The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.

Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”

Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…

I think it’s only a good thing they’re not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it’d have to be an external app anyway.

I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I’m perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.

Just today I heard someone whining about how in LinkedIn and other recruitment sites there’s like five bazillion profile tag options for RDMBSes and various dialects of SQL… when in actuality the recruiters are probably only concerned if the developer can do a bloody SELECT and stuff.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

Oh last year I paid the ticket in cash, 20€, no problem. This year? 20€, plus 1+bits euros of processing fees. To “deliver” my ticket to the platform of my choice. (…Mobile app.)

So I went to the car show. They still had the cash booth. Mild failure to communicate. I just dodged the field of view of the booth guys, out of shame, and entered like normal, glad the ticket guards were accommodating.

Oh I forgot the best part! When I was trying to log on and the security interfered with CAPTCHAs, Ticketmaster reset my password several times. That’s how you know this company take security seriously. /s (Literally no site does this.)

Meanwhile, earlier this month, I had to literally disable quite a few bits of adblocks and other extensions just so that Ticketmaster’s crappy CAPTCHA thing would allow me to even log in. Literally screamed “Why are you pestering me, I’m just trying to buy a ticket to a local car show, not a fucking Madonna concert”

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can’t believe a lot more people don’t know about it.

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?

Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you’re into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.

deleted by creator

NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

deleted by creator

It wasn’t really Microsoft that killed Nokia’s cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. “Oh, trust us, we’re the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what’s best for the market”. They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they’ll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

Can we just say that Cybertruck is basically a sum of everything wrong with right wing wackos?

“Look at me, I’m a badass, driving around in a badass vehicle, unlike you filthy libruls. … Aww shucks! There’s road salt! And my accelerator pedal just fell off wtf. …OH NO! A LITTLE WATER TOO! Anything but that!”

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

Yup. Got also added to the Jargon File, which was an influential collection of hacker slang.

If there’s one thing that Elon is really good at, it’s taking obscure beloved nerd tidbits and then pigeon-shitting all over them.

I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.

Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it’s not. It’s like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.

You can’t just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That’s nearly impossible. No no no.

Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

It’s probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it’s gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)

In the 1980s, 8-bit home computers were sold with slogans like “Kids can use these to play games! And use educational software! And the ladies can use them to keep track of the freezer contents!”

…One of three ain’t bad.

Decades later, we still open the fucking fridge to check what’s in the fridge. Such is the nature of technological progress.

(Random old person memory: when I was a kid I actually had some “home economy” software for Spectravideo SV-318, found in some random pile of tapes. I only used it once because it was boring, obviously. My father used the recipe book and added “Poop Cake”. That was enough recipes thank you very much.)