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>that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a good thing for them.

I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system. So in the long run wine/proton/mono will implement windows features on linux in an optional/replaceable/modular way in user-space while keeping backwards compatibility for older windows software, while windows is forced to implement (and distribute these features) with their OS and has to sacrifice backwards compatibility if they want to simply their OS.

I would say that the adoption of wine/proton helps the linux ecosystem a lot more because there wasn't a standard executable format for linux beforehand (static? tarball of program and dynamic libraries? .deb file? AppImage? Flatpak? Higher-level language like java?). How do you reliably link to libraries like mesa or even glibc? Now there is a solution: just distribute a windows program and test it to confirm it works in wine/proton. Perhaps it is better for DirectX adoption, but it seems like Vulkan/OpenGL/WebGPU are still superior in terms of cross-compatibility, regardless if you use wine or not.


> there wasn't a standard executable format for linux beforehand (static? tarball of program and dynamic libraries? .deb file? AppImage? Flatpak? Higher-level language like java?).

By this logic there wasn't a standard executable format for Windows, either (static? zip archive of program and dynamic libraries? .msi file? installer program? UWP? higher-level language like C#?).


Windows NT (2000, XP, etc) used to include an emulator allowing to run DOS apps and win16 apps. I don't see why running older / obsoleted win32 APIs through an emulation layer won't be a good approach. Maybe even by adopting and running Wine.


> I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system.

Sometimes running old software atop Wine on Windows is the easiest - or even only - option to have said old software work on new Windows.


I've been using an antimalware system which has been highly successful at blocking all sorts of malware. It's where I don't run invasive closed source programs on my computers and give them access to all my shit, and I don't just give my credentials and money to anyone that asks. In other words, basic computer practices from decades ago.

I know that this system may be unattainable for some, namely children, the elderly and the intellectually disabled. But maybe we shouldn't be designing general purpose computers around the lowest common denominators of society, for the same reason you wouldn't design a car for the legally blind or a book for the illiterate.

The nature of smartphones and the internet has some pretty large consequences for the economy, politics, war, and global surveilance. I understand that some people don't know how to manage their own computer, but if you really think everyone's computers should be controlled by dictators and buerocrats maybe you should just go live in a third world country instead.


If the concept here is choice, then why not force apple to clearly advertise that side loading and 3rd party apps stores are not available. The same way that Samsung and Huawei promote theirs?

Then the consumer can make that decision for themselves.

Your position here seems to be that consumers are too dumb to make that decision, but clever enough to fend off sophisticated malware attacks. You are even so gracious to note that perhaps this might be out of reach for ordinary users (well done you! you nearly got there)

If only there was a large and popular platform of devices with side-loading and 3rd party app stores available for us to already see the consequences of what this change does to malware rates. Let's call this hypothetical platform "Android", and then a well respected security report, say by Nokia, could include statistics about this "Android" malware.

Well, you're in luck dear friend! Actual security experts state: "most smartphone malware is distributed as trojanized applications and since Android users can load application from just about anywhere, it’s much easier to trick them into installing applications that are infected with malware". (worth stating twice because I don't think it sunk in the first time.)

So real security experts are advising the opposite approach from you, funny that.

As for a 3rd world country, maybe you should run one since you have the ego of a dictator.


Don't bother, Apple fanboys are delusional. They would willingly slave themselves for the Apple religion. And they generally are extremely dishonest, which is why they want "protection". It easy to see wrong doing everywhere when yourself are operating in a bad way most of the time.

I think somehow Apple found a way to group both limited intellects and intellectually dishonest. This way the second group can pry on the first one and they seem very happy about that.

If you were to listen to them, every windows PC is infested with malware, yet even my grandma that is over 80 years old operates a windows PC without much trouble. She doesn't install nonsense and ask competent people about stuff. Which is exactly the kind of relation Apple wants to steal. So they can charge a lot of money for it, making people dependent so they are fragile. And when they have no other choice anymore, charge as much as you can. Classic sociopath behavior...


This is about as naive as your other posts.

If you need to strawman the opposing point of discussion. Then you don't have an argument, instead you're the fanatic.


You are the one defending the indefensible behavior of a trillion-dollar corporation but I'm the fanatic. I don't need to strawman; you are the one misrepresenting the malware situation in Android. You are also the one misrepresenting people requesting that a corporation let them do what they wish with a device they own. If anything, you are the strawman master.

On top of the strawman nonsense, you attack me as naive. You said the previous poster he had the ego of a dictator. If there is someone who needs to rely on something else than reasonable argument (personal attacks) that's clearly you. It's rather funny because you illustrate exactly the point I alluded to before: intellectual dishonesty.


I don't think it's a fair comparison because in the PC market the bootloaders are (usually) unlocked and the firmware (usually) operates via an open standard like UEFI or BIOS... whereas in the smartphone market open bootloaders and firmware are the exception.


> for a time, FTX was considered the most trusted exchange in crypto.

citation needed


Yeah.. I remember hearing from some other big HFT firms who wouldn't touch FTX (yet were active on other crypto exchanges). They didn't elaborate on why, but we had our own concerns about their preferential treatment of Alameda's orders.


