- On a Mac Studio it’s kind of the same thing. It’s the GPU core that was in all M1 chips. I could not reproduce it with AMD GPUs, but I also did not try very hard. I remember being annoyed because I always needed to remember to look away when we were doing these instances otherwise we’d fail it because of the time it took to get out of it.
The core issue is that something slipped through the cracks. I don’t blame them, it’s a huge game and testing takes quite a lot of time. But testing does matter.
- > Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
- > Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways.
I came across a performance-killing bug that made the game unplayable (less than 1fps on a Mac Studio). It happened in a couple of dungeons (I spotted 2). From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance. There was no problem on Intel Macs, AFAICT. My old MBP was terrible but did not get any performance hit.
This is what can happen any time you don’t test even a tiny corner of the game. Also, bear in mind that this depends on graphics settings and you get a nightmare of a test matrix.
- > always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
- What happens at the NIH and NSF has absolutely no parallel in his first term. Don’t kid yourself, this is not more of the same.
- Hang on, starting benchmarks on my Raspberry Pi.
- > Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title.
The name of the supermarket is mentioned in the title when the audience is likely to know it, e.g. on French websites. I don’t blame any American who does not know Intermarché, as they are very unlikely to come across one. I am not going to link them because that’s a bit pointless and the URLs are terrible, but a quick googling of "publicité Intermarché" should give plenty of examples.
- > - So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY
My favourite: MAS, for magic angle spinning. Because every paper needs a bit of magic.
Scientists are the wrong population to pick if you want people who dislike silly names. They are everywhere because we don’t hate fun, and it does make things memorable. We’re also fond of naming things after people, which is as un-descriptive as it gets.
- From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
- I quite like the StarCraft remaster. It plays just like the old one (to me, at least; I am not a competitive player), and it looks much better.
- And also in some cultural contexts in which red and green do not carry the same meanings.
- > then everyone else followed suit
There was a Flash runtime on Android. It was terrible. Java applets were already dead anyway, outside of professional contexts, which are not relevant on phones anyway.
- That is almost entirely backwards.
> For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics.
It was politics in the sense that Flash was one of the worst cause of instability in Safari on OS X, and was terrible at managing performance and a big draw on battery life, all of which were deal breakers on the iPhone. This is fairly well documented.
> iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers.
There were very good reasons for that.
> Web apps were not a thing without Flash.
That is entirely, demonstrably false. There were plenty of web apps, and they were actually the recommended (and indeed the only one) way of getting apps onto iPhones before they scrambled to release the App Store.
> Flash ecosystem was the biggest competitor and threat for the App Store at that moment.
How could it be a competitor if it was not supported?
> iPhone users stopped complaining
It was not iPhones users who were complaining. It was Android users explaining us how prehistoric iPhones were for not supporting Flash. We were perfectly happy with our apps.
> and in 2011 Adobe stopped the development of mobile plugins.
Yeah. Without ever leaving beta status. Because it was unstable, had terrible performances, and drained batteries. Just what Jobs claimed as reasons not to support it.
> Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly.
That much is true.
> Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time.
Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?
- The discussion about the nature of auteur-ship is interesting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a highly-skilled technician, craftsman or engineer. Some people are able to do things that are genuinely awesome (in the orignal sense) without necessarily showing the intellectual aspects associated with auteurs. They are not less worthy of praise and admiration than good auteurs.
- I don’t think there will be much left of the vinegar when dried. Acetic acid is much more volatile than water. If it’s dry, it means that it’s gone. And it has an unpleasant smell even at harmless concentrations, if it’s not quite dry yet.
- > For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.
But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.
- > A powerbook 5300 was $6500 in 1995
The TCO was much higher, considering how terrible and flimsy this laptop was. The power plug would break if you looked at it funny and the hinge was stiff and brittle. I know that’s not the point you are making but I am still bitter about that computer.
- Command-Q? Or command-W to close only the current window.
- Interestingly, everyone is willing to sacrifice someone else’s livelihood.
If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.