Can't wait for the abuse of the word Grok to die (bet none of these techbros even read the book). There was even an AI company that made a product called "Sophon". Talk about an overinflated sense of self-worth.
I like the Wright Brothers, they called the first plain, "Flyer".
>> When I first set up my LG TV, my main focus was ensuring the picture quality was perfect.
First things I did when I got a new LG TV:
* Turn off auto-smoothing
* Turn off high dynamic range
* Turn off audio processing
First things I did when I got my Apple TV:
* Turn off auto-smoothing
* Turn off high dynamic range
* Force everything to play at 1080p (delete all other resolutions)
There is a sharp cultural line between people who can't stand UHD/4K/48fps and those who want everything to look like pre-HD cinema, and people who love all the post processing. I'm on the wrong side. Which side are you all on?
I'm not sure how much of this is in my head, but when I first saw 4K sitcoms, their house looked like a movie set, not a house. It looked too real so the illusion was broken.
Watching a movie on my new smart TV, the actors looked more like actors, and less like the characters they were portraying. This could be from some other feature, like AI upscaling or something. But something is definitely off.
It could be it's just different and I'll get used to it, but I haven't yet. I haven't watched much on that TV yet though to tell.
I'm fine with ripped DVDs that were purchased 20 years ago, and anything higher resolution than that is a bonus. All displayed on quality panels at neutral/middle settings with those aformentioned effects likewise disabled. Audio preserved as original, hooked up to a killer theater with real component speakers.
It's hard for me to tune in on an overly smoothed, saturated picture with fake surround sound plasticy soundbar audio.
It's gotta be me, or my eyes. I've never watched a film and said, "Oh that transfer looks beautiful," but I have watched many and said, "Damn that transfer sucks." I remember buying some Criterion films in the early 2000's and was thoroughly disappointed (but back then transfers sucked so....)
But take LoTR for example: I have a friend with a 60-something inch TV and watched the 4K DVD and then watched the streaming at home on my 50something inch and I'll be damned if I can tell A from B. Maybe I need to put them side-by-side some day!
Too bad the only people that will watch this are people who already understand the terror of what is happening. It might have helped a little if it had aired. My MAGA dad still watches 60 Minutes (no idea why, habit?) This might have penetrated his TDS-addled skull if it had aired. But the takeover of CBS by Trump and Ellison (and his 1980's-college-villain son) with Weiss is complete, and vile.
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
His Dad will be smart enough to know these questions are trying to set him up. Maybe try having a real conversation and not trying to change his mind. After all, there is a good chance you will be that Dad in the future (no matter how hard you tell yourself you won't be). Tell me how I now.
I'm almost 50. I won't be. I have friends who are becoming grandparents now, still no interest.
I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.
There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
Thanks kristopolous. We have a very similar story (I'm a few years older). I think I'm at the "I've given up point" because his glee at others' suffering is just too painful to even address. So: he get's hellos at holidays and that's it.
People have discovered being an open sewer spewing hate and prejudice gets likes, views, reposts and advertisers
It's also a very easy job. You don't need to do journalism, be diligent about citations and accuracy, use robust analysis or careful language.
You don't even need a script. Just hop on a hot mic, blame an oppressed scapegoat and see money roll in.
The content is evergreen, trivial to create and performs great!
Just like you don't have to be a doctor to swindle people with phony medicine or a psychology degree to hustle people as a psychic.
The problem is we've taking the smooth talking performative palliatives of these slick mountebanks and christened their confidence games as sacred free speech instead of the hatemonger hustle it is.
And unfortunately, like Albania’s Nationwide Ponzi scam of the 1990s, these crimes have become institutionalized power and their bullshit is bringing the country down with them.
Other than personal gain, what ought be the consequences of arsonists shouting "fire" on the crowded Internet?
It's a very prevalent form of cynicism, which I find ironic because in high school every student learned to write persuasive essays, but "adults" like to tell each other not to change people's minds. It's a subtle meta-rhetorical move used to undermine rationalism and formal education.
I debated asking, but I talk to him only a few times a year and we both work really hard to avoid politics. I realize it is my responsibility if I want to see change, but I just lack the skills.
I’ve read lots of books on psychotherapy, and the verdict is a hard disagree on that. The idea of positive relationships to parents is a toxic one, and leads to more transgenerational suffering. It’s good to process the past sufficiently to hold no grudge, but it’s still necessary for mental hygiene to set and enforce boundaries. The most important element of this is grief. Like other posters replied, it is not necessary nor healthy to suppress and wait with anger and grief processing till after their death, and plenty of opportunity to work through unfinished business with them ever after their passing (eg with representatives in constellations work).
