JustSomeGuy1

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  • Samsung is throttling the performance of over 10,000 apps

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    If you look beyond the obvious "they're cheating" response, this opens up some fascinating questions.

    *Why* are they doing this? The answer is a lot less obvious than you'd think. Benchmarking apps will use as much CPU as they can get their hands on, and so will obviously be affected by being on the list, but most of those 10,000 apps should not be. After all, MS Office, Netflix, Tiktok - generally speaking, none of them require full CPU utilization. They're just not doing that much work.

    So why are they listed? DVFS should be enough to manage the CPU for all these apps! And even though the DVFS implementation on various Androids has sometimes been poor, it should still be better than the ridiculously blunt instrument this throttle is.

    In fact, this throttle is likely bad for battery life in most cases. Race-to-idle is demonstrably the best way to go, in almost all cases. The only exception would be if the CPU were set to run so far off the optimal voltage that running at full speed was dramatically more expensive than executing the same number of cycles at lower speeds, which shouldn't be the case, except possibly for a couple of the recent Qualcomm chips (and I'm skeptical even for those). Even then the DVFS implementation would have to be totally broken.

    The two major obvious exceptions to this general rule are benchmarks and graphics-intensive games. On PCs/Macs, you'd also include video editing and a few other things, but these are phones, so that's mostly not a thing. And those aren't going to be on the throttle list or the phone will show up as slow when tested. So... what's the throttle for? Can they have broken DVFS that badly?

    This is really really weird.

    Edited to add: I could imagine using this kind of tool to deal with very badly written apps that suck up all available CPU for no reason - say, an app with a busy idle loop. But there can't be that many of those.
    Anilu_777tdknoxwatto_cobra

  • Apple TV+ 'Foundation' is getting 10 new cast members

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    GeorgeBMac said:
    JustSomeGuy1 said:
    Thank you!  That was all very enlightening.

    I blame StarTrek which, when it switched to movies, seemed to morph from great stories with great characters -- as well as some amazing science -- to drama and visual effects.  It set the tone and the bar for future SF movies.

    And, it might have something to do with the times:   the 40's, 50's & 60's were times of great hope, confidence and optimism for mankind, its future, and for the science & technology that would drive it.
    We seem to have lost that.  So today's SF films seem to be more about drama and special effects.
    An interesting thesis, but I think you're off the mark a little. The original series movies were of varying quality, but I don't think they uniformly fit your description.  The second, fourth, and sixth had tons of good character scenes. (Possibly #s 1, 3, and 5 too but I didn't like them so I haven't watched them since they first came out.) Visual effects were a part of it, but not the major point. The fourth in particular was devoid of significant action and effects for almost the entire movie, and it was still a ton of fun (though perhaps hasn't aged all that well?).

    I would argue that the turning point was the next generation series. They spent a ton of money on effects, and very little on smart writing. But my point of view seems to be a minority position. :-(

    I think your point about the zeitgeist may be more accurate. (Though if you weren't white and straight in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, today might seem a lot more hopeful. Or at least ten years ago anyway.) The original Star Trek certainly embodied that optimism.
    All true....  I think I over emphasized the visual effects because they were startling compared to card board cutouts and cheap alien costumes used in TOS while the characters and story lines in the movies tended to let me down -- so I only saw the effects.

    And yeh, there was also a lot wrong during that period too -- but TOS addressed a lot of it -- particularly equality (although the mini-skirts somehow made it through.  But somehow even that just seemed right -- I can't imagine Uhara dressed in pants

    The miniskirts weren't the producer's idea. You can see what Roddenberry et al wanted by watching "The Cage" or "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the two pilots. All the women were in pants, just like the men. And in the first pilot, the second in command, who winds up running things on the Enterprise most of the time because the captain has been captured, is a woman. The network wasn't having any of that, though, and forced them to put the women in skirts, not in command.

    TOS broke other barriers, though, including the first on-TV interracial kiss. (Interspecies, too, if you buy into Spock being Vulcan and not human. But for obvious reasons that didn't make waves.)

    Small trivia tidbit: The woman cast as the second in command in the pilot lost that job because the network insisted nobody would accept a woman in a command role. But the show creator gave her a different recurring role in the rest of the series as Nurse Chapel. (And also as a computer voice.) But that apparently wasn't a big enough "I'm sorry" so he married her too.

