PCIe link is already a serious problem. If you think either 256 or 512 Gb/s directly to the PCIe root on the same die as the main memory controller doesn't cut it I have some...bad news...about how well NICs are probably going to work for you, especially with the Nvidia parts that don't support RDMA even if you have NICs that do.

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