This parental situation is sadly repeated endlessly in the US. My dad is a wealthy retired tech executive whose mind was seemingly taken over by Fox News. He's kind of now in an anti democratic cult and he gets angry if he is even exposed to other news sources.
I will feel sad when he passes and I already feel the loss of being able to talk to him about anything. My brother says the same thing. He doesn't even talk to his grandkids much. I think this is sadly common.
Unless a Parent/Child was physically or mentally abused (by clinical standards) then I confident that stopping interacting with them over politics alone is foolish.
Maybe, but also maybe politics can be a reflection of a person’s actions in a broader sense, for which it is perfectly reasonable to disengage from them when those actions have a negative impact.
Yeah, I don’t see why one should wait until after the abuse occurs (“by clinical standards”, above commenter says) to begin defending oneself. As you say, politics isn’t divorced from the rest of their psyche.
It’s predictable that a person who e.g. yells slurs and threatens violence against (whoever they perceive as) gay people on TV is going to progress to actual violence against the gay people in their life, more often than not.
When I was first introduced to Max it was on a Mac SE in 1989, and I really only used it for saving & restoring patches (on my SY77 and U110) until someone walked me through how it really worked. I didn't understand what it could do, and I rejected it at first because it was too open-ended for me to see utility. Lol. How things changed after that.
What really blows my mind is that I wasn't at all put off by the tiny little Mac monitor, it just seemed normal. No way I could work with such a small b&w screen today I'd go mad. (weirdly I feel less creative than i did in the 1980's and NOW i have near infinite recording & mixing options. The irony.)
Wow, I thought his first book was insufferable, but I've never read his blog: after reading the first half, that's just who this guy is. The structure he outlines seems so alien to me, and out of touch. People get lucky then think their luck really isn't luck, and then the just swallow their own tail. He's created lifestyle porn for impressionable young men who will never have his luck. I think he's got a good grift. Good for him, he won.
What do you mean "vendor lock in"? Developers become accustomed to a particular SDK, and it is hard to move to new silicon because you need to relearn where the peripherals differ. If that's what you mean, I don't consider that lock-in, just inertia, but by your definition the Arduino SDK is "vendor lock in" (for all but the most trivial code it is portable). ESP32 integration with Arduino's ecosystem is severely limited to just a handful of APIs, and you need to use the ESP32 function calls if you want to do anything sophisticated (and idf.py). The Arduino API is too topical. I know from experience. Zephyr blows away Arduino, it has portable stacks, security, update, wifi/ble, etc...
Also, near everyone is offering GCC/LLVM/IAR/ARMCC (except for Synopsys ARC and Renesas RX).
Zephyr is a baby project. From the embedded devs I know they have only started seriously considering Zephyr in the last 2-3 years for commercial projects.
And you may call it inertia sure, but in the mid 2000's everyone was doing their own hardware abstraction. You had to get books and stuff because documentation sucked. MCU vendors seemingly made a point of making especially stuff like ADCs and timers very hard to abstract away between vendors.
Back then you had a choice of GCC/IAR/KEIL/CCS/Codwarrior and probably more. Each worse and less standards-compliant than the next, except for GCC/avr-gcc as was the key enabler of Arduino
All that text to say: The situation was different, and Arduino showed that there's a wider unmet demand for custom embedded stuff and that people will sacrifice a bit of performance for something that's easy to develop
"People will sacrifice a bit of performance" was also enabled by all the MCU advances.
Those bytes of memory really mattered when 512B was all the RAM you'll ever get. Nowadays, you can buy a RTOS capable 32-bit MCU for $0.20. Why count bytes when you can just... not?
The amount of memory used defines the size of the state space of the system — with exponential growth in the number of representable states. The amount of testing needed to have confidence in the behavior of a system grows (and I’d state based on experience, but without proof, grows faster than logarithmically) with the size of the state space. Building smaller, simpler systems is still the key to being able to realistically test and define behavior at high confidence levels, regardless of the price of a bit.
Most white box appliance makers use zephyr, so do some popular Wifi camera systems, and every major embedded SOC/MCU maker supports it. If that's a baby project, why don't you tell me what a "mature" project is?
