I upgraded from a 2018 Mac Mini to an M1 Macbook Air. It was quite noticeably faster. I had a big code project at the time that took over a minute to compile on the Mini, and on the Air, it zipped through it in <20s. I think even Intel programs emulating through Rosetta were faster, which is just crazy.
But now I’m thinking about going back to a Mini again. That M4 model sounds like it’s an absolute beast!
lol Xcode. I miss the days of Metrowerks Codewarrior. I guess back then, the official Mac tool was some clunky shell environment. I can’t even remember what it was called. But ironically, I’m more comfortable on the command line than in Xcode these days, which is not a shining endorsement for the latter.
Automator is kind of interesting though. I’ve been looking at it lately and it’s pretty powerful once you figure it out. Again ironically, I’ve been using it mostly to manage terminal sessions in their own windows, so even though it’s meant for gui scripting, I’m doing sort of command line on steroids with it. :p
I develop software for macOS but am not a game dev. I guess one thing that comes up with my friends who are is that Apple has a proprietary graphics framework called metal that’s historically not been easy to adapt to something more cross-platform like vulkan. There has been some progress on that front in terms of them providing some much-requested apis to give better feature parity with third parties, but I don’t know where things stand today?
My mom’s childhood was partly spent in a war-torn country where they had no choice but to eat crickets for protein. Years later, I showed her an article about how some gourmet restaurants are experimenting with cricket preparations. She looked pensive, and said “They should harvest them from the rice fields. I think the rice-fed ones taste best?”
I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?
When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.
Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!
But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.
I’m almost afraid to ask what Golden Dome is? If it’s SDI 2.0, we need to stay away in droves. I think there’s some merit in sinking a bit of R&D into dealing with emerging threats like drones, and maybe upgrading the ancient DEW line radars? But if this is another Star Wars missile shield over the entire continent proposal, that was a costly boondoggle in the 80s and I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t be one again today.
I’m not familiar with how Netflix’s ad tier works and am almost afraid to ask, but could someone ELI5?
If a company wanted to push an ad on Netflix, wouldn’t it be up to them to decide whether to use AI make the thing? Or is this sort of the equivalent of a small business sending a script to the local radio station to have the DJ read it (i.e. rather than producing their own ad), except they add some AI-generated visuals?
Well I guess he’s effected some change there in that he’s got me working hard to avoid reddit.
Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?
In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.
This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.
For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.
I guess if you look at the track record of how tariffs have played out in the past, there has tended not to be a lot of price relief in going with domestic producers.
Take something like aluminum. While the US does have a domestic industry, it couldn’t possibly meet demand in the short term at least. So industries hoping to source aluminum may initially flock to the domestic product, causing a run on it that raises prices. At the end of the day, they’ll wind up paying something close to what the imported aluminum costs. This is the new price of aluminum. Live with it.
In the long term, the domestic industry may grow to the point that it displaces the imports. Will that lead to price relief? Again, uncertain. There are reasons why certain parts of the world produce much of the world supply of X, and cost of production is one of them. Also, counter-tariffs may reduce the growth potential of a domestic industry, leading to less investment.
It’s not just the US of course. Everyone everywhere will be paying more for everything. Tariffs just suck.
Can’t say I’m surprised by the push to plastics given the 25% tariff on aluminum.
Climatology and meteorology are separate disciplines with their own very different modelling. I studied the former way back when, and it wasn’t even in the same department at my university (geography vs physics). Climatology is about long-term trends and focuses more on energy fluxes, general circulation patterns (both in the atmosphere and oceans), the hydrological cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. Meteorology is about the near-term. It focuses on the fluid and thermodynamics of specific weather systems, and how to process/interpret real-time data.
I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.
It sounds like they did some gene editing to select characteristics the dire wolf supposedly had, as opposed to finding an ancient DNA sample somewhere and working from that. So it’s more of a genetic simulation than the real deal right?
Like just because you know of some gene that happens to give people pronounced brow ridges doesn’t mean you can bring back the Neanderthal. Or am I not understanding this correctly?
About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.
But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.
This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.
He seems to have manufactured quite the crisis. Is this what he meant by bringing manufacturing back to America?
Is it not a net benefit to China in that the US drawing inwards expands their global influence? And they must be laughing at what carnage Trump is inflicting on the North American auto sector at a time when China is surging ahead with EVs.
Best case scenario is it will split the right wing vote. In Canada, we’re used to it going the other way with conservatives taking advantage of a split left.