    TOS was a product of its times, and far from perfect. But it was still an amazing leap forward for its day, and still has value today.
    GeorgeBMac

  • Apple TV+ 'Foundation' is getting 10 new cast members

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    GeorgeBMac said:
    auxio said:
    GeorgeBMac said:
    djkfisher said:
    In the mean time everyone should try reading the real thing, The Three Books :)
    And when you're done, move on and watch something else.

    I *really* wanted to like this series. Visuals were good, acting was OK, story was... a level of intense stupidity that's hard to imagine. I mean, I watched the first nine episodes (I couldn't bring myself to watch the tenth) and I still have a hard time comprehending how astonishingly moronic it was.

    For great hard SF, try Amazon's The Expanse, which just finished a six-season run. Absolutely superb, what all SF should aspire to be, but nearly never is (though the final season was a bit too compressed to be perfect).

    And if you want to watch Apple TV+, it has many terrific shows. Just... not Foundation. What a massive disappointment.

    Back in the day I read Foundation and was disappointed in it.  It seemed overly opaque and unnecessarily complicated and without any particular point,direction or reason to exist.

    I'm watching Apple's version and, while finding it watchable, I find it similarly opaque and complicated and without any particular point.  It just sort of meanders through human struggles and frailty.

    I much preferred "Invasion" -- which started similarly but coalesced into a cohesive narrative as it went.

    But, the visuals are excellent.   Part of that is they are not overly dramatic for the sake of drama:  a space ship looks pretty mundane -- like a truck looks today (utilitarian) -- just more gadgets.

    --------------------------------
    after thought:  I think part of my trouble is that I cannot relate to any of the characters.  That's not meant as a criticism.  I suspect it has more to do with me than with the story.
    That's a common criticism of Asimov's writing: that he sacrifices character development in favour of an overarching concept.  My personal bias is towards a great concept, but it certainly can be tough to struggle through flat/underdeveloped characters, which is how I'm feeling about Foundation a bit.  But I enjoyed it enough to see what the second season brings.
    Good point!
    That's probably why I preferred Heinlein -- great characters along with great stories.

    "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity"    Lazarus Long, 3023AD
    ... One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite characters.
    I was actually friends with Asimov towards the end of his life. And I read pretty much all his SF, but I preferred his nonfiction science writing, which influenced me greatly. For SF, I too vastly preferred Heinlein. (The two of them were very good friends.)

    That said, some of the flaws ascribed to Foundation are really not flaws in his writing skills as much as they are a result of the circumstances under which the stories were written: As short stories, for the pulps, made to be read on their own. He once considered rewriting it, but in the end other projects held more appeal. (Lots of other projects, really - he was insanely prolific.)

    None of this is relevant to the series, which bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the books. I mean, seriously, aside from some character/place names and some lip service to Foundation's elevator pitch (if it were to have one), there's virtually no connection at all.

    Even that wouldn't have bothered me, if the result were any good. I'm fine with changing character sexes, backstories, etc. I'm fine with rewriting big parts of the story, since the computer revolution that started a decade or more after the stories were written was missed entirely, not to mention the coming nanotech revolution and the more general question of "how did they not fall into the singularity?".

    What I'm not fine with is the incoherent nonsense they wound up with.

    spheric said:
    JustSomeGuy1 said:
    djkfisher said:
    In the mean time everyone should try reading the real thing, The Three Books :)
    And when you're done, move on and watch something else.

    I *really* wanted to like this series. Visuals were good, acting was OK, story was... a level of intense stupidity that's hard to imagine. I mean, I watched the first nine episodes (I couldn't bring myself to watch the tenth) and I still have a hard time comprehending how astonishingly moronic it was.

    For great hard SF, try Amazon's The Expanse, which just finished a six-season run. Absolutely superb, what all SF should aspire to be, but nearly never is (though the final season was a bit too compressed to be perfect).

    And if you want to watch Apple TV+, it has many terrific shows. Just... not Foundation. What a massive disappointment.
    „I don’t have the attention span for a storyline that runs beyond 45 minutes and haven’t read Asimov.“ 

    Fair enough, I suppose. 

