backlit Kindles
As I understand it, Kindles aren’t backlit but rather frontlit (or sidelit) with a layer designed to diffuse the light across the page evenly. The claim is that the lack of direct lighting helps in the fight against eye strain as well.
Safari offers ad blocking on iOS. You just have to get your extensions through the App Store. But other browsers don’t (yet).
Essentially, yes. Ebonics isn’t inherently offensive or inappropriate, as far as I can tell, but it has connotations that are not attached to AAE. Linguists avoid the term today, and modern uses of it tend to be derogatory.
Dude I’d totally ride a C5 in 2024
Just get a recumbent e-bike and slap some paneling around it.
I never got on the Xperia train cause my buddy had a rough experience with one (long before I went to the dark side and bought an iPhone).
But I did think the camera stuff seemed cool.
One of the few things I truly miss going from my OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren Edition (greatest phone I ever owned, may it rest bricked in peace) to the iPhone is being able to open the camera without waking the phone first. Double tapping the power button to open the camera was great. On iPhone I have to wake the screen and then get to the camera, which is fast but not NEARLY as fast, so I sometimes miss shots I would’ve gotten with an Android phone. This should also fix that (as did the Action button in the iPhone 15, I think, but I don’t have that).
If the rumors for the capture button are true it’s pretty neat. Being able to zoom, focus, and snap a picture with the same capacitive button is neat, and would make smartphone camerawork be nearly as easy as digital cameras from twenty five years ago! 😅
Absolutely it was better. But it’s hard to believe that Apple, who was a part of the USB-IF, didn’t know USB-C was in the works. My conspiracy theory is they knew an open standard was imminent and launched lightning to keep getting those MFI licensing checks and purposely made that long of a commitment strictly so, when regulators asked why they hadn’t switched to the new standard yet, they could say it was to “help the environment.”
Oh probably. We know that by the time they finally dropped Lightning, MFi certification was earning them like $4b per year.
There was even rumor they were going to limit charging speeds over USB-C unless they were detectably “MFi” USB-C cables. Ostensibly to prevent damage to the phone from bad cables, but obviously an attempt to maintain MFi income. I don’t remember if they went through with it.
we promise we’ll use the inferior, proprietary connector
Honestly Lightning wasn’t inferior when it launched in 2012, two years before the design of USB-C was even published. And in some ways I actually prefer it physically (though obviously I would much rather all my devices use USB-C now as it is a much superior connector).
Lightning was reversible where Micro-USB was not, and Lightning’s female port is entirely a hole that the entirely-a-prong male plug goes into, whereas with USB (like with most connectors) the female side has something sticking up inside it that slots into the male plug. This means Lightning is much easier to clean, which becomes necessary because phones in people’s pockets collect lint.
I’m thrilled that iPhone has moved to USB-C, but people forget how much better Lightning was than both the 30-pin iPod connector AND Micro-USB.
Just looked it up to confirm. From DuckDuckGo’s page on the topic:
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Edit: That said, I’d rather use DDG than Bing because DDG eats Bing’s tracking for me, as I understand it.
Isn’t DDG also tied to Bing? I could be mistaken.
Honestly most of what I’ve learned about how to use SD comes from seeing what other people have done and trying to tweak or adjust to get a feel for the tool and its various models. Spend some time on a site like CivitAI to both see what can be done and to find models. I’m very much a noob and cannot produce results nearly as impressive as a good chunk of what I find on there.
The most important thing I’ve learned is how much generative AI, especially SD, is just a tool. And people with more creativity and a better understanding of the tool use it better, just like every other tool.
I do like the idea of using it in GIMP as an answer to Adobe’s Firefly.
you can’t really fit full image generation AI on iPads - for example Stable Diffusion needs at the very least 6GB of GPU memory to work.
You can currently run Stable Diffusion and Flux on iPads and iPhones with the Draw Things app. Including LoRAs and TIs and ControlNet and a whole bunch of other options I’m too green to understand.
Technically the app even runs on relatively old devices, though I imagine only at lower resolutions and probably takes ages.
But in my limited experience it works quite well on an iPad Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro.
