dansalvato (u/dansalvato)

dansalvato commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan

FinnKuhn · 3 months ago

All of the mentioned issues are mostly solved with Apple CarPlay Ultra though so this doesn't explain to me why they don't offer that.

dansalvato · 3 months ago

I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).

Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.

And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.

dansalvato commented on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm theverge.com/report/82065... · Posted by u/evolve2k

tonetegeatinst · 3 months ago

Given how arm license is know to be less than friendly.... Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.

As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.

dansalvato · 3 months ago

From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):

> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.

Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.

dansalvato commented on Google Antigravity antigravity.google/... · Posted by u/Fysi

antimora · 4 months ago

Why is scrolling modified on this page? I how to disable it?

dansalvato · 4 months ago

I can't believe these "smooth scrolling" scripts are still a thing. I was wondering why I was having a hard time scrolling the page on my phone, when I got to my PC and felt the reason.

It's incredible to think how many employees of this world-leading Web technology company must have visited this site before launch, yet felt nothing wrong with its basic behavior.

dansalvato commented on SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM github.com/sgi-demos... · Posted by u/yankcrime

dansalvato · 6 months ago

The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.

Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.

Here's a decent comparison: https://www.resetera.com/threads/super-mario-64-took-its-3d-...

dansalvato commented on I've Had It with Microsoft disconnect.blog/p/ive-had... · Posted by u/speckx

dansalvato · 8 months ago

This article inspired me to check if Google has something similar for Google Workspace, which also just increased its price due to a bunch of Gemini integration I have absolutely no need for.

As it turns out, they do—but it's hidden from the "Plans and Upgrade" page, which only shows the Standard plan and above. After some digging, I finally found an inconspicuous dropdown on my plan's billing page that had an option to downgrade my plan. Upon clicking it, I was taken back to the earlier "Plans and Upgrade" page, but this time, the Starter plan was made visible on the page.

It's exactly half the price of the Standard plan, just with less storage, no Gemini, and some restrictions on other enterprise features I've never even heard of. Pretty bizarre and upsetting that they completely hide the existence of the Starter plan like that.

I'm hoping I can eventually bring my reliance on Google services down to zero, whenever I can afford the effort it takes to migrate to something better.

dansalvato commented on ThornWalli/web-workbench: Old operating system as homepage github.com/ThornWalli/web... · Posted by u/rbanffy

krunck · 9 months ago

I love this. The CRT sync lines and interlace effect are perfect. I fondly remember my Amiga 1000 days....

dansalvato · 9 months ago

The CRT effect is immediately what stood out to me as well. It's the first time I've ever looked at a "CRT filter" that really gave my eyes the sensation of looking at a real CRT, specifically Amiga. It's so good that I would compel the author to share it with Amiga emulator developers to see if there's any chance of it being implemented. Maybe except for the line that occasionally travels from bottom to top, that's more reminiscent to me of a camera artifact and not something I experience with my eyes on Amiga monitors.

dansalvato commented on Microsoft Windows 1.0 with Steve Ballmer (1986) youtube.com/watch?v=EtuDS... · Posted by u/belter

jimt1234 · a year ago

Congrats to Microsoft for Windows 1. But I still think Amiga/AmigaOS was superior. However, when Microsoft released Windows 3, you could start to see where the puck was going. So I skated toward the puck, like everyone else. Sorry Commodore. :(

dansalvato · a year ago

Let's be real, Commodore has no one to blame but themselves for squandering their 5-year lead in hardware and OS. They were carried hard by the passion of their engineers, but irredeemably greedy and soulless at the top. At Microsoft and Apple, engineers were the lifeblood from the very beginning. At Commodore, they were a spreadsheet column.

dansalvato commented on Customizable HTML Select developer.chrome.com/blog... · Posted by u/dsego

prmph · a year ago

So after decades of developer pain, all we're getting is a better select?

Where is the native HTML datagrid (that supports sorting, filtering, paging, downloading, row/column freezing, column resizing and re-ordering)?

Where are the native HTML Tabs control? Image selector, resizer/cropper, and uploader? Toggle button? etc.

We can't even get text input to respect autocomplete directives properly. On the major browsers, giving your user id and password inputs nonsensical names seems to be required, along with numerous other hacks, to ensure that when a user is registering, the form is not auto-completed with saved passwords.

