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trm42 commented on New Huawei 96GB GPU   e.huawei.com/cn/products/... · Posted by u/elorant
tangotaylor · 4 months ago
I think it will be effective. This stuff is hard. There used to be many competitors capable of the best process technology: TI, GlobalFoundries, Intel, IBM, Samsung, TSMC.

Canon, Nikon, ASML all used to have competitive lithography machines.

Now it’s just TSMC and Samsung at the edge, and only ASML supplies the latest lithography machines.

China will probably catch up quickly but the pace will be nonlinear and illusory. They will hit diminishing returns just like everyone else has.

They’ve probably stolen every bit of semiconductor IP they can through economic coercion or espionage.

All they can do now is out-innovate everyone else and that will take a long time. But who knows, their pace of advancement since Mao died has been impressive.

trm42 · 4 months ago
One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.

The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.

I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.

trm42 commented on Against Best Practices   arp242.net/best-practices... · Posted by u/ingve
trm42 · a year ago
Best practices and such shouldn't be obeyed as "laws" but guidelines for general work. Once in a while there's good reason to avoid / skip them for whatever reason.

The bigger issue is that developers (me included) are usually making the decisions in their own heads. Usually the reasons are quite ok but they are not really said out loud or documented.

I've been stumbled upon this as both developer trying to get their code approved and when doing a code review.

For the developer it feels super annoying that somebody nitpicks about things which the developer has probably gone through in their heads already and ended up with the resulting solution. Just like Martin in the post complains and reacts passive aggressively towards reviewers mentioning these things.

For the code reviewer it feels like the developer is being sloppy or doesn't care about our common way of doing things thus increasing the need to nitpick and explain so that the developer understands how it should be done.

The solution for this is actually quite easy: document in the comments and in the Pull Request _why_ you're breaking team's / company's guidelines and why you think it's warranted for solution for this case. This seems to remove quite a lot of friction.

Oh and of course it doesn't mean that the guidelines should be broken all the time just because one thinks this kind of stuff is for "idiots|assholes". When working as a team, we need to adhere to common way of working for most of the time.

trm42 commented on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is so buggy you can't install the OS [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=g1__q... · Posted by u/ArtemZ
trm42 · 2 years ago
Haven't used any Linux Distribution on Desktop so cannot comment that side or the installer but my home server has been running Ubuntu LTSes for over a decade. Last night I upgraded it to 24.04 LTS and I was really surprised how well and easy it was to upgrade. Couple of previous upgrades were a lot more hairier things breaking in surprisingly ways after upgrade but this time everything worked perfectly from the first reboot.
trm42 commented on I upgraded my iBook G4 to have an SSD   boredzo.org/blog/archives... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
trm42 · 2 years ago
Happened to upgrade my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio model with OWC's PATA SSD (actually was SATA SSD with PATA adapter), It wasn't a slouch with the probably original PATA HDD but SSD made things even faster and I don't have to worry about 20+ years old HDD dying out that much. That SSD saturates the Ultra ATA/66 IDE Bus completely which feels awesome.

Of course when used with Mac OS Classic, the OS is the biggest bottle neck because of it's bad multi-tasking capabilities. That OS reminds me of things we take granted these days, like computer not locking almost completely when decompressing zip package.

trm42 commented on Nokia made too many phones   textquery.app/2024/02/06/... · Posted by u/shubhamjain
kipchak · 2 years ago
I agree the user interface was a huge difference, but Nokia did have high spec-ed and priced battery burners like the N95. They even sold quite well, for example over their lifetimes there were 10 million N95s sold and 6 million iPhone 1s.
trm42 · 2 years ago
The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc.

N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great.

I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs demoing the iPhone prototype. Couldn't believe for a second that the Nokia's way would work out with S60 series and was super surprised to hear N95 was selling really well.

Of course iPhone would gather steam for a couple of years before getting good enough but still.

trm42 commented on Nokia made too many phones   textquery.app/2024/02/06/... · Posted by u/shubhamjain
pavlov · 2 years ago
Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens.

Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.

The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.

Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.

trm42 · 2 years ago
For Symbian phones Nokia was designing different icons for every phone model. When times started to go bad for them, they introduced common icons for new models and hailed that as a big design innovation.
trm42 commented on Nokia made too many phones   textquery.app/2024/02/06/... · Posted by u/shubhamjain
marttt · 2 years ago
I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day).

Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.

But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.

Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.

That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.

Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic

2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg

trm42 · 2 years ago
The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.

At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.

trm42 commented on Nokia made too many phones   textquery.app/2024/02/06/... · Posted by u/shubhamjain
selcuka · 2 years ago
> Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs.

I still think that the wheel (navi-roller) they introduced with 7710 [1] was revolutionary and they should have used it in other phones they made.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7110

trm42 · 2 years ago
It was super nice to use at the time but it was also completely unsealed against weather so if a bit of snow or water got beneath the wheel, you would get unusable phone quite fast. Happened to mine even though I was super careful, luckily bought it used super cheap. It was also too expensive just because it has WAP and nothing otherwise spectacular.
trm42 commented on Tintin, Hergé and Chang   thewire.in/books/tintin-h... · Posted by u/webmobdev
trm42 · 2 years ago
Ooh, Tintin is one of the first comics I was introduced after Donald Duck (the Carl Barks stories are still as good as then!)

Luckily the Franco-Belgian comics have been readily available in Finland and usually with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.

From what I've heard, Asterix is notorious on the French wordplays that cannot be translated.

There's so much more ideas and humanity in those compared to Marvel/DC stuff (which I happen to read occasionally as well but they are repeating the same stuff from decade to decade). The Franco-Belgian comics are the reason why I'm contemplating on learning French enough to be able read them in the original language.

And don't forget that the Metal Hurlant comics anthology affected quite a lot of English comics as well.

trm42 commented on Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org   blog.persistent.info/2023... · Posted by u/mariuz
trm42 · 3 years ago
Oh wow, before this I haven't used old System versions than 6.0.8 or so and it's just super amazing how ready and well thought even the System 1.0 feels usability-wise! Compare to any Windows before Windows 95, which finally caught on enough of the System/Mac OS classic desktop metaphor and made things feel not too clunky.

I've probably said it before and I say it once again: the old Mac OS windowing and spatial Finder feels even today better and more usable than any of the current DEs, macOS included. They managed to cram bunch of windows and widgets in the paltry 512x384 resolution when nowadays we manage to have max 2 windows in one screen or one window per display. (and yes, there are tiling WMs etc but that's a different story...)

u/trm42

KarmaCake day459July 31, 2015View Original