The Quest's Snapdragon GPU, like most mobile GPUs, uses a tiled rendering [1] architecture.
The basic technique for rendering gaussian splats is kryptonite for this architecture, essentially implementing every worse practice for rendering on a mobile GPU:
* Tons of overdraw (overlapping splats)
* Tons of alpha blending
* Millions of splats in the distance generate a lot of tiny triangles resolving to a single pixel
* Long thin splats in the foreground generate triangles that cover multiple tiles
These are all the ingredients you need to bring a mobile GPU to its knees! Any desktop GPU (including most laptops) will be far less sensitive to these issues, even if it's not very powerful. It's a fundamental issue of architecture rather than one of raw FLOPs.
Sure maybe, but that depends the DOJ’s actions. Also depends on the buyer, the search engine alternatives, whether DOJ allow Google to pay to be the default, etc.
Again, they don’t drive or steer remotely. What sometimes happens is a multiple choice question is presented to the operator in an ambiguous situation:
<photo of construction zone>
Can I drive through here?
[Yes] [No]
When this is happening, the car is stopped and lets the passenger know that it’s reaching out for remote help to figure out what to do. For me this has happened two times across my 125 Waymo rides (571 miles) so far, and was resolved in under 20 seconds. Though I must say, 20 seconds feels like ages when you’re in the car and blocking traffic!
It’s pretty surprising that they believed this. The heart is very obviously thumping in your chest, and it’s very easy to notice that the (visible) veins in your wrists, neck and thighs are pulsing at the same rate.
It just seems like a more obvious “center” for an ancient person; the mechanics are so easily detectable from the outside, while the liver sits silently.
I think that's at least partially a view that's obvious because we now consider the heart the "center" of the body. The lungs are obviously expanding as you breath, your stomach obviously digests your food into what becomes you, blows to the head cause mental issues so it's obvious that the brain is used to think.
Meanwhile there's this huge organ in your chest with a non-obvious purpose, I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone to claim it holds your soul or something.
Agreed. We put the things we want to believe, but don't have evidence for, in places where we have the least evidence lying around to contradict them. It's why there's a woo woo subculture that uses words like "quantum" in dubious ways.
Not only that but the heart rate changes with your breathing, physical activity, thoughts, emotions ... I want to say it "has the pulse" but that sounds like a corny literal use of the expression.
> Today, iOS users already have the ability to set a third-party web browser — other than Safari — as their default. Reflecting the DMA’s requirements, Apple is also introducing a new choice screen that will surface when users first open Safari in iOS 17.4 or later. That screen will prompt EU users to choose a default browser from a list of options.
Any idea if this means you can actually choose a different browser, or are you choosing a different WebKit wrapper (e.g. the current version of Chrome on iOS)?
> To reflect the DMA’s changes, developers will be able to use alternative browser engines — other than WebKit — for dedicated browser apps and apps providing in-app browsing experiences in the EU.
So now European users could be using Firefox with mobile gecko engine, but no one in the US will ever test with that because they're not allowed to have it. Fun!
AFAIK, from various interactions I’ve had on here and on Lobsters, Big Tech developers seem to often have Firefox as a target. But people in startups don’t.
And European users will have 3000 instances of Chrome now that every app is going to bundle it. I'm all for alternate rendering engines but without giving users a choice the bloat is going to be massive. I don't trust developers to not be bloating their apps and I can almost guarantee we'll see custom versions of Chrome to enhance dev tracking capability on users.
I don't expect many EU apps to bundle Chrome because they can't use it outside the EU and the benefits of bundling a different browser engine for in-app browsing would be limited for the types of basic browsing that is typically done inside a non-browser app. Additionally, Apple is imposing additional requirements on apps that embed alternative browser engines, including requiring apps to be updated within 15 business days of a browser engine update and requiring the app to only be available in the EU.
As a result, I would expect Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Opera to ship their own browser engines on iOS but am doubtful that many other apps will embed Chromium/Gecko with the possible exception of apps that only operate in the EU.
You don't need custom versions for Chrome for tracking. Plenty of apps force links to open in-app, inject JS and then you have to make a few additional taps to get it to open in untampered Safari
Apples rules make it clear you can't bundle Chrome. Your alternate browser has to be fundamentally a browser, not something else that happens to have a browser as an extra feature
Can’t speak for other Fanboys™ but I have to help my in-laws with their Pixels weekly, which also happens to coincide with the one time a week I want to blow my brains out.
Luckily I’m extremely close to having them inducted into the fruit cult just by having them play around on my dev iPhone when I’m not working.
So fingers crossed it happens before get pushed over the edge.
As an aside: what kind of OS allows apps to create read-only contacts in the Contacts app, ffs…
My comment will seem a bit rude, but do all of you guys just have idiots for inlaws? My parents are in their 70s now and are by no stretch of the imagination technical in any way, yet I've literally never had to help untangle them like I see people talk about here constantly. Hell, my 97 year old grandpa uses his ancient android phone just fine, what on earth are people doing out there?
