"The ZEN77 Dimmer is recommended for 3-way and 4-way installations since you won't need to rewire your other switches in the set-up, you can simply replace the main switch with direct connection to power with the ZEN77 dimmer.
This model can control up to 100 Watts of LED bulbs but we don't recommend using it in installations with chandeliers or large groups of lights over 6 bulbs.
Version 1.0 and 2.0 of the ZEN77 (700 series Z-Wave chip) were MOSFET dimmers so if your bulbs work better with trailing-edge (or reverse-phase) drivers, those versions of the model worked best.
Version 3.0 of the ZEN77 (700 series Z-Wave chip) is now a TRIAC dimmer so if your bulbs work better with leading-edge drivers, this model will work better.
The 800 series version of the ZEN77 is also a TRIAC dimmer.
Why We Changed to all TRIAC: We found that newer LED bulbs dimmed better with TRIAC dimmers, and considering limited availability for MOSFETS, we decided to transfer the ZEN77 model to TRIAC as well."
In the past (with h265 / h264 at least), hardware encoding always ended up with visibly worse quality (and often even bigger file sizes) compared to a software encoder like x264/x265.
Do you happen to know if that's still the case?
(I guess for use-cases such as live streaming it doesn't matter that much, but for video that ends up in some archive, it's probably less acceptable)
That's usually the case as the hardware encoders tend to make tradeoffs in the direction of lower transistor count / faster frame processing while software encoders have the luxury of going for higher quality.
Yes, a YouTuber named EposVox released a video on AV1 hardware encoding when the first Intel dGPUs with support for it released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctbTTRoqZsM
Later on in the video, there are some graphs comparing Intel's AV1 encoder to SVT-AV1 at different speed presets. Even one of the faster presets (9) will comfortably stay above AV1 quality according to VMAF, and if you don't need real-time speeds you can lower the preset to get further ahead of the hardware encoder. (BTW: That video is >1 year old now, and SVT-AV1 had some significant updates in the meantime too. So the software side is probably looking better now.)
It's around 5% (maybe 10%?) larger file sizes for same visual quality at the moment. For archival I think that's fine, as storage is cheap, it can still be a problem when you pay for outbound bandwidth to users.
Last I talked to people about Apple's internal tooling, it was still pretty fragmented between different organizations.
I was told about e.g. multiple internal CI/build systems because one org didn't want to rely on the other, so they both built their own little software stacks.
That's a bit different than what I've heard from meta/google/amazon who seem to be more open to running centralized internal services
This was rather a long time ago now so I wouldn't be surprised if things have changed since then, though having never worked at Amazon I wouldn't know one way or the other.
I think one of the problems with large parts of academia is that the system thrives by finding flaws within things other people have created.
Criticism is certainly helpful and necessary for advancing the state of the art, but without something to balance it, it turns into a pretty bleak place to work. I guess this is one example that feels more like a personal vendetta than a constructive criticism of the work.
> Some companies hire dedicated tech people whose only job is to be oncall, handle alerts, and improve the oncall infrastructure. This role is called ‘DevOps Engineer’ at some companies, SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) at others, and may also be called ‘Operations Engineer.’
Any company that I've seen put SRE/"DevOps"/... as the sole primary on-call rotation basically just created a glorified operations team.
Unless you have shared pain for botched releases, you will never get rid of these problems.
One thing that this article is also kinda missing is the base compensation. Some companies (e.g. FB) are in the top 90th percentile or so of the industry but then don't pay on-call compensation..
But that means that in one case you make 200k base, have an on-call and don't get any extra on-call money.
In the other case you make 140k base, have an on-call and get 10k extra on-call money.
Ultimately you end up doing the same work but one of them gets paid less.
“7. “It’s part of the job for all software engineers and not paid additional.”
This approach is common at many companies. A few which stand out:
Companies paying top of the market. Places which sit in the top tier of the trimodal nature of salaries usually pay far more without compensating for oncall, than lower-tier companies with very generous oncall compensation do.
Big Tech. Most of Big Tech don't pay for oncall with cash compensation. Google is the only exception.”
Zooz (popular zwave manufacturer) has some interesting tidbits on their homepage.
https://www.support.getzooz.com/kb/article/1103-zen72-vs-zen...
"The ZEN77 Dimmer is recommended for 3-way and 4-way installations since you won't need to rewire your other switches in the set-up, you can simply replace the main switch with direct connection to power with the ZEN77 dimmer.
This model can control up to 100 Watts of LED bulbs but we don't recommend using it in installations with chandeliers or large groups of lights over 6 bulbs. Version 1.0 and 2.0 of the ZEN77 (700 series Z-Wave chip) were MOSFET dimmers so if your bulbs work better with trailing-edge (or reverse-phase) drivers, those versions of the model worked best. Version 3.0 of the ZEN77 (700 series Z-Wave chip) is now a TRIAC dimmer so if your bulbs work better with leading-edge drivers, this model will work better. The 800 series version of the ZEN77 is also a TRIAC dimmer. Why We Changed to all TRIAC: We found that newer LED bulbs dimmed better with TRIAC dimmers, and considering limited availability for MOSFETS, we decided to transfer the ZEN77 model to TRIAC as well."