HTML is really holding us back right now.

dansalvato · a year ago

I think some of this stuff isn't the responsibility of HTML. If HTML already has a full autocomplete spec, isn't it the fault of browsers/extensions/OS if the implementation is broken? Or are you saying the spec is too ambiguous?

A lot of stuff becomes redundant under the framing that HTML is designed to provide semantics, not a user interface. How is a toggle button different from a checkbox? How are tabs different from <details>, where you can give multiple <details> tags the same name to ensure only one can be expanded at a time?

Image manipulation is totally out of scope for HTML. <input type="file"> has an attribute to limit the available choices by MIME type. Should there be special attributes for the "image" MIME type to enforce a specific resolution/aspect ratio? Can we expect every user agent to help you resize/crop to the restrictions? Surely, some of them will simply forbid the user from selecting the file. So of course, devs would favor the better user experience of accepting any image, and then providing a crop tool after the fact.

Data grid does seem like a weak spot for HTML, because there are no attributes to tell the user agent if a <table> should be possible to sort, filter, paginate, etc. It's definitely feasible for a user agent to support those operations without having to modify the DOM. (And yes, I think those attributes are the job of HTML, because not every table makes sense to sort/filter, such as tables where the context of the data is dependent on it being displayed in order.)

Generalized rant below:

Yes, there are pain points based on the user interfaces people want to build. But if we remember that a) HTML is a semantic language, not a UI language; and b) not every user agent is a visual Web browser with point-and-click controls, then the solution to some of these headaches becomes a lot less obvious. HTML is not built for the common denominator of UI; it's built to make the Web possible to navigate with nothing but a screen reader, a next/previous button, and a select/confirm button. If the baseline spec for the Web deviates from that goal, then we no longer have a Web that's as free and open as we like to think it is.

That may be incredibly obvious to the many Web devs (who are much more qualified than me) reading this, but it's not something any end user understands, unless they're forced to understand it through their use of assistive technology. But how about aspiring Web devs? Do they learn these important principles when looking up React tutorials to build some application? Probably not—they're going to hate "dealing with" HTML because it's not streamlined for their specific purpose. I'm not saying the commenter I'm replying to is part of that group (again, they're probably way more experienced than me), but it reminded me that I want to make these points to those who aren't educated on the subject matter.

dansalvato commented on Test if a number is even ubuntuincident.wordpress.... · Posted by u/Fake4d

amiga386 · a year ago

> On m68k, shifting right by 1 and performing a logical AND both take 8 CPU cycles. But the right-shift is 2 bytes smaller

There's also BTST #0,xx but it wastefully needs an extra 16 bits say which bit to test (even though the bit can only be from 0-31)

> That makes a difference on Amiga, because (other than size) the DMA might be shared with other chips, so you're saving yourself a memory read that could stall the CPU while it's waiting its turn.

That's a load-bearing "could". If the 68000 has to read/write chip RAM, it gets the even cycles while the custom chips get odd cycles, so it doesn't even notice (unless you're doing something that steals even cycles from the CPU, e.g. the blitter is active and you set BLTPRI, or you have 5+ bitplanes in lowres or 3+ bitplanes in highres)

dansalvato · a year ago

> There's also BTST #0,xx but it wastefully needs an extra 16 bits say which bit to test (even though the bit can only be from 0-31)

That reminds me, it's theoretically fastest to do `and d1,d0` e.g. in a loop if d1 is pre-loaded with the value (4 cycles and 1 read). `btst d1,d0` is 6 cycles and 1 read.

> the blitter is active and you set BLTPRI

I thought BLTPRI enabled meant the blitter takes every even DMA cycle it needs, and when disabled it gives the CPU 1 in every 4 even DMA cycles. But yes, I'm splitting hairs a bit when it comes to DMA performance because I code game/demo stuff targeting stock A500, meaning one of those cases (blitter running or 5+ bitplanes enabled) is very likely to be true.

dansalvato commented on Test if a number is even ubuntuincident.wordpress.... · Posted by u/Fake4d

userbinator · a year ago

That instruction only encodes to 2 bytes, so size-wise it's the most efficient.

In isolation it's the smallest, but it's no longer the smallest if you consider that the value, which in this example is the loop counter, needs to be preserved, meaning you'll need at least 2 bytes for another mov to make a copy. With test, the value doesn't get modified.

dansalvato · a year ago

That is true, I deliberately set up an isolated scenario to do these fun theoretical tests. It actually took some effort to stop the compiler from being too smart, because it would want to transform the result into a return value, or even into a pointer offset, to avoid branching.