When I was in my late teens there was a neighborhood with computer stores.
They would have sheets of specials on components. I would go around and collect all the sheets, find somewhere to sit and compare prices.
Hardware review websites were big at the time (Tom's, etc.) and I knew where all the components ranked. So I made an educated decision before speccing out a system.
Saving a few dollars here and there I would optimize.
Moore's law was big and framerates were low, benchmarks between components would have significant percentage differences.

Moore's law has stopped the gamers did it, GPUs used for rendering millions of pixels proved similar in intention to AI machine learning requirements.
Going to computer stores now is depressing, the huge gains are gone.
AI is often wrong and almost always lowest common denominator. Teenage boys blowing up mutants and Nazi's did more for computing than AI has.

Bitcoin was created partially because the laws surrounding money assumed it was an option not a necessity.
The idea of cryptocurrencies was that possession should be in a sense above local governments.
The statistics on illicit use of cryptocurrency and people's appetite for a secure store of value seem to be demonstrating that this aspect of crypto is valid.

I agree, when I got into Bitcoin I thought adoption would take off due to fees and micropayments but now that Bitcoin is popular the fees are too high for those use-cases,. Also $1Million is only a 10x, stocks offer ten bagger opportunities as well. Bitcoin is still a solid investment but it's not amazingly better than a good value stock pick. If Bitcoin isn't your thing: Copy Berkshire Hathaway, Pershing Square or get involved on the Value Investors Club.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

if my loose interpretation of news is accurate, xbox is doing pretty poor with market share and might make more money short-term by selling cross-platform than limiting it to boost their xbox sales.

lol they make some of the best SD cards available for photographers.

The reason for the disparity in belief here is compound:

- It's legitimately a skill you need to learn, a mix of technical writing and indeed programming. It's not just writing some quick text and boom magic you have an app. Don't believe the marketing bullshit.
- Some large corps give their devs unlimited token use. Personal users have in 1 month what a FANG dev can use in 1 day. Personal users can't use it enough to learn it.
- It's been getting better _rapidly_ and if you tried it 6 months ago, it's worth trying again now.

It isn't replacing us yet but if it never got better than current state, it's legitimately useful where it is. Just like Stack Overflow lowered the bar for copy&paste devs, AI does too. Just like Stack Overflow was a force multiplier to legit devs, AI will be a force multiplier for legit devs. ... signed, a dev who does complex low-level optimization work and loves coding. yeah it works for my stuff too, not just websites. I'm scared it will become purely a hobby in the next 10 years.

Apple had a very tempting nationwide trade-in deal with all the carriers. It wouldn't shock me if that drove units higher than usual.

From a cold business perspective, yeah. Yearly releases keep you competitive at the top end and tempt your most liquid of customers to upgrade more and more. From a philosphical perspective, phones are a solved problem for most people, and upgrades aren't really what they once were. I could see someone believing yearly releases are wasteful. The cynic in me says the're probably just not able to keep up, though. Phone design must be expensive and skilled work that demands high coordination.

it does beg the obvious question of how the AIs are going to get training material for future technologies.

Prior to Stack Overflow you had to be really good at reading docs, reading code, know the right forums / IRC servers, occasionally just reach out to someone, etc. -- it doesn't even seem possible to quantify the impact it's had as a fulcrum for organized, vetted, expert dev knowledge. Stack Overflow is dead now, and I don't think AI will ever give us a full replacement for what it provides.

games already do this, with algorithms that are more advanced than what a monitor can do.

i don't really see a reason for a monitor to do this.

I think that one was more about image persistence. Old screens flashed one bright image each frame. Then LCDs showed the frame the entire time and suddenly animals could perceive it as more than a strobe light.

It was never about high FPS in a vacuum, but people don't know that so it just becomes HFR=bad for them. The thing missing is *shutter speed* needs to also adjust. By no means is it static, but if you show people 24fps @ 1/48 shutter and then 48fps @ 1/96 shutter, they won't be complaining about soap opera effect.

The challenge is that you need to do shooting, VFX, compositing, etc. in HFR and then apply some fake motion blur to the LFR version to make it seem more correct, and that's never going to look perfect but maybe it'll look OK enough.

Or you do what The Hobbit did and choose an in-between shutter speed that makes the LFR version look a bit too choppy and the HFR version look a bit soap opera effecty. Don't do what The Hobbit did.