    Love The Expanse, BTW. And Foundation. 
    Don't be an ass. I've read the books, three or four times (though one of those times I skipped the second half of the second book- I really disliked the Mule). Short attention span is not the problem- as should be obvious to you if you too have read or watched The Expanse.

    The Expanse was great because the future it imagines *makes sense*. The politics, the economics, and even (as much as you can reasonably ask, anyway) the science. All the pieces fit together, even if you didn't always see how until after it was over.

    The Foundation TV show, on the other hand, is grossly and unforgivably stupid. Here's just a couple points, because it's not worth any more time than that. The foundation is supposed to be the bastion of knowledge, against the tide of darkness. *All* fields of study were expressly represented and preserved within (except one key field- psychohistory!). Most specifically, it had the highest tech level in the galaxy, especially once the Empire started to decay. That strength is what allowed it to beat back the aggression from Anacreon and other tiny Rim powers. That was really the whole point of its existence.

    But in the TV show, we have a hardscrabble colony living in destitution, barely eking out a living on a cold rock. WTF? Who exactly is going to be preserving knowledge for a thousand years there?? They make a point towards the end that some important fields are only understood by one person each there. Insane.

    Oh, and even worse, Seldon (not at all a technology man himself) has somehow arranged for some super-secret monolith to be on the planet from before the Foundation people ever show up? And it has mysterious tech that nobody can understand? It knocks out anyone who gets close to it, and THEY'RE NOT STUDYING IT???

    There were countless other problems. You can choose "The writers were morons" or "The writers had utter contempt for their audience" or "The producers didn't give a shit about the writing" or some combination of all three. That's pretty much the story of that series.
    GeorgeBMac

  • How we ended up with the 'Pregnant Man' Emoji

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    lalafresh said:
    JustSomeGuy1 said:
    You have a very narrow view based mostly on genetics (but not entirely, as there are rare people born as "obviously female" who have XY genes).
    That is flatly untrue. You must mean “have a Y chromosome” but even that is inaccurate. 

    I hate when people with no understanding of genetics or even basic biology attempt to talk about this subject with authority. So annoying.

    I was speaking loosely because, in my experience, people more often understand the word "gene" than "chromosome".

    In fact, you are the one who is ignorant. There are a range of conditions that can produce XY women. Most often, they appear unremarkably female at birth but have conditions that need treatment later (such as Swyer syndrome). In a very few (perhaps requiring genetic mosaicism), successful pregnancy is possible. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/ . My recollection, which may be inaccurate, is that these conditions collectively have an incidence rate of about 1 in 100k, meaning that in the USA alone there are about 3500 such people. Rare, but far from nonexistant.

    There is a wide range of genetic defects that can produce this sort of outcome. Some do not involve defects in the Y chromosome - for example, the AR gene on the X chromosome can be defective. (Perhaps unusual conditions in the womb may also produce this outcome - I don't have to time to research this but vaguely recall reading something like that once. That memory may be incorrect however.)

    If you'd like to be less of an ignoramus, finding info on this on the web is not hard. Ask google if there are XY women and you'll find a bunch of useful links. Then you can be less foolish online. Getting rid of the supercilious attitude and underlying Dunning-Krueger syndrome is likely to be much more challenging, however.
    darkvader

  • How we ended up with the 'Pregnant Man' Emoji

    JustSomeGuy1JustSomeGuy1
    Marvin said:
    Some people think this issue will be like gay rights and will just take time to resolve but this issue will be controversial until the end of time because there will never be a consensus on whether biological or gender identity is the more important one in every circumstance.
    I think you missed what I wrote a couple days ago here.

    It will likely NOT be until the end of time, because technology will catch up with this problem and render it moot. As long as we don't destroy ourselves first (nukes, climate change, etc.), we're likely to have perfect functional sex-changes, within the lifetime of many (most?) reading this site. Not to mention horns, tails, gills, extra limbs, etc. When bodies and sex become that fluid, I expect it's going to get harder to motivate people to hate based on sex. A lot of that energy will probably be directed against people taking on animal characteristics. Because while humans progress, we also like our petty moralizing and religious narrowmindedness. :-(
    darkvader