I'm a power user. I do FreeBSD kernel performance work for Netflix.
I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.
Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.
What gets me is the "play/pause" button behavior on a firestick remote. How many presses of play/pause would you think it takes to pause then resume playing? 2? Oh, no. Its 4! Pressing play/pause on the remote brings up the UI, like a mouse-over on some crappy web-player. You have to hit pause twice to actually pause the video. Then play again brings up the UI, then you have to hit it again to play again.
And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.
Another big issue with the fire tv is that it just refuses to work when there's no internet access. It just shows an error page you can't get out of. So I can't even play local content through VLC or Jellyfin.
they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion
I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?
The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.
what's sad is that it's not the company who is causing you to see that ad fill, few companies want you to be spammed back to back with the same ad. it's the low ad fill rate on the platform or target for you meaning the company is one of the few ads in the pool. I look at it as they're trying to support the type of content you watch but not many people are. or trying to sell to you specifically.
early on in streaming there'd be so little fill you'd be getting mad at say blizzard for spamming ads in a games related place but they were the only one buying ads and supporting those streams. it's not blizzards fault taht the rest of the advertisers didn't trust that channel and.
iOS doesn't give developers access to other apps' notifications, AFAIK. I'm not an iOS developer though - maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.
There's an API for notification mirroring, but only in the EU. As you can guess this is a "deprivileging Apple Watch" thing. So there's no generic "filter notifications" ability, it's ONLY for sending notifications to a connected non-Apple smartwatch.
Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
There is nothing magic about the congestion control in QUIC. It shares a lot with TCP BBR.
Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs. And most stacks are in userspace. So it is horrifically expensive in terms of watts/byte or cycles/byte sent for a CDN workload (something like 8x as a expensive the last time I looked), and its primarily used and advocated for by people who have metrics for latency, but not server side costs.
> Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs.
That's not quite true. You can offload QUIC connection steering just fine, as long as your NICs can do hardware encryption. It's actually _easier_ because you can never get a QUIC datagram split across multiple physical packets (barring the IP-level fragmentation).
The only real difference from TCP is the encryption for ACKs.
From a CDN perspective, whats missing is there is no kernel stack on FreeBSD / Linux, and no support for sendfile/sendpage and no support for segmentation offload entirely in hardware. So you can't just send an entire file (or a large range) and forget about it, like you can with TCP.
Some NICs, like Broadcom's newer ones, support crypto offloads, but this is not enough to be competitive with TCP / TLS. Especially since support for those offloads are not in any mainline kernel in Linux or BSD.
I've found you have to stay granular, i.e. to the model level rather than the brand level, or you end up with basically no consumer focused brand to pick from (or, even more likely, a misunderstanding that a given brand had no such problems because you didn't casually run across an example).
My desktop progression has been
1989: twm
1995: ctwm
2000: kde
2022: lxde
I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch
Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with
Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university
I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
There was a time when Siri would confirm before making a phone call. But now it will call anyone, including people I've literally never called (and rarely text), without confirmation. This seems like a bad outcome that is very easy to fix.
But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)
We need to separate three separate issues. I work with call centers and I always need to discuss all three
1. Voice to text transcriptions
2. Text to understanding
3. Adding capabilities where it can do something with #2.
The voice to text that Siri uses seems to be worse than when you are dictating using voice to text from the keyboard.
The latter gets close to 100% with my southern native English accent and does okay when I’m trying to speak Spanish. Siri messes up with English a lot more and it’s a lost cause when I try to speak Spanish.
I have a British accent and the speech-to-text from the keyboard is also terrible.
Honestly with these assistants I'd rather just type my query. Voice input is embarrassing and error-prone. The only place that voice input is useful is in the kitchen.
Counter anecdote: I also have a British accent, and while I find Siri as shit as everyone else in this thread the dictation built into the iOS keyboard very rarely has a problem with my accent. I'm fairly close to Received Pronunciation, which I'd guess is one of the easier British accents for Siri to understand.
(I do often get frustrated with dictation quirks that don't have anything to do with my accent, like it choosing the obviously wrong option when their are multiple words that sound the same, especially its insistence on assuming I'm saying the name of a contact rather than the common noun that sounds the same.)
I wish I could speak my unlock code so I didn't have to, you know, take my eyes off the road in order to play music or change my GPS destination or something like that.
I'm not saying that way to solve a problem, but I refuse to believe that it has to be as bad as it is. The worst part is that it's still better than the alternative of leaving the iOS ecosystem.
Apple is just so bizarre in general. I would say "nowadays" but I think they have always been like this. It took them how many decades to add a unit converter to the iPhone? And after all that time, they buried it in a menu in the Calculator app?
I know there is an infinite list of reasons Siri sucks but one that really irks me is now Siri can be integrated with ChatGPT. You can also change settings so it will automatically query ChatGPT without asking…
Yet Siri will still tell you about a web results on your phone… but sometimes same question asked? Will check ChatGPT and give you an actual answer (15% hit rate?).
I have a macbook as my work laptop. I use it as a dumb terminal to my FreeBSD desktop, a platform for corp. video conferencing, and to surf the web. Any actual work happens on my desktop (Unless I'm working on something arm64 specific, and am using a VM on the laptop ... but then I'm probably ssh'ed in from my desktop.
Why the macbook? I have never gotten along with Windows (have tried on a few separate occasions). And I'm too lazy to put effort into getting Linux running well on a laptop, since that would still be just a dumb terminal for FreeBSD dev. And I'm not enough of a masochist to run FreeBSD on a laptop. So the macbook is the path of least resistance. It works well as a laptop (suspend / resume, connects to random wifi) and comes with a terminal and ssh client that require zero effort to get working.
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