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Comment Software engineering as a career is changed (Score 0) 101

The reason for the disparity in belief here is compound:

- It's legitimately a skill you need to learn, a mix of technical writing and indeed programming. It's not just writing some quick text and boom magic you have an app. Don't believe the marketing bullshit.
- Some large corps give their devs unlimited token use. Personal users have in 1 month what a FANG dev can use in 1 day. Personal users can't use it enough to learn it.
- It's been getting better _rapidly_ and if you tried it 6 months ago, it's worth trying again now.

It isn't replacing us yet but if it never got better than current state, it's legitimately useful where it is. Just like Stack Overflow lowered the bar for copy&paste devs, AI does too. Just like Stack Overflow was a force multiplier to legit devs, AI will be a force multiplier for legit devs. ... signed, a dev who does complex low-level optimization work and loves coding. yeah it works for my stuff too, not just websites. I'm scared it will become purely a hobby in the next 10 years.

Comment Re:Deflecting (Score 2) 24

From a cold business perspective, yeah. Yearly releases keep you competitive at the top end and tempt your most liquid of customers to upgrade more and more. From a philosphical perspective, phones are a solved problem for most people, and upgrades aren't really what they once were. I could see someone believing yearly releases are wasteful. The cynic in me says the're probably just not able to keep up, though. Phone design must be expensive and skilled work that demands high coordination.

Comment Re:disagree with all the shade here (Score 1) 125

it does beg the obvious question of how the AIs are going to get training material for future technologies.

Prior to Stack Overflow you had to be really good at reading docs, reading code, know the right forums / IRC servers, occasionally just reach out to someone, etc. -- it doesn't even seem possible to quantify the impact it's had as a fulcrum for organized, vetted, expert dev knowledge. Stack Overflow is dead now, and I don't think AI will ever give us a full replacement for what it provides.

Comment Re:Finally.... Stop the 24fps nonsense. (Score 1) 62

It was never about high FPS in a vacuum, but people don't know that so it just becomes HFR=bad for them. The thing missing is *shutter speed* needs to also adjust. By no means is it static, but if you show people 24fps @ 1/48 shutter and then 48fps @ 1/96 shutter, they won't be complaining about soap opera effect.

The challenge is that you need to do shooting, VFX, compositing, etc. in HFR and then apply some fake motion blur to the LFR version to make it seem more correct, and that's never going to look perfect but maybe it'll look OK enough.

Or you do what The Hobbit did and choose an in-between shutter speed that makes the LFR version look a bit too choppy and the HFR version look a bit soap opera effecty. Don't do what The Hobbit did.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1, Troll) 83

A lot of high-quality electronics ship from China. As a hobbyist I've directly felt the burn on IoT project type stuff that simply isn't made anywhere else. I've felt it on high-end Audio gear as well.

I don't know if it's the same policy being discussed, but I've also had the annoying experience ordering a cool pair of *sweatpants* from Canada -- charged the tarrif and a processing fee that combined cost more than the damn pants did.

Trump isn't clamping down on junk.

Comment Re:Rust's faster than Lua, what a surprise (Score 1) 53

Usually I see a headline like this and I'm like "yeah, the original code sucked and would have been made faster by rewriting it in the original language too".

And I'm 100% confident that this is the case here too. But Lua is slow as fuck and I'm sure that transition did help considerably.

Comment The Pi 5 line has a very narrow lane (Score 1) 70

You use a Pi 5 if you want GPIO and community support. Its appropriateness in other areas has rapidly shrunk, despite the price of the Pi being relatively stable (the 2GB model Pi 5 is like $10 more than the 2GB Pi 2).

The Pi 5 is too expensive to be used as a simple SFF PC. x86 gives you way better bang for buck but will use more power.

The Pi 5 also has a huge amount of competition as a GPIO-ready IoT dev board -- there are faster options, there are cheaper options, there are lower power options. So even in the IoT space, you're really choosing it because you want the strong community support.

The 500+ to me is perfect for a "GPIO-ready Linux dev box" ... I have a Pi 5 setup in desktop mode specifically for this and if this were available at the time, I probably would have just got this instead.

Comment Re:Historians are not impacted by AI (Score 1) 166

Do you have a source for these things? This is fascinating!

My favorite there being that the revolutionary war was fought by the American ruling class and the general public didn't care much one way or the other.

No doubt the ruling class had the most to gain. But the general public not really caring isn't something I've heard before.

Also the volunteer soldiers they did have, which were few and far between, were also completely useless and the war was fought almost entirely with paid mercenaries.

I know the Brits used mercs but wasn't aware the States used them with any significance.

Comment Consistency (Score 1) 41

I assume this is kind of a way for a game to say "yeah, don't need all the clocks, thanks..." in a way that gives devs a testable max performance target that can be more aggressive than, say, just down/up-clocking the chips on demand based on heuristics (which is already happening today).

I can't imagine the average PS5 user will care about saving a few pennies a year by consuming a little less power, especially if it limits game functionality or makes the graphics worse. Even businesses displaying PS5s... I can't imagine the power ask is huge, but maybe it is?

Making it a setting with tradeoffs is the one thing that throws off my understanding. It seems like it should be automatic.

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