I had to use Google to work out how to crop to a rectangular selection on affinity 2. Not sure about affinity 3. I was also really unhappy with the ‘personas’ UI pattern which locks away different photo editing tools into whole parallel universe user interfaces. As a new user it just looked like those features were missing and I had to Google again. It’s not hard to learn but my first impression of the software was googling to work out how to do things that are obvious in any other image editor. Maybe it’s better in affinity 3?

I’m already an fl studio user, I was more interested in an audio editing program instead of a daw

A few years ago I replaced Photoshop with Affinity. Affinity’s user interface is pretty awful, even compared to Photoshop, but it does at least run a bit better. A few years ago I switched from premiere pro to da Vinci resolve, and though resolve has a bit of a learning curve, overall I think it’s better than premiere - it’s definitely faster and crashes a lot less.

I’m hoping that audacity 4 is a good enough audio editor to replace audition - we’ll see, audition is actually pretty good imo but I’d accept a slight downgrade if it means I can get away from Adobe entirely.

At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.

The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.

The matrix sequels definitely muddle the pacing and characters, and they struggle to fill the void left by the central mystery of the first film, but the philosophising and action are both as good or better than the first film.

Speed racer has already been critically reevaluated so I guess my wachowski hot take is that Jupiter Ascending is due. It’s idiotic but it’s a sweaty blast of pure cinema.

• machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
• open source models will catch up with commercial ones
• the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
• The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
• Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
• Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
• Google images will never fully recover

my mum bought a fairphone 3 about 5 years ago and is extremely happy with it, so far she’s gone through one usb-c port and one battery. it looks and feels exactly like a normal phone but it pops open with just 4 screws. helping her fix it has taught me that phone manufacturers could make repairable phones easily and they all just choose not to

people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence

I looked in stoat’s issue tracker and there is an issue asking for video chat which is 5 years old and still open. Safe to say it’s a dead project.

tailwind is a product born out of complete ignorance for the fundamental technologies that underlay the web and why they exist the way they do. I hope tailwind’s decline encourages people to learn the fundamentals

when capcom were working with inti creates, they were reliably putting out good games at a time when indie developers weren’t - at least in that genre. now they put out one mediocre game every ten years.

the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.

I swapped to jellyfin and it was worth it but it was a lot of work. I had to pay for a static ip, set up my home network properly, and redo all my metadata. and months later I’m still finding missing or incorrectly tagged media. plus it doesn’t auto update. also I had to tell my friends and family to download a new app and make logins for them.

I’ve been using windows 11 for six months. when I hover over the taskbar, a phantom windows explorer window appears, but it’s not clickable and it disappears when I move the mouse away. my right hand monitor has a white box with a small ‘no’ symbol in it stuck in the middle of the screen. it doesn’t seem to derive from any running application and I cannot get rid of it. on the windows 10 install I ran before, the task manager totally stopped working, it just froze every time I opened it. I run Linux on all my other machines and stuff does go wrong, but it goes wrong in ways that make sense to me and which I can fix. on windows people just tell you to run sfc scannow and reinstall if it doesn’t work. that’s no way to live your life.

every programmer I’ve seen who says their code is self documenting writes dogshit code

I’m confused at all these comments saying podman is hard to use, I used it a bunch last year and found it a drop in replacement for docker (though I didn’t set it up).

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be