https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/demos/compare...

I was talking about. He linked another one! Guess people finally realized that one sucks and now they have a new one. I screwed up.

Granted, AVIF performs impressively for, say, a huge hero image for a blog where you're out to create an overall impression and people aren't going to look at it closely. It does not impress me when I am compressing photos I took with my mirrorless and I expect them to look like photos taken with a mirrorless and not cell phone snaps.

https://www.gpsnation.com/collections/garmin-refurbished?pag...

The official charging cable is atrociously unreliable, enough that I almost gave up on the brand, but there are numerous third party charging attachments like

https://www.amazon.com/RUXELY-Charging-Forerunner-Approach-V...

https://www.amazon.com/Itramax-Charging-Converter-Forerunner...

from Chinese brands with weird names that work perfectly.

[1] like with rare exceptions we can't climb trees!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50118476

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Omrons do their primary job well but you run into the "IT is where great brands go to die" phenomenon that you run into everywhere -- like the stay I had at a Hilton where the staff was great but between bad wiring and bad React apps the IT experience was shoddy... Staff would be held accountable if they did a bad job but problems with IT are treated like the weather, something nobody can do anything about.

I am really impressed with my Apple hardware but the services strike me as uniformly shoddy and dare I say a lifestyle brand that seduces people into treating garbage as if was gold. Ok, I like what they did with Foundation, I really do, but I think Apple Health, Apple Home and all of those things are for suckers and Withings probably thinks so too. For all I know Apple is charging them an arm and a leg to participate. On the other hand, Garmin Connect takes my active lifestyle seriously.

[1] with 100% satisfaction after discovering third party charging cables!

What struck me was the varied personality of the birds. Some of them would come right to my hands like it was a Disney movie, others I would have to chase into a corner and carefully capture.

One day I was walking towards my firepit and a whole tree full of starlings was cackling at me getting louder and louder to scold me as I approached and I was pretty offended that they were telling me what to do on my own land. At one moment collectively they flew away in a great big flock with a few slow birds left behind who took off to follow the main bod about three seconds later.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108850

Points: 48

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108278

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I like the image of Muse and think a product that delivers what it promises to the consumer could be a hit but,,, this looks like something they rolled out in a hurry to take advantage of the FOMO of the uninformed and boost their stock price for a few months until reality catches up. They are a huge company and they could do something only a big company could do but no…

Like the real mass market product is not going to be a smart shell for a Mac it’s going to be cloud based. Like is it economic for your Mac to be sitting there running all the time when you are using 10%? The true believer say yes, the mass market says no. Is Apple going to let them put a skin on your Mac or is this a product that Apple will embrace and extinguish?

It is easy to laugh but C programmers have demonstrated that they can't handle variable-sized buffers on the stack, malloc(), free() and all that.

Early versions of FORTRAN [2] didn't even have a stack, like you couldn't write recursive functions, the program would take parameters for array sizes when it boots and the memory layout would all be figured out at the beginning. When I was developing a display controller for persistence of vision displays for the AVR-8 it drove me nuts how the C compiler kept moving the stack pointer around all the time for no real reason when an assembly program could move data to and from statically allocated structures. [3]

FORTRAN and COBOL came out around the time Syntactic Structures did so of course there was not an established theory for how to parse grammars, no parser generators, etc. No Dragon Book, but the heroic techniques used to develop compilers in that age are legendary if not quite lost.

I wrote some FORTRAN programs in high school on a VAX, in a comparative programming languages class in college, converted a lot of FORTRAN algorithms into statically allocated Java in grad school in 1990 and in my postdoc I wrote a generator that wrote JNI bindings for LAPACK.

[1] ... e.g. the typical struct is < 4096 bytes

[2] before the FORTRAN 90 standard though you could set the /RECURSIVE flag on DEC FORTRAN

[3] we were done such a disservice by all those "it's so elegant to compute Fibonacci in a better programming language than BASIC" articles in Creative Computing because recursion is one of those things, like C's memory management, that most programmers can't really handle.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104303

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Remarkably Steam has been successful as it is because Gabe Newell is the king and isn't accountable to shareholders and bean counters, much as Elon has been successful at developing reusable space flight. (Of course, there are counterexamples such as Mark Zuckerberg who keeps running Facebook into the ground but maybe there's a reason there is always a frown on his face.)