The issue isn’t the final, individual art pieces, it’s the scale. An AI can produce sub-par art quickly enough to threaten the livelyhood of artists, especially now that there is far too much art for anyone to consume and appreciate. AI art can win attention via spam, drowning out human artists.
This is literally what people said about photography.
And they were right, painting became less prolific as photography became available to the masses. People generally don’t get their portrait painted.
But people also generally don’t go to photo studios to have their picture taken, either, and those used to be in every shopping mall. But now we all have camera phones that adjust lighting and color and focus for us, and we can send a sufficiently decent picture off to be printed and mailed back to us. For those who want it done professionally that option is available and will be higher quality, just like portrait painting is still available, but technology has shrunk those client pools.
Technology always changes job markets. Generative AI will, just as others have done. People will lose careers they thought were stable, and it will be awful, but this isn’t anything unique to generative AI.
The only constant is that things change.
Generative AI is a tool. It is neither a creator nor an artist, any more than paintbrushes or cameras are. The problem arises not with the tool itself but with how it is used. The creativity must come from the user, just like the way Procreate or GIMP or even photography works.
The skill factor is certainly lower than other forms of artistic expression, but that is true of photography vs painting as well.
I am not trying to say all uses of generative AI are art, anymore than every photograph is art. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a tool to create art, part of the workflow as utilized by someone with a vision willing to take the time to get the end product they want.
Generative AI doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but neither does a camera.
I won’t downvote you for having an opinion on a game that doesn’t align with mine. Diverse thought is what makes conversation interesting!
I suspect part of the issue is that what D3 and D4 are is significantly different from what D2 was. Story-wise I think they’re all about the same level of “good but not amazing,” but in terms of gameplay they differ a lot. Largely because D3 and D4 came so much later in the evolution of the ARPG genre.
D2 is much slower paced, more difficult, requires much more careful play. D3 and D4, in my experience, are mostly about moving fast and getting the most and biggest numbers on the screen. Not that there isn’t difficulty available in D3 and D4, but that difficulty is very different.
D3 and D4 almost feel like a different genre, so if you go into them expecting more of the same feel as D2, it can be disappointing.
Of course my position on this could be because I’ve had much more experience with 3 and 4 than I’ve had with 2.
I’m enjoying season 5 quite a bit, too. The story is definitely leading into the expansion, and I really like the simplification of Varshan summons (although I don’t understand why they’re still having the parts we now turn into Malignant Hearts drop rather than just having Malignant Hearts).
None of its sequels beat Diablo II’s greatness.
I dunno man. I think people have a lot of nostalgia for Diablo II. I didn’t play it that much when I was younger (parents wouldn’t let me buy it because satan or some shit), though I did manage to borrow a friend’s copy for a month or so. Absolutely loved it, but it was hard.
Recently got the Switch version and tried to play through. If you don’t have a plan for your build, and you don’t know where to get good items, it can be extremely frustrating trying to progress. And you have limited respecs. And every time you die you risk losing all of your stuff if you can’t get back to it.
Diablo II was amazing for its time, but it lacks a lot of the quality of life improvements that make Diablo III and Diablo IV (after updates) better to play, IMO.
(Don’t get me wrong, D3 and D4 needed serious help when they launched, but both have gotten pretty awesome updates since launch. D4 season 4 especially breathed wonderful life into that game.)
Edit: Also this article is talking about Diablo ONE, not Diablo II.
Every podcast I support on Patreon provides a link that you can plug into your podcatcher to subscribe. I don’t need the Patreon app to listen to the podcast then, just Pocket Casts or whatever I’m using for all my podcasts.
Even the video links are YouTube links.
I don’t doubt that the app makes life easier in some ways, but the website works just fine.
Compared to something like JPEG XL? It is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.
Only thing I can think of is that PNG is inherently lossless. Whereas JPEG XL can be lossless or lossy.
Opens the camera faster than going through the lock screen (something I desperately miss from my Android phones), and it’s multifunctional. You can press it with different intensity levels to get different functionality, and it’s touch sensitive so you can use it to make adjustments.
It’s not like, revolutionary. But it looks pretty cool and I’m looking forward to trying it out.