Not sure what kind of citation you're looking for, but just search for HN threads mentioning FTX before the collapse, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31738029

I can't recount how many times I've read something along the lines of "FTX is more trustable/better insured/less risky" on HN. And I don't even blame anyone, because the fake numbers did look impressive. Built by people with a trading background and backed by famous VCs. It was also the largest exchange by volume for a while. They had enough money to rescue all the "illiquid" (read: scam) projects. And of course, effective altruism. I never significantly invested in crypto but I would've bought the lie, too.

Knowing what we know now of course it seems like an obvious fraud, and admittedly there are skeptics on any FTX thread (but so were there about any crypto exchange), but the comments who actually foresaw what happened (instead of just referring to a single SBF interview) did either not get traction or are partly even greyed out.

And if you ask people now, you have selection bias. Everyone who was even just a tiny bit distrusting will blow it out of proportion, and those who always believed it was legitimate will stay silent.

> It’s been pretty interesting watching YC backed Coinbase get absolutely crushed by FTX, which has a higher % of crypto trading volume despite having less than 10% of the headcount. [...] FTX was founded by traders which is valuable when the ultimate purpose of the crypto industry is to separate uninformed people from their money.

> FTX is interested in being a real business. I think a lot of people the past several years have failed to try to become a real sustainable business, and instead have been pawns in Benchmark's and Tiger Global's schemes to flip companies into the S&P or into a F500 acquisition.

> FTX people clearly know a lot more about market making and how exchanges work. Makes coinbase look like amateurs.


Gizmodo: We made it up for the click/ragebait.

I do recall earlier this year that SVB was the most trusted bank for these VCs and the startups in Silicon Valley for decades and was one of the biggest bank failures since 2008.

Had the government not intervened (and bailed them out), the entire VCs and startups with their deposits would have been wiped out clean.


Yeah really, nobody I know trusted FTX at all.


I think OpenGL is important as a simple, "universal" legacy standard. As long as it's supported (with reasonable performance), through something like Zink it's fine.

As someone who is new to graphics programming, the pervasiveness of OpenGLES3/WebGL2 is really great. It's a single relatively-simple standard that is almost everywhere.


Desktop OpenGL isn't simple, it's hard to use and even harder to debug, and it doesn't have reasonable performance unless you know which APIs are mysteriously slow.

WebGL is covering up a lot of stuff for you, but it's better to find/create a modern "simple" API on top of a modern rendering API if you want one.


Deprecate OpenGL i.e. let it be recreated on top of Vulkan in user code.


have you looked at the vulkan scenegraph thing?


>mainly because android is multiplatform and rust, by it's nature, is only available for what it's built for

Android is one platform: android. I thought rust worked across multiple operating systems.

>Rust doesn't have a GC so it'd (likely) have a lower memory consumption and could possibly be lighter on the CPU.

So what? I have never used G.C.

>Native compilation helps mainly with startup time and memory consumption. It's not exactly great for runtime performance as it takes away some key optimizations.

That is fair I suppose

I think the main benefit of rust/c++/ndk on android is that I can just port desktop programs and I don't have to learn android's java/kotlin and sdk.


> Android is one platform: android. I thought rust worked across multiple operating systems.

Operating systems, not architectures. You'd have to cross-compile your application 4 times if you want to support all arms and x86s.

> I think the main benefit of rust/c++/ndk on android is that I can just port desktop programs and I don't have to learn android's java/kotlin and sdk.

It's not "just" port desktop programs. Android doesn't even use glibc.


With respect to grapheneOS on samsung, I don't think it's about security. It's about openness, there is already samsung knox (or whatever it is called, samsung dex?) so clearly they know how to make a secure enclave it's just that samsung wants to keep their stuff proprietary.

In general samsung and others (huawei, etc.) are trying to get a grip on android, and open-source seems to oppose that.

I don't know what motivates google to lean in so hard with open-source ( maybe trying to prevent fragmentation or avoid future antitrust or set a "clean" example standard for stock android with their pixel brand ), but we do currently enjoy its fruits.


You're right about that. Google seems to be a lot more open with its hardware compared to other manufacturers. This attitude apparently even extends towards their laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about Google.


Why does no one ever consider Sony? They let you unlock the bootloader and the hardware is excellent.


I stopped when they started permanently breaking camera procesing on bootloader unlock.


I thought they stopped doing that in 2019?


It seems their chipset doesn't have the security features required by the GrapheneOS project such as hardware resistance to brute force attacks.


Bare minimum support horizon (no, a self-compile repo doesn't count) combined with small but numerous hardware demerits:

flashlight, overheating, extremely slippery which mandates a case, small chance of screen lines, no personal need for SD, weird camera choices e.g. focal length of telephoto, notification LED, waterproof but unusable in the rain, I think one vendor sells a screen protector that isn't total garbage, no personal need for Qi charging, basic photography mode has always been awful, antenna/battery/amp/side sense/night mode is nothing special, previous gen microphone config had echo and/or gain problems on Signal calls, and the list goes on and on...