Can't say, and you're not obliged to believe me. The vendors are just the companies supporting it. Companies that use it aren't going to announce it. Think about it: if it is just vendors on the site that would mean nobody is using it.
Zephyr is basically "let's have the nice things from Linux on small MCUs" and it sucks. Yes, it is numbers of magnitude better than vendor-specific not-quite-RTOS crap. It blows away Arduino because Arduino is an educational environment just a step above Scratch. Zephyr still sucks. And there is no hope of fixing it because it doesn't suck because the authors did a bad job. They did a fantastic job and it still sucks because the approach fundamentally doesn't work.
Zephyr loves to reuse Linux tooling but it simply doesn't fit. Kconfig silently disabling options because of missing dependencies sucks. No, I'm not using menuconfig, thank you very much, navigating a million of menus is the last thing I need. DTS to C macros abomination sucks. Tons of CMake scripts scattered over every directory suck.
The build in-drivers? What is implemented and tested directly by SoC vendors works, the rest is unusable for anything but example project. Want to use an external SPI flash? Too bad the driver doesn't implement any power management, program it all yourself or accept a constant 12mA draw (fine for many projects, absolutely unacceptable for some). Want to read this I2C sensor once an hour? Too bad, the build-in driver can only poll it constantly in a dedicated thread, just write one yourself. Not like that's a big job, but the build-in driver would be infinitely more useful if it just defined the register map in a header.
And worse yet, Zephyr doesn't do anything to actually solve the silicon lock-in problem, because it's not something that can be solved by new abstractions. Peripheral interconnect, interval timers and basically any peripheral that isn't I2C or UART is simply impossible to abstract over in a useful way. There is no common denominator like there is on desktop.
IMHO, FreeRTOS is a much better system simply because it doesn't tries to be a HAL. It switches between threads and that's it. And HAL for MCUs is simply a pipedream. If you can afford a HAL, go with Linux on a SoC large enough for that.
Nothing you've said is wrong, but I strongly disagree that it sucks.
The DTS error messages are awful, but having declarative configs with compile time validation is amazing once you've figured out what the errors actually mean. Writing drivers is just something you accept for board bringup, so that's basically a non-issue for me.
West's main problem is that it's just a weird little custom tool, not that it's annoying in itself. It's a large improvement over most other
embedded build systems, especially the config tools offered by TI and NXP.
And in exchange for those things you get an extremely capable RTOS with a decent shell, good features, and one of the best RTOS networking stacks out there. When you want to rev the layout 2, 3, 4 times or even make a new board entirely, it's straightforward to reuse all the effort in your initial bringup. A FreeRTOS system is much less reusable and has proportionally more schedule risk.
I guess that's depends on the application. What I had was a series of wireless DAQ devices with a common application core but different sets of sensors (and hence drivers). Some are as simple as "read and I2C value and put in into uplink queue" and that's where I often made the mistake to assume I could rely on stock drivers. Other are fully driven from the MCU's analog guts. Once the application core was there on one board I quickly found myself spending 50% of my time fighting against DTS.
FreeRTOS is much less reusable, but that means you are confidently pessimistic about schedule risk. That's an RTOS and that's it. The rest is on you and you know it. With Zephyr you get tons of support infrastructure, but you also risk finding that it doesn't fit too late in the process. E.g. the flash chip power management issue was quite bad - we ended up dropping the features that required an external flash altogether.
Then again, Zephyr is the best we have got, but I feel it's due to the Zephyr team's dedication to details - and in spite, not thanks to, the general approach.
The thing with Zephyr drivers is: sometimes you need to do something very special and exact to the hardware, and sometimes you just want to use it in the most generic and braindead way possible.
>> Zephyr loves to reuse Linux tooling but it simply doesn't fit.
What? It has its own tooling.
>> What is implemented and tested directly by SoC vendors works,
Yes, that's the point.
>> And HAL for MCUs is simply a pipedream.
Huh? What does this even mean?
>> Want to read this I2C sensor once an hour? Too bad, the build-in driver can only poll it constantly in a dedicated thread
That's literally how it an RTOS works. I'm baffled by your complaint. It sounds like you just don't understand embedded programming.
>> There is no common denominator like there is on desktop.
Ah ok, there we go: found the problem. If you expect linux, then of course you'll miss all of the embedded patterns that Zephyr solves cross-platform.
Their HAL works, their stacks work, the portability is incredibly smooth compared to other vendors. I just disagree with everything you've said in my experience using it, and working with companies that use it.
