amusingfool

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amusingfool
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  • A future iPhone may get a 200MP camera -- eventually

    It certainly seems inevitable that this will arrive at some point.  And I hadn't been paying enough attention to Samsung to realize they have shipped one.  But it seems weird to ship it now, when not even an $8k Hasselblad medium-format camera will get you over 100MP (and only one full-frame model will get you over 50MP.  Most are 24-48MP).  I feel like the only reason you get something even usable with that kind of resolution on that small a sensor with such small lenses is a combination of AI post-processing and pixel binning.  And if you're just going to be binning the pixels, you'll do better to have fewer pixels because there will be fewer interstitial lines on the sensor leading to more usable surface space.
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • It's tough, but you can hack a M4 Mac mini to get power over USB-C

    The video certainly demonstrates that it is feasible for a USB-C cable to power an M4 Mac mini.

    Feasible is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence.

    As for using a Mini as a portable, I looked into that, thinking of using a Vision Pro as the display.  Not feasible; the Vision Pro refuses to connect if the Mini is not already attached to some sort of display (even a very crummy one.  I suppose I didn't try using an iPad as one, although I would guess that would fail as well, for the same reason).
    watto_cobra
  • Trump delays TikTok ban for another 75 days

    Ignoring, of course, that the shut-down delay was only legal if there was a deal to sell in place. And that that authority to delay was for a maximum of 90 days. More examples of the "party of law and order".
    watto_cobra
  • A new Chinese AI app tops the App Store, but its meteoric rise could be short-lived

    Pema said:
    Once again the Chinese have upended the market. This time with AI. The whole Western model has been debunked.
    Kind of reminds me of the 1990s when Oracle and other big name tech titans committed to spend trillions to create the information superhighway with the mantra the first and best would control it. When a little canary in the coal mine tweeted 'hey we have just such a model an it costs nada' it is called the internet and it was invented in the 70s as ARPANET bringing the whole proposed model crashing down. And the rest is history as they say. 
    The reason that the Western model is unwieldily is the gargantuan amounts of data and the nuclear processing power required to deliver even a smidgen of info that it becomes like the Russian wristwatch: a clunky face with a car battery required to run it. Not to mention the fact that the smidgen of data is woefully inadequate and wrong most of time. 

    China is the future: manufacturing, EV and now AIs. 
    You might want to pay some attention to the deleveraging going on in the Chinese housing market, and see how deep the scars of that go before declaring them the future. Not saying there aren’t problems here (lord knows, there are plenty), but this sort of jingoism seems rather facile. 
    ronn
  • Marvel Snap is back online in the US after outage caused by the TikTok ban

    Anilu_777 said:
    If the Americans can’t compete, they ban. Remember Huawei’s phones before the ban? This is ridiculous. 
    I have mixed feelings on this, but you are aware that China bans all the US social networks, right?

     I wonder if Trump’s promise not to fine (for the next 75 days) companies for allowing TikTok to run is a way to get leverage over those companies. Ie: in the future, he can say to them (and so far, that’s Oracle and Akamai), “Do this for me or I’ll impose those fines.”

    Paranoid? Conspiracist? Maybe. But that’s how Putin has controlled the oligarchs in Russia. 

    Any way you slice it, it’s a messy situation. 
    watto_cobra