JPEG XL can't be decoded in such a way, and tons of people still use JPG.

This is not a general purpose model, it makes sense to only bench it on tasks it's supposed to be good at, which is to help out finance-related knowledge work.

Obviously a financially rational person wouldn't lend money with worse returns it can get from the government risk-free as that would be charity, hence these are considered 'junk'.

There's no single oldschool look, as people writing software renderers didn't have a sanctioned way of doing so - a lot of them weren't even using triangles, or were using a mix of techniques.

You are describing how to make a game look like the PS1 games, but the PS1 actually had a - somewhat flawed, but unique - GPU which kind of forced the limitations you outlined here, and forced a singular way of rendering.

That wasn't really true with Quake or Duke3D or the PC in general. You just drew to the screen with whatever technique you chose, which resulted in a unique look for each game.

I have some friends who work on designing wafers and they told me compared to autorouting, hand layout is always better, with quality asymptotically approaching a certain ideal with hours invested.

Based on how many engineer-hours you can put in, you can get a single or even double digit increase in silicon density, it's just that nobody actually has the manpower to actually get close to that ideal, but the difference is very noticeable between 'tier 1' and 'tier 2' manufacturers, the former of which can afford an army of highly educated engineers who will slog through this task, with the latter having to decide where to spend the effort.

This is one of the reasons why second or third generations of CPU architectures perform better even on the same or very similar process node, because this logic optimization builds up.

The whole process is standardized with GPU rendering, leading to ways of rendering and content authoring that's quite different from how things used to be, and while definitely possible, modern 'retro' games often render like GPU accelerated games and just disable texture filtering, which doesn't quite give you the look.

He mentions Build games, which are not strictly polygonal.

While general purpose computation exists on GPUs, and the standard rasterization pipeline can be implemented in software, graphics cards have pushed people towards a 'look and feel' which comes partly from standardized data structures, content authoring and rendering approaches, that have made games feel samey.

Whereas with software rendering, essentially you have an array of pixels which you can set to a certain color, and the rest is up to you, which made devs come up with unique ways of rendering and authoring content.

The intricate level designs that were made possible with BSP based tools and are basically 'free' to render in software, had hell of a time making the transition to GPUs, as they rely on traversing the tree while drawing pixels, whereas for the GPU, you need to submit a list of triangles (unless you go GPGPU)

Wonder why they never innovated on the clearly limited smartphone touch controls.

They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.

First, eInk used to be glossy, and not backlit which sucked, since you needed a light source to illuminate it well enough, but not so much that it shone on the screen and caused weird reflections.

After they added backlight, it became much better, but I'm not sure how it's better than an LCD (I dont think it is).

The only thing that sucks both about the iPad and most ereaders is the lack of physical buttons to flip pages, which makes 1 handed operation clumsy at best.

Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.

Why does this thing have to be another Web API?

So I'm almost certain they are being counted

But expensive. Stuff like Api Gateway is just absurd (but necessary since you don't want that stuff to reach your lambdas, which are dog slow to handle). Paying per request is like charging for every breath.

Another big advantage (and I guess the reason this exists), is for some reason, AWS lambda is a hostile environment for node, with its ephemeral VMs, performance is quite bad (much worse than expected)

https://github.com/CodeGenieApp/serverless-express

This wraps Lambda's 'handler' function and allows express to run on top of it, essentially you get a node web server with no persistence between requests which usually isn't a good thing to rely on, but you can also kinda have that with persistent tcp connections.

Of course since this is not real HTTP, things like WebSocket aren't available, but it's good enough to build a CRUD backend or two.

Similar libs exist for other runtimes as well.

It used to be much more true. The Biden admin sent a lot more US weapons to fight Russia, Trump used to be much more amenable to send similar weapons provided somebody paid for it.

Nowadays US materiel is either tied up in the middle east or somewhere else (Patriots), or has been neutralized by Russian EW (HIMARS), or the US is just unwilling to part with it for whatever justification.

I suspect when it comes to the production of certain kinds of advanced war materiel, like missiles, shells or drones, Europe lags or doesn't have a clear advantage.

GDP doesn't matter, despite European defense stocks benefiting majorly from the Ukraine war, this didn't seem to have translated into a similar increase in output, which indicates there are bottlenecks in the system somewhere.

This implies that the TAM of the $200+ subs is 20m people, translating to $4B/mo or $48B/year.