• 5 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoHardware@lemmy.world•[CNBC] How Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses fit into Mark Zuckerberg's vision of a smartphone successorEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    I don’t really understand the use case for this. It’s got no head-tracking, so no AR stuff. It’s got no display, so can’t even overlay non-AR stuff in your field of vision, which is the main reason that I’d be willing to stick an electronic device in front of my eyes. It’s not a value play, because it costs about as much as AR goggles.

    It gives you okay audio, a microphone, and not-so-impressive-compared-to-phone-cameras binocular video.

    Maybe if it constantly recorded video and you could just smack a button to save the last N minutes or something, I could sort of see that, if you assume that people don’t want to miss recording something critical, which they might with a smartphone – with this, if you saw it, you could save it. But they don’t permit for that, probably because the battery is too limited.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Trump issues threat of sanctions, tariffs on RussiaEnglish
    81·
    4 days ago

    My understanding is that pressure on both Ukraine and Russia was basically part of the Trump administration’s plan.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Kellogg

    In June 2024, Kellogg and Frederick H. Fleitz, who had also served on Trump’s National Security Council staff, presented Trump with a detailed peace plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.[30] The plan proposes a ceasefire on the current front lines, forcing both Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and continued military aid to Ukraine if it agrees to a ceasefire and peace talks. If Russia did not also agree to a ceasefire and peace talks, the United States would increase arms supplies to Ukraine. Ukraine would not have to formally cede the occupied and annexed territories to Russia, but would postpone its plans for NATO membership for a longer period of time, and the territories currently under Russian occupation would remain under de facto Russian control. Kellogg and Fleitz said their main concern is that the war has devolved into attrition warfare that could wipe out an entire generation of young men in both countries.[31][32]

    In November 2024, President-elect Trump selected Kellogg to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.[2]

    Michael Kofman’s has been skeptical of Trump’s direction here, has said that he’s likely to have problems getting Russia to go along with anything that isn’t total capitulation for Ukraine, because the Kremlin thinks that it’s going to win this militarily. He’s also pointed out that Ukraine doesn’t have any incentive to go along with something that puts it in a weaker position, which basically anything that Russia would accept, as things stand, would. And the war only stops if both sides feel that they’re better off with it stopping.

    The US has a finite amount of leverage here, unless it’s willing to do something like put troops in, which it isn’t willing to do.

    EDIT: I also watched an analysis the other day from someone taking the position that Trump really views this in terms of scoring domestic political points — like, he’s the peacemaker president, and Biden is the incompetent war president, which is a theme that he’s been campaigning on. If one agrees with that, he also wants the war ended quickly, which places even more impractical constraints on Rubio and similar.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux Gaming@lemmy.world•Ultra wide vs. Multi-monitor setup?English
    1·
    4 days ago

    What kind of setup do you rock?

    Single-monitor, non-ultrawide.

    My take is that as long as your monitor is positioned sufficiently-closely to fill a sufficient chunk of your visual arc, you don’t need larger monitors set further back.

    If you want to be able to have ready access to the stuff you want to see, it’s a software problem, not a hardware problem. Instead of having a ton of displays constantly showing stuff, where you’re only looking at a fraction of it, you want to make it easy to switch to the stuff you do want to see.

    Like, I’ve seen people who have a monitor that they’re writing code on displaying something like Visual Studio. It’s got a tiny portal into code, and then the entire surrounding area is filled with widgets showing information about that code, lists of files, etc, that’s mostly being ignored, where the user is only using a tiny portion of the display’s space at once. I think that that’s a sign of mis-designed software:

    The part where I can clearly read text is a comparatively-narrow cone in front of my eyes. Rather than turning my head and eyes for productivity stuff, I’d rather have software aimed at rapidly letting me put what I want to see into that cone, and if it’s multiple things, to switch among them.

    Also, if you use a laptop at all on the go, you’ve got limited options as to a ton of monitor space, so you probably want a workflow that works with that unless you’re willing to alter your workflow on the go.

    When would I consider an ultrawide or many-monitor setup? Well, there are some types of games where filling peripheral vision is useful. People have had many-monitor flight sim sets for a long time.

    If I were really into a particular genre of game that did that, I might consider it.

    Problem is, that competes with VR headsets, and in general, I think that VR headsets compete pretty favorably for that use case in 2025. Some flight and racing sim fans have physical hardware, and VR doesn’t permit for interaction with those controls:

    But that’s really the only drawback, and I think that the people who build rigs like that are a very small niche: they’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars and lots of configuration and setup time on controls for a single game.

    And HMDs aren’t, in my opinion, really suitable as a general-purpose monitor replacement in 2025, so can’t just use VR headsets or whatever everywhere.

    So my take is probably “single monitor positioned relatively-close to eyes”. My monitor is on one of those monitor mount arms, floats over my keyboard. If one wants to fill one’s peripheral vision for video games, probably use a VR headset for that.

    oled monitor

    I really like the contrast on these, was waiting a long time for these to come down in price. But one caveat which may-or-may not matter to you: OLED monitors in 2025 do not deal well with variable refresh rate (VRR, FreeSync, GSync, etc). When the refresh rate changes, it messes with the brightness momentarily. I am pretty sure that this is not a fundamental limitation, but as best as I can tell from reading, it’s not an issue that’s been eliminated by any monitor manufacturer. I’d guess that there are a limited number of OLED controllers out there, rather fewer than monitor manufacturers, so not that surprising that issues would be common across manufacturers)

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoLinux@lemmy.world•Aoostar R1 N100 fan swap hugely reduces noiseEnglish
    31·
    6 days ago

    It said that he didn’t have a variable-speed fan and then moved to a variable-speed one. That is, he had a fan that was always running at the highest level he’d ever need. That’s gonna be a big change.

