I don't know how scientifically valid this is (I hope very) but when a friend told me my USB hub / switcher would be introducing a lot of input lag, I bought a USB to eth adaptor and did a few thousand pings to the router, from direct to mobo and then from via the switcher. Unsurprisingly, there was no measurable latency (I had to use a 3P tool because Windows wouldn't go lower than ms by default).
I am aware that admitting to using Windows in these hallowed halls is a terrible sin, but the anecdote was too relevant to pass up and that's an important detail for anybody looking to repro.
So, the complaints against USB coming from PS/2 were around the switch from pushing inputs to polling with a relatively low rate on vastly slower CPUs. Nowadays CPUs are much faster and parallel; and the polling rates are in the 1-8 kHz as opposed to 100-400Hz.
I don't see any pro gamers carrying in any kind of PS/2 device, they even moved to wireless so the differences are likely meaningless these days.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
> Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
I think half the people who think AI is incredibly dumb and can't understand why anyone is using it is because they're using the free samples. This whole thing is so horribly expensive that they lose money even on people who pay therefore the free samples are necessarily as minimal as they can get away with.
The free samples worked famously initially to get people to try it initially, though.
But whenever that free Gemini text pops up in my search, I know why people think it's stupid. But that's not the experience I have with paid options.
Thank you. Making bank means I will have to do something I never did - make a sale or two. I am an engineer and trying founder for more than a decade. Always struggled to keep things in balance.
Things changed dramatically in the last few months. I can enjoy my super cheap nomad life of $200 / month while I build and market all my ideas, without working over 40 hours a week.
I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
That would have been a good excuse/explanation in the days before Chrome existed. But since Chrome is THE browser, users have a hard time escaping Google.
So, GP is right.
Windows is still the most popular desktop / laptop OS, and while it might come with a Chromium browser it defaults to Bing. Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it's an obscenely profitable money making machine. But a lot of people seek it out because it's a functional product that (at least for me) is free and still outperforms the competition.
I don't want to like Google, but I'm not going to pretend the product sucks just because I'm unhappy with the business model and the decline in quality.
I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic.
I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64.
I don't understand the Chrome reality distortion field.
I think that's a slightly orthogonal issue - I'm talking Google Search vs other search providers. I doubt there's a significant gap between Chrome and Chromium.
> Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
Did you miss the part where Google would directly advertise and ask if you wanted to use Chrome instead on Google's search page? Or how it would be bundled with every installer under the sun? Chrome isn't the most popular browser because we collectively decided it's the best. It's because they leveraged their position as the world's search engine and advertiser.
I've worked with tons of your average PC user. They don't even know what a browser is or what a search engine is. If Google asks them if they want to install Chrome, they will always answer yes because why not. It's Google.
Bing on windows does the exact same thing. M$ and Google have roughly equivalent resources and audience reach to push their product. Google still comes out on top because via both reputation and average use case it's quality is better than bings.
This is not likely to change unless OpenAI finds a way break the monopoly. It's the only currently existing search that can claim to be better than Google. Which is why Google is pushing Gemini so hard.
That one visual is far better than the original article, which blithers about this change without showing it.
It's not even clear how that package is used. Do you invert it and snap open the brown plastic flap, or what? Was that just concept art, or did they actually sell that.
What they seem to be selling now is a minor mod to the 19th century design.[1]
Agree that the picture is worth a 1000 words, but per kingkongjaffa, one is a squeezy bottle while the other is a robust tin.
My dad used to have dozens of the tins in his shed, each holding a collection of screws, washers, resistors, capacitors, bolts etc 'that will come in useful one day'. I still can't see the tins without thinking of his re-use collections. That's my biggest gripe with the new container: it's a single-use throw-away plastic thing. The traditionalist press in the UK is also upset by the new image: stylised logo, compared with a 'proper' picture of a sleepy lion surrounded by bees.
Haha, I think every household in the UK had these tins filled with screws :D
The tins keep the old branding, for now.
Only the squeezies get the new branding.
I don't get that they went from a serif to a lifeless san-serif font on a vintage brand like Lyle's, though. It loses a lot of soul with that transition and wasn't necessary.
Its a plastic squeezy bottle, the brown cap has a lid section that opens and theres a hole membrane, you squeeze the side and this pushes the contents through the membrane.
If there was ever a good rebranding that stays true to history it's this one. A dead lion swarming with insects isn't the most appetizing thing. A lion with a bee reminds of the story in a tasteful way. They could have kept the biblical quote.
For me it completely loses what made the original special, specifically that it wasn't appetizing. The juxtaposition was delightful and I would often buy jars of it for a laugh. Now it"s just another sweet syrup among many.
It would be possible to plug an LLM [1] into the stream history and be able to directly type the ideas you cited and get instant results.
> If you had this data at scale
That was the "raison d'etre" of last.fm. Alas, it is not popular anymore (=smaller scale)
> favourite songs from people who enjoy similar niches to you
In last.fm, you can go to an artist's listener page [2], pick a user who "listens to Televators a lot", export their most-listened/loved tracks to Spotify, filter them by genre, and try them out :). You could also go to a track page [3], pick a user who commented on it, and do the same.
Google used to be good at data liberation, are you sure you can't get your streaming history somewhere?
If they don't have it, you can do what I did to Spotify many years ago, in annoyance after they closed a request for shared listening history across their apps: I GDPR'd them. See, if you store my listening history at all, sharing it back with me is not optional.
So that's why I know what their Kafka layout looks like. Or what it looked like in 2018 anyway. I like to hope I hastened their implementation of giving users access to their data slightly.
I am aware that admitting to using Windows in these hallowed halls is a terrible sin, but the anecdote was too relevant to pass up and that's an important detail for anybody looking to repro.
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