Firefox mobile extensions on mobile was basically a graveyard during their mobile overhaul. But it sounds like they are slowly making it easier to support mobile extensions with a metaphorical (or maybe literal) push of a button.
> actually choose a different browser, or are you choosing a different WebKit wrapper
I understand the "WebKit wrapper" for iOS criticism and do want different rendering engines available (e.g. Firefox's) and yet...
The worse thing about Firefox for iOS is the wrapper part, not the lack of rendering engine choice part. The UI of Firefox on iOS is inconsistent and buggy, and syncing doesn't sync well, etc. I doubt using FF's own rendering engine instead of WebKit would help the situation, as it'd drain engineering resources away from making the "wrapper" more usable.
I've always used Firefox, on Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, everywhere I can, but I find myself using it less and less on iOS... and it's not because of the rendering engine!
But since this change for the DMA will allow FF to use its own rendering engine (in the EU), hopefully maybe it'll reenergize the development of FF and improve the "wrapper" part more - even for non EU users!
Writing this on FF for iOS, the biggest reason I want to use the Firefox engine is for Firefox extensions. WebKit doesn't support extensions except the App Store ones in Safari, I want to use traditional extensions from AMO. Just let me use uBlock on my phone!
I do agree, the Firefox iOS UI is clunky, but I find it useful for stuff where I want to sync passwords or tabs. I use Safari for browsing the web casually because it's nicer, and the feature of swiping between tabs is so convenient.
Just to correct the common misconception. It is browser vendors that need to build web extension API support on top of WebKit. Orion browser [1] did this both for macOS and iOS . The support is still in beta and improving with each new release. iOS support remains limited to what is possible to achieve with a JS wrapper. Nothing prevents Firefox from doing the same and offer at least partial web extension support on iOS.
WebKit does support the same extension API as Firefox - it’s an open standard. How you install them, bundled in a native app from the App Store, is the annoying clunky part.
WebKit does not support blocking Web Request, which is what uBlock Origin uses (See compatibility matrix at the bottom of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...)
In fact, it is all about blocking Web Request, not say, Manifest V2 vs Manifest V3 (Firefox supports MV3 but adds blocking Web Request support.)
> Apple is giving app developers in the EU access to NFC and allowing for alternative browser engines, so WebKit will not be required for third-party browser apps. Apps will be able to offer NFC payments without using Apple Pay or the Wallet app through Host Card Emulation. Apps can also access field detect, and a default app can be set to activate when an iPhone is placed near a terminal.
Although this only changes things for us developers. Regular users really don’t care what browser is running the web pages they’re looking at, everyone who downloads chrome does so to get their synced bookmarks and history.
> Regular users really don’t care what browser is running the web pages they’re looking at, everyone who downloads chrome does so to get their synced bookmarks and history.
This is ahistorical. Regular users switched to Firefox and Chrome in droves from IE. And it wasn’t to sync their bookmarks. It was because they provided a much better experience.
If Blink or Gecko are able to provide a better experience than WebKit on iOS that would certainly prompt many users to switch to browsers using those engines.
Seems unlikely given that out in the free world we’ve seen a consolidation around Chromium. The web is mature enough at this point that the choice of browser engine mostly isn’t a differentiating factor.
You're missing the point. People can feel that a twin turbo inline 6 drives much smoother and more powerfully than a 1.3L 4 banger even if they don't know the first thing about what's under the bonnet. The engine changes the entire experience.
And most people don't care at all what's under the bonnet.
They want something that reliably gets them from A to B and back, with occasional side trips to C, D and E. They want something that does that in a way that matches their personal style. They want something that isn't going to cost them an arm and a leg to run.
Forty, fifty, and sixty years ago people cared a lot more. Starting really in the mid-90s, that changed. Nowadays, there are probably as many gearheads as there were decades ago, but as a population they represent a smaller percentage. And there's a tiny percentage of people who care only so that they can mod their engines to run less efficiently so they can pwn the libz.
Inasmuch as people do care about the 1.3 4 banger — they choose it because it generally runs more reliably over time with fewer litres burned per 100km.
I think you're wrong: people who buy a shitty second-hand car to go to work and have little money to spare on it: indeed, really 0 interest in the car as long as it runs long enough to generate profit to break even.
But if you are going to spend 10k$+ on a car, then you start caring, A LOT. I've seen the change from when I was a student willing to take any crap on wheel, vs when I had some money to burn on a car and I spent weeks looking at everything to end up buying a 10k$ 20yo Porsche 911 :D See, I didn't even look at the fuel cost: only the engine perf per dollars. And it cost me an arm and a leg to run, in Hong Kong where the fuel cost is the highest in the world !
People don't work as rational machines balancing perfectly cost and profit in a constant manner over time. It's more a constraint compromise game with a repressed desire for luxury that seem to drive us: you'll buy what you can afford and within those boundaries you will choose comfort and design over economic optimization. Like when people buy an iphone, evidently they didn't look at all about cost for performance and choose something economically suboptimal but luxurious.
Accept it and you'll start liking them more I think.