    I don’t think that, at a given diameter and rate of airflow, there’s a huge difference in the noise from one fan to another. A lot of what quieter fans do is to just use a reduced airflow via one route or another. IIRC, Noctua has some fancy bearings, but fans are mostly wind noise, not bearing noise (well, unless your bearings are going, in which case you should replace a fan anyway).

    EDIT: Out of curiosity, I went looking. Kind of surprisingly – this doesn’t seem like it would be a very expensive test to run, just put a sound meter a fixed distance away from fans, get a bunch of PC fans, and have some sort of acoustic enclosure in a reasonably-quiet environment – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of testing out there.

    You can get fancier, because some sounds are more-obnoxious to humans than others, and then it can get more-complicated, but if you’re willing to limit yourself to the simpler “how loud does it sound on average”, you shouldn’t have too much work.

    I did find this:

    https://imgur.com/3lAEFPn

    No idea the source. It ranks the Noctua fans (NF-) as slightly worse than average at a given flow rate, which kind of surprises me.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•It's time to take Trump seriously, investors say as markets recoilEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    I mean, Goldman Sachs is publicly-traded, and you can short them. That will – by a tiny amount – decrease the amount of the company. Unless you’re throwing around huge amounts of money, they won’t notice, though, and I’d call the whole process of activist investment generally not very sensible, as in an efficient market, capital from other investors should flow into the hole you’ve created and pull the value of the company back up. I’ve heard the process of activist investing described as “trying to bail a hole in a lake”. I don’t think that that’s a good way to express disagreement with the CEO of the company, and would consider doing so to be an unwise decision in terms of your own finances.

    I’ve seen a lot of moves by people on various communities here who are upset over one aspect or another of the Trump administration talking about or encouraging things that I’m pretty sure aren’t going to do much to stop them. This includes:

    • Not buying any products from anyone for one day.

    • Highlighting some vehicles being burned at a Tesla dealership in France.

    • Highlighting a row of Tesla superchargers being burned in Massachusetts.

    • Spamming a DOGE email address.

    Some of those can potentially be personally-costly, like giving someone jail time, but I don’t think that anything on there will likely stop Trump or Musk from doing things or reverse what they’re doing.

    I’m gonna repeat the last comment I made on the topic: if someone — assuming that they’re in the US — legitimately wants to stop the stuff the Trump administration is doing, the most-direct route is probably for the Democrats to flip the House in the midterms. It’s likely that they will cheerfully disrupt a lot of this, to the extent that they can. Right now, the GOP holds a trifecta, and Congressional Republicans are very likely to be very hesitant to do anything that starts a fight with the President and might threaten their legislative agenda, even people like Lisa Murkowski, who has been pretty vocally upset with Trump. The Democrats, on the other hand, have every incentive to do so. I’d go link up with the Democratic Party – I know that they take volunteers, though I’ve never done so myself – and ask what someone can volunteer to do to flip the House in the midterms. That’s nearly 23 months from now, which is a while, but that’s the biggest hammer readily available.

    kagis

    They do have this “volunteer” page, including with some checkboxes as to what one wants to volunteer to help do. I don’t see specifically “flip the House in the midterms”, but some similar-sounding stuff is in there, and I’m sure that if someone gets in touch with them and talks to a human trying to organize volunteers, they can probably hook someone up with whatever is going on there.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•It's time to take Trump seriously, investors say as markets recoilEnglish
    14·
    6 days ago

    “I’m spending a lot of time talking to CEOs who are really trying to understand the consequence of some of this,” said Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon at conference in Australia.

    “Until there’s more certainty, we have a little bit more runway time. I think we’re going to live with a slightly higher level of volatility. But I think he (Trump) has a purposeful direction that he’s pursuing, and we should take him at his word that he’s going to pursue that direction.”

    I mean, I think that there’s an extremely straightforward purposeful direction. He campaigned on tariffs. He appeals principally to a group of people who want protectionist trade policy. Those people are in swing states and don’t like trade with Canada and Mexico. He’s worked hard to give the impression that he’s adopted protectionist policy in the past. Why would he stop?

    I don’t think that there needs to be some kind of more-complicated plan. You’ve already got a plan on the table in front of you. The only degree of complication is that Trump’s tended to aim to give the impression that he’s adopting considerably more-protectionist trade policy than he actually is.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Currency investors grow wary of bets on Trump tariffsEnglish
    7·
    9 days ago

    “Trump will shout about some tariffs, row back from those announcements, the White House will say something totally contradictory and then Trump might post the opposite on Truth Social 10 minutes later,” the trader said. “You can’t trade that.”

    If you can figure out a reasonably-reliable analytical way to determine when Trump is bullshitting, you might.

    I would also be interested in such a system.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoHardware@lemmy.world•Amazon CEO says ‘beautiful’ new Alexa hardware is coming this fallEnglish
    4·
    11 days ago

    Setting aside any issues with Amazon themselves running these…

    I suspect that there is, at some point, going to be one almighty privacy clusterfuck when someone manages to mass-compromise Internet-connected speech-recognizing microphones.

    I’m not saying that Alexa devices are even the worst here. I’d be more-worried about stuff like inexpensive security cameras out of China from some random company that promptly goes under and doesn’t provide any security updates.

    But I really think that people don’t stop and consider “am I really prepared to put a sensor in my house that may have some random party on the Internet in control of it at some point in the future?”