pathartl

Surely for these multi-thousand-dollar lenses Sony can afford to laser etch the serial number?

The fragility I think is the main concern here, like you said. I hate when I have three 12v, 8 pin connectors on my GPU. I would be ecstatic between that and a small connector that catches fire if it's not perfectly 100% seated and strain relieved.

I've only watched Lex's episode with Carmack and I just don't understand the appeal. It was like listening to a junior frontend dev stumble around programming topics with buzzwords. Maybe I just watched one episode and got a bad taste, but the questions weren't great and somehow Carmack still was able to give interesting answers.

It's interesting how in this age of displays and video we're finally shedding the idea of 8 bits per channel. The stuff I've been shooting in film I've been scanning in with a Flextight Precision II which has a sensor that claims to have a 16 bit DAC per channel.

Scanning in RGB 16 bit definitely helps with color banding. However, it's kinda like having access to a video camera that records in 16K, but you're only going to be able to view it on a 4K display. What's really interesting is if you use an old film recorder like a Lasergraphics LFR M3 (something in the $25,000 range in 1998) and don't mind dropping to a max resolution of 8K and 12 bits per channel, you can somewhat preserve that RGB16 image back to film.

Like yeah, this was professional level equipment in the tens of thousands of dollars in the late 90's, but some of the consumer technologies still haven't caught up. It speaks volumes to how limited the human eye is and how much technology surpassed it a long time ago.

I have practically no creative bone in my body but have always been drawn to photography due to my parents being photographers their whole life. I've started using their film equipment because yeah, 12 shots on a roll of 120 film means you have to think before you hit that button.

Luckily I was able to dump the SQLite db that Tinder used in the past when I met my SO

Some people are willing to make that sacrifice because their limited feature set doesn't impede on their day-to-day use. I know quite a few people who use their phone for nothing but texting, a camera, and two factor auth.

Hell, I, who would be considered a power user, spend 99% of the time on my phone browsing the web, Reddit, some Facebook, using a calculator, or taking photos. Most of my computing is done on an actual computer because the form factor of a phone just doesn't satisfy my needs.

This is essentially correct. I've been bouncing between different boxes and HTPCs for almost a couple decades now and the best experience I've had has always been the Nvidia Shield. The only annoyance I have is I want to reliably set Kodi as the main launcher, which is more of Kodi's issue rather than the system.

But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will allow you to get much better quality out of your source file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just absolutely not worth it.

Yeah, I mean if you enable post processing (which is most likely garbage) you're going to get bad input lag.

I've had a TV that were nearly 200ms, but it was the absolute cheapest panel I could find.

If you don't configure your TV correctly sure, you could get massive amounts of lag. Even with an OLED display if you turn on all the post processing you're going to have problems. That's not really a fault of the TV though. I disable almost all post processing on my TVs and get a better picture without the downsides.

With digital receivers adding lag is minimal at best. Especially with newer models that don't draw on top of the source signal.

That is amazingly inaccurate. If you count the entire chain from input to processing to display you'll be under 40-50ms.

Are there articles that actually audit the data sent from your phone? My biggest gripe is we're supposed to take all marketing at face value.

I use Tile's Slim tracker. It has the footprint of two credit cards. Sucks the battery is not replaceable, but it's helped more often than I can count.

I would love to see price tags added to them as well. Wheels? $100. Handle? $50. Pro handle? $1000.

Edit: It does update price, but I'd like an itemized list

I think a QR code would be pretty limiting. Even just the intro from Doom II is 2KB.

There's always Rider which works very well for .NET stuff.

For older applications, I would consider Mono or WINE if you really want to run it on Linux. We are experiencing the same scenario where we have an application that was built on .NET 4 over 10 years ago and there's a couple of packages we rely on that will not work on .NET 5/6. We have a rebuild planned, but it will be a large overhaul.

Honestly using Edge has been a great experience for me. When they adopted Chromium over sticking with _another_ browser engine I was happy. MS has contributed a great amount to the Chromium project so far and I really don't think there's an issue with standardizing on an engine as long as innovations can still happen. It seems like being able to have vendor skins on top of Chromium has been a net positive in light of what's happened in the past. I'm a bit of a Microsoft shill as of late so take my experiences with a grain of salt.

