Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
> The speech of the manipulator is not the same as the speech of the expert
I don't think that's contentious. The point of free speech is not that all speech is equally valuable or positive. It's that I don't trust you to decide which speech shouldn't be allowed, because that power will 100% be abused, until it's just as pernicious as the "manipulators" it's claiming to defend against.
> I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
> Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.”
And now most of the profit for the 300-seater is gone. What does this do to flight pricing for those who were flying economy?
Most being the operating word here. Economy class tickets still make a profit if the airline wants it, just see the vast majority of regional flights which have zero business class seats. Southwest for instance has single-class layouts.
Some airlines "take" the marginal economy seat loss on larger planes because those are the ones they can fill with business class seats and make an even larger profit.
Even then it's a complex math on whether economy is hurting those flights' profit margins since those people buy things in-flight such as Wi-Fi and extra bags. Base fare is not the only way airlines make money.
Yup, it's a bad pitch. Let's say the economy airplane without the business seats can now accommodate 400 economy seats. You now need two air crews and twice as much maintenance (or more) to transport 480 people (~60% increase) with a smaller percentage of those passengers being business class fares.
What really kills this though is the value proposition for the business class passengers. I think I'd rather pay extra to sit in a comfortable seat for 16 hours, where wifi is now a standard feature, than cram into a smaller (likely noisier) seat for 8 hours. The cases where that 8 hours matters - especially when you can work from the seat if you have to - are fleetingly few. In the 70s, you couldn't do much in an airplane seat so it was wasted time. This is no longer the case and is steadily getting better.
Depends on how well the wifi actually works. I flew Lufthansa from Europe to the US and paid for wifi that didn't actually work of most of the flight. If I could have just gotten there quicker, I would have paid for that instead.
I'm bang in the middle of a reread now; I've lost count of how many there've been. I'm 55 now, having first read it in my early teens, and it's astonishing how it just keeps growing and changing with you. Even after all these years, I'm still surprised by a painterly description of a cloud, or the sense of comfortable rootedness of a little Shire lane, or a little "aha, I never noticed that correlation before, that's what those orcs were doing", or "hmm, that's an odd word to put in that sentence, I wonder why he picked it?" followed by a fascinating bit of research.
I've recently started the Letters too, and can thoroughly recommend it. It's fascinating and oddly cosy to get a direct tap into a mind you know so well at second hand, through its fiction.
> They will not outcompete Sony/MS/Nintendo in consoles because price is king for the mass market
I don't follow the console market at all, but don't its players subsidize their hardware by keeping software (game) costs high? I didn't think they had anything like Steam's level of regular discounted sales. "Price is king" can cut both ways.
"Steam" doesn't decide to have discounted sales -- games are heavily discounted because developers compete against one another for attention. Nintendo and Sony generally have less need to do this.
> Nintendo and Sony generally have less need to do this.
The prime Nintendo games (i.e. Animal Crossing, Pokemon and anything Mario related) are rarely discounted, yes - and Nintendo can do this because these games have borderline drooling fanbases and the games aren't available anywhere else.
But everything else? There's constantly something on sale on the Switch store.
Likewise, the PS5 has absolutely dominated the Xbox's current generation in terms of sales in large part due to exclusives. Xbox Series S is far cheaper than a PS5, mind you.
Isn't this already happening to some degree? E.g. UE's Nanite uses a software rasterizer for small triangles, albeit running on the GPU via a compute shader.
Things are kind of heading in two opposite directions at the moment. Early GPU rasterization was all done in fixed-function hardware, but then we got programmable shading, and then we started using compute shaders to feed the HW rasterizer, and then we started replacing the HW rasterizer itself with more compute (as in Nanite). The flexibility of doing whatever you want in software has gradually displaced the inflexible hardware units.
Meanwhile GPU raytracing was a purely software affair until quite recently when fixed-function raytracing hardware arrived. It's fast but also opaque and inflexible, only exposed through high-level driver interfaces which hide most of the details, so you have to let Jensen take the wheel. There's nothing stopping someone from going back to software RT of course but the performance of hardware RT is hard to pass up for now, so that's mostly the way things are going even if it does have annoying limitations.
And hardware raytracing is on the same trajectory as hardware rasterization: devs finding ways to repurpose it, leading to pressure for more general APIs, which enable further repurposing, until hardware raytracing evolves into a flexible hardware accelerated facility for indexing, reordering, etc.
Nanite is just working around an inefficiency that occurs on small triangles that require screen space derivatives, which the hardware approxinates using finite differences between neighbors, e.g. for the texture footprint estimation in mipmapping. The rasterizer invokes additional shader instances around triangle borders to get the source values for these operations. That gets excessive when triangles are tiny. This is an edge case, but it becomes important when there is lots of tiny geometric details on screen.
Why do you say 'albeit'? I think it's established that 'software rendering' can mean running on the GPU. That's what Octane is doing with CUDA in the comment you are replying to. But good callout on Nanite.
Personally I've found it much easier to sustain creative stuff on the side while doing a non-knowledge-based job than a knowledge-based one. Mental exhaustion is much more of a drag than physical. (Though the knowledge-based hours were longer too, which I'm sure was a factor.)
You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)
Same here with uBlock on iOS. This happens every now and then, not too often. But when it does, I usually decide the page is probably not worth reading anyway.
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