I remember thinking the Matrox cards in the 90s (Millennium, G400) had super-solid drivers, and their 2-D image quality was amazing. Interestingly, at the time, we were doing software 3-D rendering and NVIDIA RIVA TNT was much slower for bitblt. I guess they've fixed that by now. ;)
The G200 and G400 are two of my absolute favorit graphics cards from my early computing years, but if you needed any reasonable 3D performance or feature set, they weren't a great choice. However, if you just needed a stable graphics card for a desktop/developer machine it was one of the most stable and well supported cards, followed by the ATi Rage 128.
> no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering
Gimmicks that are even today way overused. The world would be better off without them.
Note that I am not into 3d games, and while someday I mean to learn CAD that day is far in the future. If I was into either of those things the features you name would be important. However since I'm not those things are useless gimmicks - YMMV.
What 2D game you play doesn't have textures, alpha blending or transparency in any way? Seems like pong might be one of the few that fits your criteria.
I specifically said I don't do CAD. My IDE doesn't need all those special effects. Nor does my web browser - I'm happy with what lynx can do as a web browser for most things since I want information not pretty.
As a broke teenager, I came to have a G400 much later on in its lifecycle (c. 2007-2008). It did indeed have amazing analogue output quality (kids these days think VGA is inherently blurry, but it can be pretty much indistinguishable from DVI/HDMI if your graphics adapter has a good RAMDAC and you connect the monitor with a high-quality cable). However, my experience with the 3D drivers was pretty consistently terrible. I suspect the card was getting much less QA attention by that point, because one driver release would have broken OpenGL support, the next would break Direct3D, and so on. Very obviously not consumer-focused cards. I remember it extremely fondly nonetheless! Multi-monitor support was not common then, and that card was extremely formative to my lifelong thirst for desktop real estate.
We know the typical LMS responses for human cones (e.g., Stockman-Sharpe) that could easily be plotted instead of the bell-curve-like things they use here - why? Is it good enough for illustration? You could say, kind of but then all the colors are kind of wrong too. For example, D65 is very blue here.
The article takes a really long time to get to the thing everyone should know: which is that our cones responses overlap a lot, and we get color sensations by (kind of) differencing them. Doing a matrix transform after ten pages to get to chromaticity is technically correct, but it's not the most accessible/intuitive way to teach this.
Nice effort but it would be better if it were closer to "real" color math.
Oh I didn’t know about Stockman-Sharpe, but FWIW the article acknowledges your point:
“The sensitivity curves shown here are normalized approximations (for simpler visualizations and calculations), and are not accurate. In reality, the sensitivity curves are less smooth, and different types of cones have differing levels of sensitivity. For example, the sensitivity of S-cones is significantly lower compared to the other cones. Similarly, rods are more sensitive to light than any of the cones.”
I was thinking to myself this article approaches color better than the majority of color articles I see on the HN front page. Many of them start from RGB and work backwards, often awkwardly with conceptual gaps; at least this start with SPD right out of the gate. The cone response overlap is implied via plots right at the beginning, and the first equation is an integral, and the correct integral… it might not be the most accessible, that may be true, but it’s getting across the right physics concepts first and cleanly separating perception and leaving that murky pit for after the physics is established.
Author here. Yes, as mentioned, all the colours and curves are approximations. I created it in a rush during my last summer break, to be able to submit it before the SoME4 [0] deadline.
I agree that working from RGB backwards results in a lot of back-and-forth between concepts, sometimes leaving unanswered questions. Starting with the SPD means getting to matrix transforms and chromaticity is a much longer route, but I feel is ultimately more intuitive — at least compared to most of the other ways to present it. Also, I wrote this for an audience with some (basic high school) background in math, but zero background in colours. So I'd rather it be drawn-out than underexplained. I myself didn't know much about cone fundamentals before deciding to write about it :)
No - there is a huge difference between "this AI created this image" and "this user did it" - the first we need more of, and the second is a big privacy concern. The article does not say anything about identifying a user.
A guid isn’t a user id, if it is in this case, it’s an abuse of how guid is used, at least colloquially. I haven’t read enough to understand if it is user / machine id, I.e. only globally unique in the sense it’s a globally unique entity identifier.
Not telling someone you used AI is a perversion of writing. Also agree that an AI proofreader should not claim authorship, but in most other cases, the AI is not reading your mind, it's only watermarking its own usage, and we kind of need more of that.
It's fine for installing, but uninstalling is madness: Windows uninstallers try to clean up all the registry and user profile stuff they install. Mac apps seem to just leave stuff behind in Local Settings or Caches forever? Containers are not such a bad idea.
Same here. I’m least familiar with macOS compared to Windows and Linux, but the uninstall story on Mac was always baffling to me.
