> People ditched their digital cameras en masse when smartphones became popular. Not because the smartphone cameras were better, but because they were convenient.
The early 00's transition from CRT to LCD monitors was similar. The early desktop LCD panels were expensive, had worse refresh rates, worse contrast, and worse colour rendering. To this day, even very good modern displays struggle to match CRT motion rendering.
But LCDs are so much thinner and lighter, and that was enough to overcome the disadvantages.
Ha, my mid 90s 21" Nanao CRT cost more than my used car was worth. I went on to get some high-end CRTs with Trinitron tubes after that at work.
But, as soon as I could get an LCD with DVI-D input, I never wanted to go back to a CRT. I just got whatever high resolution Dell LCD monitors I could find. I was much happier with perfect pixel addressing and zero bleed for rendering my text terminals and source code. I didn't care about color rendition and hardly cared about ghosting from scrolling.
There’s also the depth. A crt monitor would have a depth at least equal to the diagonal measurement which meant a lot of desk space lost to the monitor. On the other hand that also meant some prime cat nesting space that was lost with the lcd transition.
Looks like there is currently no RDMA support for thunderbolt, so it's a much higher latency connection. Apple has RDMA over thunderbolt working, so I wonder if it's possible on Strix Halo.
There is one obscure product that actually did use the feature. The Sharp Famicom Titler (or Famicom Editor) was a full Famicom that could show an external video input behind the Famicom graphics.
The EXT pins only allow setting the backdrop color to one of the palette values in the master PPU's color palette, so the Titler can't use that functionality to superimpose graphics over arbitrary video. It actually uses an RGB PPU which doesn't even have the EXT pins. Instead, it uses a separate video encoder chip for the video superimposing feature. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/X0858CE
It doesn't seem that bad to me? Most of the problems that I see in that video look like recording issues where the camera isn't handling max brightness well. Recording CRTs is notoriously difficult!
Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.
On top of this, I find ads on app store search results to be particularly bad. It's a business model that comes with all sorts of perverse incentives. It's so bad for users and legitimate developers.
The Mac Studio, in some ways, is in a class of its own for LLM inference. I think this is Apple leaning into that. They didn't add RDMA for general server clustering usefulness. They added it so you can put 4 Studios together in an LLM inferencing cluster exactly as demonstrated in the article.
It almost certainly is not. Until we know what the useful life of NVIDIA GPUs are, then it's impossible to determine whether this is profitable or not.
The depreciation schedule isn't as big a factor as you'd think.
The marginal cost of an API call is small relative to what users pay, and utilization rates at scale are pretty high. You don't need perfect certainty about GPU lifespan to see that the spread between cost-per-token and revenue-per-token leaves a lot of room.
And datacenter GPUs have been running inference workloads for years now, so companies have a good idea of rates of failure and obsolescence. They're not throwing away two-year-old chips.
> The marginal cost of an API call is small relative to what users pay, and utilization rates at scale are pretty high.
How do you know this?
> You don't need perfect certainty about GPU lifespan to see that the spread between cost-per-token and revenue-per-token leaves a lot of room.
You can't even speculate this spread without knowing even a rough idea of cost-per-token. Currently, it's total paper math on what the cost-per-token is.
> And datacenter GPUs have been running inference workloads for years now,
And inference resource intensity is a moving target. If a new model comes out that requires 2x the amount of resources now.
> They're not throwing away two-year-old chips.
Maybe, but they'll be replaced by either (a) a higher performance GPU that can deliver the same results with less energy, less physical density, and less cooling or (b) the extended support costs becomes financially untenable.
I was thinking more Lua/Luaua which make it trivial to restrict permissions. In general, the gaming client has access to a lot more information than it shares, so to prevent cheats from plugins, the developers have to be explicit about security boundaries.
> many people have never actually seen the colour "violet" which is a single wavelength of visible light
The violet seen in a rainbow (in nature, not a photo) is legit single wavelength violet. Same with the rainbows created from shining white light through a prism.
It's true that you don't really get to see it in isolation very often though. Maybe some flowers, birds, or butterflies? Or maybe the purple glow you get from UV lights?
Because the cone isn't really a "blue" cone, and neither is the "red" one. The curves overlap in complex ways. A pure violet photon also slightly stimulates the long wavelength cone.
That's why red+blue=purple feels a bit like violet. It creates a similar double firing.
(And why red plus green gives an even more accurate yellow. The long and medium cones have a lot of overlap.)
This is a common misconception, but the sensitivity of L cones ("red" cones) increases monotonically until about 570nm (monochromatic yellow), so violet light stimulates L cones the least out of all visible wavelengths of light. Magenta light, a mixture of red and blue wavelengths, stimulates L cones far more than violet light. See Wikipedia's LMS responsivity plot[1] or the cone fundamental tables from the Color & Vision Research Laboratory at [2].
I think the misconception comes from plots of XYZ color matching functions[3]. The X color matching function indeed has a local maximum in the short wavelengths, but X doesn't represent L cone stimulation; it's a mathematically derived curve used to define the XYZ color space, which is a linear transform of LMS color space selected for useful mathematical properties.
It is technically the bluest color possible. What we perceive as true blue is different, and the brain has the weird imaginary magenta gradient between blue and red to confuse.
First of all, all colors are imagined only in our minds.
Second, the term imaginary color already exists, and it refers to a specific thing [0], and the colors on the line of purple are not one of them. What you are describing is a non-spectral color. They exist in day to day life and in nature, they simply do not have an associated wavelength.
What exactly are you trying to prove? The gradient between red and blue (magentas) are the only fully saturated colors that we can perceive, which aren't part of the electromagnetic spectrum. That's fantastic. Do you want to waste your life arguing about nothing instead of enjoying the miracles of nature?
The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply.
And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.
The early 00's transition from CRT to LCD monitors was similar. The early desktop LCD panels were expensive, had worse refresh rates, worse contrast, and worse colour rendering. To this day, even very good modern displays struggle to match CRT motion rendering.
But LCDs are so much thinner and lighter, and that was enough to overcome the disadvantages.