I said: “They want something that reliably gets them from A to B and back, with occasional side trips to C, D and E. They want something that does that in a way that matches their personal style. They want something that isn't going to cost them an arm and a leg to run.”
I did indicate that personal style comes into it, and I don't think that it's not an emotional decision. But there's a reason that Camry, Corolla, and Accord show up in bestselling car lists every year (and similar models elsewhere in the world), and it has nothing to do with "caring about what's under the bonnet".
There is a subset of people who do care about the engine, but they don't do so because they actually know a damned thing about how the engine runs, but because a big engine makes them feel powerful in their oversized pickemup trucks that never carry a load in the bed.
Your assertion that people who buy an iPhone aren't looking at cost for performance is partially correct, but only insofar as most (I mean > 99% of people including people in tech—including myself) wouldn't be able to objectively measure phone performance worth a damn. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who have switched from android devices to iPhones because they see their friends holding onto the same iPhones for years without complaints, yet they can't see the benefit of holding onto their android phones and realize that they may be spending a bit more up front, but are getting more possible useful years of phone updates than had been available in Android until promises made (and several years to see if they are kept) just few months ago.
Yes, I also know people who are enamoured of their Android devices and have their own smugness about what they think that they've gotten over the "sheeple" who buy Apple devices, but most people really don't give a shit about the phone operating system any more than they do about whether the engine in their car is 3, 4 or 6 cylinders (people who by v8s are intentionally buying a v8) or whether it happens to just be a family of hamsters running around underneath—as long as it runs.
If you do not see those statements as complementary, that is on you, not on me.
Most people who buy cars don't actually give a shit how many cylinders, spark plug configuration, or hamsters are involved in the engine. They want to know that it will work and not cost them too much in fuel, maintenance, insurance, and repairs. They want it to "look good" for their sense of style, and they want it to be a "safe" car.
In order, it's usually price, style, then fuel efficiency (not engine, but whole car fuel efficiency), insurance cost, and everything else. For some people, it ends up being style, price, then everything else.
i still think the claim regular car users don't really care about the engine specs holds true ... you'd be hard pressed if you can tell the difference between an inline 4 and v6 these days tho (apart from how many more times you are hitting the gas station; some inline 4s even perform better than v6s)
That's exactly what I predicted for NFC when Apple announced Apple Pay. Apple kept developers from using any of the NFC APIs until they were ready to roll out Apple Pay, and then only allowed non-payment NFC after that. It gave them 10 years to establish Apple Pay.
Being the system default was obviously very convenient for customers and there would be a very high bar for any other payment app to compete, but Apple wanted to make absolutely sure there was no possible competition.
> Regular users really don’t care what browser is running the web pages they’re looking at, everyone who downloads chrome does so to get their synced bookmarks and history.
Well first version it will be different WebKit wrappers, as they are the only option available on iOS right now.
But they simultaneously open the door to other browser engines, so I imagine Firefox at least will release their app with a new browser engine down the line.
It does, but on closer reading looks restricted to EU, they certainly aren’t suggesting a , say, gecko based browser could be published globally outside the EU.
"New frameworks and APIs for alternative browser engines — enabling developers to use browser engines, other than WebKit, for browser apps and apps with in-app browsing experiences."
No idea where they got that stat from because it's not supported by anything they've linked to.
The article attributes the stat to "a study by Business Insider" but the reference links to an article in The Atlantic which: A) doesn't support the claim and B) is mostly dedicated to debunking it.
He probably wrote the entire article based on a certain conception, and then pulled in statistics that supported it without looking too closely at where they came from.
I don't even need to dig into the article to know it's bullshit. SFH are not a good investment when you're trying lease them out at scale. You don't get economies of scale which an apartment has.
Also no homes cashflow, the cap-rates are absurdly low, no credible institutional investor will buy them to rent out, let alone 40% of sale volume levels of purchases.
OP is just promoting their blog spam with zero research.
I much prefer the handheld scanner method, in which you scan while you shop. This used to be more widespread in the UK before self checkout took over. I seem to remember it being launched in the late 2000s?
Advantages:
1) Your scanning labor is spread out across your entire visit
2) No need to unload and bag everything at the end
3) You can see a running price total
Is that last point the reason why supermarkets moved away from them? Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime?
>Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime?
I’ve seen lots of technological progress in my day, but nothing towards making this process more efficient in-store.
In a way, doing groceries is one of my few remaining financial uncertainties. Depending on meal plan and the status of my pantry it could be plus/minus $50 or $100
The basic technique for rendering gaussian splats is kryptonite for this architecture, essentially implementing every worse practice for rendering on a mobile GPU:
* Tons of overdraw (overlapping splats)
* Tons of alpha blending
* Millions of splats in the distance generate a lot of tiny triangles resolving to a single pixel
* Long thin splats in the foreground generate triangles that cover multiple tiles
These are all the ingredients you need to bring a mobile GPU to its knees! Any desktop GPU (including most laptops) will be far less sensitive to these issues, even if it's not very powerful. It's a fundamental issue of architecture rather than one of raw FLOPs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_rendering