On Windows, it’s not perfect because it’s ultimately cooperative, but at least the developer of the application can also configure how it should be uninstalled. If you mostly stick to “reputable” applications, you know they would have gotten so many complaints about random things they leave behind that they slowly fix their uninstaller. Also you usually get the option to completely uninstall or keep data files, etc. Though it’s not universal. Uninstaller apps like CCleaner used to be more popular, but I hardly hear about these things anymore and usually advise against them.
On Linux, the story is slightly better as you rely on your distro package maintainer to configure the right uninstall logic. Removing random config files in /etc/ or data files in /var/ or systemd units, etc. Usually maintainers get it right as long as you stick to those feeds, and when something is missed it’ll get fixed eventually.
On Mac it seems to be either google it to get a list of locations to clean (which is what I do), or just delete the folder and ignore the random files or use CleanMyMac ($19.99) or CCleaner ($12.99) or MacAppBeGone (that’ll be $8.99) etc. luckily you can try to stick to homebrew and the App Store, but it’s limiting.
I switched to Windows in the year 2000, or 2002, around then. It used to be cool because "the app is just a file that you can place anywhere, or trash when done" was true. They arrived usually as Stuffit or Binhex archives, rarely as disk images. There was no fussy "applications folder" with special permissions. You decompressed the file to anywhere and ran it. If you felt like updating something, this was accomplished by going and getting a new one.
Counterpoint: you reinstall something later and all your setting and preferences are still there.
It’s a classic cloud vs disk debate about where and who should persist and own the data. Lately I think it’s kinda refreshing that it’s entirely on your disk and up to you.
Decent Windows uninstallers have a checkbox for that. Often disabled by default.
It's not universal, but at least it's possible. Not having to hunt down random directories (or buying a program to do it for you) also has advantages to user control.
Counterpoint: explain to me how to make two different versions of an app cohabit. I found out about homebrew, so it isn't as much as an issue as it used to be, but in the 2000s, it was impossible to maintain two versions of RoR on mac. Granted, window was not much better (two versions of crypt on ISS took me way too long to install correctly). But for anyone used to sane OS, it was a detriment until homebrew became ubiquitous.
Maybe the correct UX could be to list the locations of settings data, their size and ask the user whether they want to leave them, put them aside in a dedicated folder ("the attic", "the basement" or whatever), or remove them
I agree entirely, my Mac is full of half leftover data from old apps.
But that is quite independent from the creativity people show in these install workflows. You could have both a cool .dmg and a proper uninstallation process (but we don’t, for the most part).
I would expect local settings and caches to remain. They are your files. Caches I would expect to be cleaned up by some operating system service. This, of course, relies on the app putting stuff in expected places and not just in random places.
Been using the great and free AppCleaner[1] since I have memory. It's so good I just forget it's there.
It autodetects when you delete an app from the Applications folder runs a quick scan and suggests which other files you might want to delete (So you might save savedata or settings if needed)
I bought AppZapper years ago, and it still works. There's a free tool out there somewhere as well.
Don't knock on this feature, it can be a lifesaver if you've lost the license info. When you reinstall, sometimes the app can retrieve the license from old files.
This seems to do XYZ->RGB without any gamma correction. XYZ is linear, as is the transform to RGB, so we usually convert linear RGB to (gamma-encoded) sRGB at the end.
The JS code seems to output linear RGB directly to the webpage (missing gamma). I guess the difficulty with "adding gamma" to it is this: if the training data were also gamma encoded, then it might need to be refit with linear values.
I scanned the post on pangram and got the same result. Also, I'm not sure about you, but using AI tools for AI detection seems more rigorous than people going based off counting how many em-dashes there are and similar vibes.
It seems plausible that someone could make a decent discriminator for distinguishing human text from AI text. I wouldn't immediately discount the idea.
So if this Mac uses 30-50W, that's 40-60 tok/Wh...vs maybe 80k for a modern GPU cluster? So that's about 1000-2000x more power for the SSD streaming, unfortunately.
Nicely illustrated, and only one criticism: our preference for luminance (using more bits for "Y" vs "Cr/Cb") isn't due to the number of rods in the eye - there are so many rods so that we can capture more photons at night, and they are usually saturated at daylight illuminances.
The effectiveness of the YCbCr encoding is much more related to the predominant pathway to the LGN (80-90% of the "number of bits" used) encoding luminance and center-surround, so those things both map well to using more bits for "Y".
I think portability is very confusing: they rolled out passkeys with no device portability (device-bound) and only recently added it (CXP). So for anyone with multiple devices it was a relative disaster - why should my Windows PC hold a device-bound passkey to anything? How do I login on Linux or macOS?
Picking a password manager to do portability also means another kind of lockin, though maybe you can live with that kind if you really trust the company. Even so, the password managers all seem to be competing to have relaxed security, so that vault and account passwords are the same, or you are asked to type your master password into a webpage - surely we didn't replace per-site passwords with this?
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