It uses KConfig (which is Linux specific-tool) and devicetree (which has origins in OpenFirmware but is nowadays maintained by Linux). And these are over-complicated overkill for MCUs. KConfig is oriented towards generating a nice-looking menu interface for kernel builders to pick and match from a set of well-tested configurations, it provides no debug aid for "where the option I enabled but didn't got into the build actually got rejected". DTS originally works as boot-time configuration format, which is silly for a MCU so Zephyr process it into a set of C macros. Not a bad idea in itself, but the error messages are as cryptic as it gets - and sometimes stuff get silently disabled because of a missing dependency with no build warning.
> Huh? What does this even mean?
You cannot have a portable interface for timers, comparators, peripheral interconnect, programmable logic - all the MCU goodies.
> That's literally how it an RTOS works.
You don't allocate a separate thread stack for something you do once an hour - not unless it's a high-criticality task. You don't constantly poll a sensor that consumes 10mA on a device that has 10µA idle consumption budget. Zephyr does have the facility to do this the right way: workqueues (which is also a ripoff of Linux workqueues nee bottom halves). But most stock device drivers (or the network stack for that matter) don't play well with these, I guess because of the bulky callback-driven interface.
>If you expect linux
I don't expect Linux. That's my point - you can't have Linux on embedded so why even bother with all the abstractions? Why bother with DTS and Kconfig when you still end with a set of header files to debug - except now they are also auto-generated unreadable mess?
> portability is incredibly smooth compared to other vendors
Oh, kconifg is great. Do you think arduino is better? lolno. Check out NXP or STM's solution, and kconfig makes way more sense. Again, my opinion.
>> You don't allocate a separate thread stack for something you do once an hour - not unless it's a high-criticality task. You don't constantly poll a sensor that consumes 10mA on a device that has 10µA idle consumption budget.
I know. But you said you were TRYING to do that. You invent a scenario then you explain why it is wrong.
I don't like to argue for the sake of arguing. Peace out.
Germany has a big alt-rising in the form of AFD, and consequently, they do track social media heavily. There is also a non-insignificant fundamentalist Muslim population.
For things like troll posts or just general hate speech, most of the time the police visit your house and ask you questions and give you a stern warning. And remember, police in EU isn't like police in US - when you get visited by police in EU, you aren't afraid that you are going to get shot up or thrown on the ground and tazed if you did nothing wrong.
In extreme cases where you are calling for things like beheading, yea they def arrest for that.
Source: close friend that lives in Germanty works for a company that does business with German government. I don't know first hand but he is pretty aware of the policics in EU and I have no reason to believe he would be exaggerating.
On anther note, Germany policing is quite progressive actually. For example, if you run, you don't get a charge for evading/eluding - its actually legal to run from police because "desire for freedom is a human right".
In France, discriminatory identity checks are a striking illustration of this. Police disproportionately target certain citizens on the basis of their skin color or presumed origin, particularly young people perceived to be Black or Arab, including children. These abusive controls can often lead to more serious police violence, including with fatal outcomes.
> "big alt-rising in the form of AFD, and consequently, they do track social media heavily. There is also a non-insignificant fundamentalist Muslim population"
They are not though alt-right movements all work on shifting the blame. They always find a scapegoat (jewish people in WW2) for material conditions instead of attacking the root causes.
It seems reasonable to be concerned about a government that wants the power to reveal Internet users, but I couldn’t say on what basis Proton expects legal protection to continue after the move.
Neither of your links mention arrests, one specifically says "None of the suspects were detained". They don't seem to back up the original claim about Germany arresting the most people based on social media posts.
That’s an important distinction. Thank you for referring back to the original wording. They were investigated for violating the criminal code, searched, interrogated, and had devices seized in a number of cases, but seemingly not arrested.
as a german i can confirm that this happens very frequently (way more often than you think). usually it's politicians who file police reports which get prosecuted most of the time. i believe the last government (left wing coalition) built up massive infrastructure to prosecute such offenses. politicians in germany get special protection in terms of speech laws. §188 StGB allows the state to prosecute you severely, even without a private complaint from the politician in some cases.
people love to be reductionist... i wonder what aspects of a culture make everyone so black/white us/them ingroup/outgroup. Is it particular to the US, or like, is France the same way? Or Ghana? Or is it just human that everything is a war? Naqoyqattsi.
I like the Wright Brothers, they called the first plain, "Flyer".
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