The first alpha was basically unusable for me (not complaining, as it’s expected for an alpha). But from the little I could see it’s very promising. Will probably give this 4th alpha a go on Tumbleweed.

I actually fell asleep playing the original, so…

(not hating on the game, it literally happened though)

It felt like a placeholder so future generations wouldn’t have to increase the notch’s size for Face ID.

But if they remove it again, then I’ll be confused.

An expensive gadget that requires the cloud to function that is designed to manipulate young children into believing that this gadget is their “friend”.

How this is even legal is beyond me.

CUDA is a proprietary platform that (officially) only runs on Nvidia cards, so making projects that use CUDA run on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.

I don’t think the consumer-facing stuff can be called a monopoly per se, but Nvidia can easily force proprietary features onto the market (G-Sync before they adapted VESA Adaptive-Sync, DLSS etc.) because they have such a large market share.

Assume a scenario where Nvidia has 90% market share and Nvidia cards would still only support adaptive sync via their proprietary G-Sync solution. Display manufacturers will obviously want to tailor to the market, so most displays will release with support for G-Sync instead of VESA Adaptive-Sync. 9 out of 10 customers will likely buy a G-Sync display as they have Nvidia cards. Now everyone has a monitor supporting some form of adaptive sync. AMD and Nvidia release their new GPU generation and isolated (in this hypothetical scenario), AMD cards are 10% cheaper for the same performance and efficiency as their Nvidia counterparts. The problem for AMD here is that even though per $ they have the better cards, 9 out of 10 people would need new displays to get adaptive sync working with an AMD card (because their current display only supports the proprietary G-Sync), and AMD can’t possibly undercut Nvidia by so much that the customer can also buy a new display for the price difference. This results in 9 out of 10 customers going for Nvidia again.

To be fair to Nvidia, most of their proprietary features are somewhat innovative. When G-Sync first came out, VESA Adaptive-Sync wasn’t really a thing yet. DLSS was way better than any other upscaler in existence when it released and it required hardware that only Nvidia had.

But with CUDA, it’s a big problem. Entire software projects that just won’t (officially) run on non-Nvidia hardware so Nvidia is able to charge whatever they want (unless what they’re charging is more than the cost of switching to competitor products and importantly porting over the affected software projects).

I’m not sure how sustainable this model is. Especially when a reader browses via a link aggregator and therefore reads news articles on many different websites. I doubt most people want/can afford a subscription on dozens of different news outlets, as that’ll quickly add up to a triple-digit monthly bill.

Something like Flattr, but maybe non-optional, would be better. Pay a fixed monthly fee and split the payment between all sites you read articles on (maybe based on how many, or reading time or whatever).

USB-PD was very much “hammered down” in 2017. USB-PD 3.0 was introduced in 2015.

We even offered expandable storage with our proprietary MemoryStick ProDuo Max Plus Ultra, only $100 for 32 GB!

The Steam Deck leaves little to be desired, especially with the OLED model where Valve made so many small changes that just made it a great device overall.

That being said, a faster SoC would be very welcome, and architectural advancements as well as more modern process nodes would obviously allow for more performance in the same power envelope.

Some games aren’t a great experience on Deck, say Baldur’s Gate 3 in Act 3 especially, or also simply walking through a complex base in Valheim. Zen 5 vs. Zen 2 and RDNA4 vs. RDNA2 on 3nm vs. 6nm should vastly improve things.

With recent SteamOS release notes mentioning the ASUS ROG Ally, I think the writing’s on the wall that we’ll see a version of the Ally with SteamOS preinstalled soon.

I simply use the default iOS keyboard.

Accessing region-specific content doesn’t work as well as it once did with some services actively blocking access from public VPN services nowadays.

Windscribe has a plan where you can pay for an IP address dedicated to you, but this takes away the advantages a shared IP may have.

I think most of VSCode performance improvements just stem from newer CPUs being faster.

Yo Gaben, are you donating your 30% share as well?

Recommendation would be to use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter so it can directly connect via PCI Express. These USB Ethernet dongles are often crappy.

USB-C is fairly open, and USB4 can do most things Thunderbolt 3/4 can do, but there are exceptions like daisy-chaining. Thunderbolt 5 is also out now, and it has no open counterpart. And Thunderbolt is very much proprietary, requiring licensing and certification from Intel.

To be fair, USB-C, especially with Thunderbolt, is much more universal. There are adapters for pretty much every “legacy” port out there so if you really need FireWire you can have it, but it’s clear why FireWire isn’t built into the laptop itself anymore.

The top MacBook Pro is also the 2016+ pre Apple Silicon chassis (that was also used with M chips, but sort of as a leftover), while the newer MacBook Pro chassis at least brought back HDMI and an SD card reader (and MagSafe as a dedicated charging port, although USB-C still works fine for that).

Considering modern “docking” solutions only need a single USB-C/Thunderbolt cable for everything, these additional ports only matter when on the go. HDMI comes in handy for presentations for example.

I’d love to see at least a single USB-A port on the MacBook Pro, but that’s likely never coming back. USB-C to A adapters exist though, so it’s not a huge deal. Ethernet can be handy as well, but most use cases for that are docked anyway.

I like the Framework concept the most, also “only” 4 ports (on the 13" at least, plus a built-in combo jack), but using adapter cards you can configure it to whatever you need at that point in time and the cards slide into the chassis instead of sticking out like dongles would. I usually go for one USB-C/Thunderbolt on either side (so charging works on either side), a single USB-A and video out in the form of DisplayPort or HDMI. Sometimes I swap the video out (that also works via USB-C obviously) for Ethernet, even though the Ethernet card sticks out. For a (retro) LAN party, I used 1 USB-C, USB-A (with a 4-port hub for wired peripherals), DisplayPort and Ethernet.

A game can both be complete and have expansions later. While it is true that many games strip what seems like core content off the main purchase to sell it separately as DLC, there are many examples of DLCs expanding upon an already finished game.

They will run Linux, but you might fry them if your fans don’t work properly.

The EFI will control the fans just fine.

I’d recommend a separate authentication plugin independent of Mojang accounts. For example this one (didn’t test it myself).