I don’t know, it has the opposite effect, IMO.

It just makes them seem obnoxious, since the example they chose was a parent who was distracted with the computer open in the changing room while they were supposed to be helping their children with their skates, and literally mentions how the other parents have to navigate around the thing.

You’d be more inclined to think that they’re a computer addict who can’t put the the thing down for even a moment.

On top of that, the video is basically a recipe to drop the laptop and have it shatter into fine powder, if you’re holding it by the corner like that.

They’re used for some trains now, though I think that a lot of them have since switched to rheostat or regenerative braking instead.

Slightly odd choice to use a motor instead of an eddy current brake or some such, when it’s supposed to be a drop-in replacement for existing braking systems.

Is it supposed to be a quick hybrid conversion system rather than just a brake?

EDIT: I’m not sure if it is. The article makes it unclear, but going by the manufacturer’s site, the electric motors are meant to replace the piston on the caliper, rather than using the motor itself as a brake.

It’s still a mostly conventional braking system.

We had a rather nice thing going with pure HTML. Sure, it wasn’t the prettiest thing, even with CSS, but almost every device could run and display it in its own way.

You didn’t need a custom thing, or a bunch of extra code adjusting the webpage for each type of device that opened the web page, since that job was all done by the browser.

That’s basically model routing, and has existed a while. Open AI’s GPT-5 and llama-swap do that, for example. If the task is simple, it uses a smaller, less intensive model, and only uses the slower, larger one of the task is more complex.

Though most tend to operate with models on the same device/service, rather than a model run elsewhere.

Back in my day, computer was a job, and all you had was an abacus. We liked it that way. None of this newfangled al-gebra nonsense.

It’s also cheaper, if they can offload a portion to the user’s computer.

So what happens if the artist is dead?

Freddie Mercury would find it difficult to maintain an active social nedia presence to prove he’s human, being rather indisposed at the present.

Who doesn’t like their phone charging them by the word?

To be fair, using react for it was just an odd decision to begin with.

Is this anything new at all?

Even back in the day, you had people wanting to live in the recent past, because the past usually gets romanticised.

So people in the 1960s might have a rosy view of the turn of the century, and want to go back to the 1930 days of art deco and balls, or those today, that might want to return what they believe to be glory days of 1960. Even if it isn’t actually realistic to how you might live in the past. The average citizen in 1930 was not attending balls at a swanky music lounge.

Give it a few decades, we might also have people from 2050 pining for the 2020s, believing it to be just like the advertisements, where we all live in the penthouse level of skyscrapers, overlooking a vast cityscape.

That instance needs a login to show the post.

If you don’t have a Kobo, the file conversion is also a lifesaver.

I have one of the old Kindle e-readers, and it doesn’t support epub, for example. It does support pdf, in theory, but the age of the hardware means any decently large/complicated pdf bogs it down something fierce.

Being able to use calibre to convert my books to a format it does support is nice.

Do kind of wish that they had less silly names, though.

It’s hard to recommend them without sounding like you’re just babbling nonsense.

If you get Libby and Hoopla for your Kobo, you don’t need Ploob, no matter how much Ploob has it for you.

Sort of? Apple’s reputation is traditionally that they make middle-of-the-road hardware, but make up for the shortcomings with software.

On paper, you can buy a Windows computer with better specs for cheaper, but the Apple computer still holds its own because the software is well-made, at least on the OS side of things. Even if the rest of their software was rubbish, you could get rid of it and still have a good foundation to work from. Hence why the Hackintosh was all the rage some years back. In theory, you could eke out the best of both worlds.

I think that’s why we haven’t seen Apple Silicon advertised that heavily lately.

There’s also not much of a point to advertise it at this point. The M-Series chips been around for a good while now, and is used in a bunch of their products. It’s basically turned into the status quo, so they have no need to advertise it, particularly as the improvements seem to be mostly incremental for the time being.

I do kind of wish that there was a way to bring back the old squishy gel 3D icons, though.

The current thing is a bit of an awkward cross between them, and the flat colours that seem to be basically everywhere now.

It’s still a bewildering oversight that, or something just like it, is the only way you can link with a device.

If you stuff your phone with photos, you can’t delete them by connecting them to a computer and sorting through them on that. You have to use a utility to import them either straight onto the computer, or delete them separately on the phone. Even if you use a Mac instead of a PC, you basically need to work with an iTunes-like interface.

Especially with the focus on trying to make the iPad a computer. You’re still largely relegated to the iTunes-type interface, unless you sidestep it with a cloud service, or Airdrop.

Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could’ve given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they’re calling this.

I think that they shot themselves in the foot by trying to make it a computer that goes on your face, and have it do as much as possible.

The interface is weird, and comes with a bunch of features that don’t seem very useful. The eye thing is simply odd, and the keyboard seems like it would run into the same problems that those laser keyboards that were all the rage back in the day had, where it’s awful to type on, since you get no feedback, and are just whacking your hand against a solid surface.

If they had stripped it all the way down into basically being a wearable monitor you can plug into your devices, with workspaces you can expand or move around as you like, in lieu of having a bunch of monitors, it would have been more of a sell.

As it is, it comes across as a proof-of-concept that’s stuffed to the gills with gimmicks to try and make it fit a niche, which in turn makes it seem a toy more so than anything else.

The skeumorphic days of the early 2000s were nice, and gave things a bit of character. The current trend of having everything be flat colours is fine, but does lose a little bit of that whimsy.

Admittedly, part of it might also just be that the grass is greener. We could easily be saying the same thing in reverse if we were still on the gel look of the time.