Biggest selling point: photography, right? Sony continues to develop amazing hardware and then takes the most leisurely and conservative approach toward camera firmware/software. Both auto modes on an a6000 are head-and-shoulders above this year's Xperia auto mode, despite being nearly a decade older. The fanboys continue to defend manual mode photography as if every serious picture taker wants to dial in focus, white balance, shutter speed, etc. all on a touchscreen while their toddler hangs from a branch for his/her first time; as if every photo should go straight into Lightroom Mobile before getting sent to grandma or the friend group or onto social media.

Beyond that, the update schedule is suboptimal (Hello, Pro-I!?) and so fast-paced, you're always hoping the next generation or surprise mid-year model fixes most of the details you dislike.

The 5 V comes out and totally eliminates the telephoto which you loved and frequently used. Not only that, everyone compares it to the 5 IV (60 mm) when Gen. II had a 70 mm shooter and Gen. III had a 70--105 mm (which, as most non-prime lenses, was quite soft at the longer range). "You get literally the same detail because 52 MP!" Sure, dude. Now explain why every comparison review of the 5 V telephoto has significantly less detail than even a lowly 3x zoom, even factoring in how 1/9th of 52 is 5.8 MP? (Notebookcheck.net supposedly lets you downscale its comparisons to 2 MP and 4 MP, and the closest-to-Xperia-quality but still better shot belongs to the 3x Galaxy S23.)

You remember being disappointed when the 1 V bundle was WH-1000XM5 and you already owned well-worn WH-1000XM3s. You're even more disappointed when the new 5 bundles inferior cans rather than buds or something wired from Sony's Pro Audio division. The 5 price is always the same as the 1 price when the 5 drops in September, so you wonder why not get the 1, which is superior in nearly every way?

Oh, right, because you know it only gets one more OS upgrade (Material You: Yuck!) and you probably won't get whatever new APK comes standard in the next gen's Xperia 1, plus you've already missed your chance to order and resell the bundled headphones, so the now-300-off price of the 1 is just the same that you would've paid by selling the bundle plus a little depreciation.

Also, where the hell IS this Pro-I successor? Is _that_ going to have a real telephoto and less of Xperia 5's wacky design changes and 4 to 7 years of software support and a screen bright enough to use as a flashlight because, let's face it, Sony will close its mobile division before letting its users put more current through the rear LED. Plus, who knows, maybe next year they finally release crimson or that same sweet shade of orange that sits at the base of their true flagship full-frame mirrorless??

-----

Cost, within reason, is not an issue for me. I would get another Xperia---any model---if it ticked most boxes. My main reason for ignoring Sony as a serious contender? Sony continues to nerf two peripherals or APKs for every one feature they improve, and then I continue to wait for actual improvement while my Zenfone 8 and a6400 slowly age. Every few months, I wonder what phone I would get if I needed a replacement today, and Xperia drops further down the list.


Same, in fact it's the reason I buy and continue to buy their products. I continually hope that doesn't change


I have had a pretty similarly bad experience repairing my pixel 4a the other month. Purchased a new screen and kit from ifixit for 1/3 the cost of buying a new phone, even had to get a heat gun to unglue the old screen, and guess what? she dies a week later anyways due to some other issue.

The problem with all these phones is that they're kind of built to be disposable. They're just glued together plastic. And even if you can repair the phone or it survives 5 years or so, the vendor is just going to stop supporting the chipset anyways.

Just got a fairphone 4, optimistic but the build quality is shit and they're already rolling out a fairphone 5 now... whatever, I use AOSP. I can't stand samsung anyways with all the crapware they put on stock android.


I can't speak for stock android, but I can say AOSP (GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, lineageOS and such) is a much better experience than iOS.

The free software ecosystem is nice cause the mobile apps are way more functional. You can do almost anything you can do on your laptop. Syncthing, K-9 mail, newpipe, firefox (with ublock), orbot, libretorrent, etc. are a few pretty good reasons to use AOSP.

its kind of stylish too. google put out this "material you" thing which basically makes it so the whole OS uses the same color pallete.

The only thing I miss about my iphone was that it was nice and small and could be used in one hand.

Sorry to hear about your shadowban, it's annoying.


What kind of websites? You mean like social media sites that are obfuscated to prevent scraping? I suppose, it would have to be quite reliable.

I don't know how relevant this is, but I was thinking that you could probably use some sort of AI to enhance OCR and convert written documents into some sort of semantic form like HTML or Latex. That would allow you to use books to scrape information, and written books still have a lot of untapped knowledge.

It seems like the demand for web scraping and such is to create datasets for ML training. And now you are using AI for scraping. So it is sort of a self-improving cycle


Not specifically social media sites, getting through prevention would be difficult and there are already a lot of existing companies working on scraping popular social media sites.

Interesting idea, we're definitely looking into coupling OCR and LLMs today but not for that particular case. I think raw language models with a good workflow are typically good enough to extract structured data from things like books

ML training is definitely one area we can see this being useful. General data aggregation across a large industry (clothing, retail, etc) is something we want to look into. Also RPA style workflows involving multi-click actions across a variety of sites


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