I dropped a new cheap Android head unit into my partner's 2011 Civic and having Android Auto is such a massive upgrade that really breathes new life into the car. That being said, there's definitely issues with it.

It's VERY bright at nighttime, which I think could probably be fixed with an OLED panel and working ambient light sensor. Additionally the volume controls are capacitive buttons to the left of the display. I've seriously considered modding in a manual volume knob because of how annoying it is to adjust while trying to pay attention to the road.

I can't even imagine having to adjust things like windows, windshield wipers, or climate control all with a touch screen.

Even System Preferences (Settings now?) in macOS is a complete mess.

I personally feel like Windows in the past 3-4 years has been slowly unifying to at the very least be more consistent. Part of this was the introduction of Windows Terminal, the rebuild of Notepad, tweaks to Explorer, rebuild of Task Manager coming in 22H2, and the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly rendering Control Panel obsolete.

While "weird" it's certainly not surprising. Consumer protections have not kept up with the overall global economy. Snake oil products have always existed, but it's getting easier to spin up a new company that targets an uneducated consumer.

Always love myself a good ol' trolley. Those things are beautiful.

Complacency.

I get terrible motion sickness so I opted for teleportation. I still get sick in a playthrough. The part where you free the vort in the square was the first time I started really feeling sick, but that's because you have to take an elevator.

After like 3 playthroughs I've gotten the teleporting movement down and it's pretty much second nature. Outside of the game I found myself holding out my hand and flicking to try to pick things up IRL

It has two modes. To play comfortably you need probably a 6x6x10ft area.

Alyx is probably one of the greatest gaming experiences I've had... but I was also able to borrow a Vive from a friend to play it. I'm a Half-Life nut so I would have bought a headset anyway, but I'm glad I haven't bought a Quest.

I have subtitles enabled by default. I don't know whether to place the blame on the acoustics of my room, the mixing of the source, or my hardware... but _I just can't hear the dialogue_.

My setup is wildly unmatched in that I have a cheap Yamaha RX-V683BL AV receiver (which needs to be replaced, but high cost of HDMI 2.1 makes this hard) and a 5.0 arrangement with two KEF LS50's serving as L/R and one more LS50 serving as the center. Now certainly the receiver and speakers should be paired better. However, even if I'm not driving them correctly my setup is magnitudes better quality than the average soundbar I see most people buying up.

Most of the stuff I'm watching is Blu-ray so the quality of the source isn't to blame here. So the question remains, is my equipment that poorly matched, is the mixing terrible, or do I just have hearing loss in the vocal frequency range?

In a similar vein I find reviews in general from most outlets are written only for the release day and are often either not revised if in written form, or not addressed in later videos.

Case in point Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 just saw a re-release where the devs didn't do much but port it to other systems and render the game at a higher resolution. It had a release day bug that caused the game to crash so [some review sites pan the game](https://xboxera.com/2022/07/21/review-baldurs-gate-dark-alli...) giving it low scores of sub-5-out-of-10. The devs fixed it the next day. Now is that particular site going to revise their review? No. It sits at a 4/10 with a small note at the top saying the glitch has been fixed.

Court of public opinion is obviously a thing with Intel, and there's a lot of long-established fanboyism with "team green" and "team red", so there's a lot of people looking to Intel to fail.

Also I hope it's only a matter of time until companies embrace abstraction layers like dxvk.

We absolutely need some consumer protections for things like this, but at the end of the day it takes some smart choices by the consumer. Sometimes those smart choices are to not make a purchase for that type of product, or compromise on design for reputability, etc.

Keep in mind that while Amazon is the white whale here, this absolutely happens at pretty much any retailer that has moved to an online store where they list more than any individual store has inventory of. I hate supporting Amazon, but personally Best Buy is the lesser of two evils, and at least there I can return in store.

The only plus I can see is a focus on DLNA might make DLNA not _strictly_ garbage. In reality if you don't want to use Plex and don't need to rely on DLNA, there's other options out there like Jellyfin or Emby.