xtracto

Thanks for the hardmard reference. It's pretty amazing what people can do with maths. I should have studied that instead of software.

Nice article, however it seems the author started with a lot of punch, explaining Frequency Domain and it's lossy compression in high detail, but then got tired/bored to write rest of the article. It's like a movie that starts very slow at the beginning and compensates at the end by just glossing around things.

I particularly would have enjoyed a detail explanation of the Chroma subsampling, with the same level of detail (graphics, examples, etc) as the first third of the article.

The amount of battery waste in 10/15 years will be crazy.

I bought a Kicks e-power [here in Mexico] a d one of my worries is what will happen when the battery life runs out...

We [Mexico] dont have the logistics, technology or know-how to recycle or dispose these correctly.

I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.

First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.

The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.

Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].

So much this. I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Dangerous Dave, Prince.exe , TDCGA.exe, and installing all the amazing jungle of applications in DOS , Win3 and later [anybody remembers the Win3 program, that made your icons move? the logo was a rabbit in a hat]. Winamp, Musicmatch, SoundForge, all the CADs for more or less professional work, etc.

Now it's all websites.. or horrible android apps. Open source is the only thing remaining.

The good thing is that with LLMs, it is more and more possible to add all sort of cool functionality to existing code. And soon we will be able to add functionality also to compiled programs [like adding line numbers to windows note pad as a "cracking" tutorial, that was so cool].

Just yesterday I added the functionality of "show all unread" to an open source C++ low resource Slack desktop app [the official one is so bad]. And also I added VIM bindings to a text editor.

Yes sure, I'll move my mortage, tell my employer to move my deposit account and go through all automatic payments I have setup.

Thanks for the suggestion, how didn't I think about that!

This. Today is this, tomorrow is people doing car turns where it's not allowed, the day after tomorrow there's chaos like in Mexico (my country) because nobody gives a fuck about crap.

I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.

[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]

My bank application doesn't run if it detects developer mode enabled.

I remember in 2013 the first time someone showed me Docker [im in Mexico]. My first thought is that we already had Vagrant for setting up and running virtual machines through console.

I didnt get it at that time haha.

For me, it depended on the price.

Several years ago, I had to take a very early flight so wanted to stay near the airport. I rented an Airbnb VERY cheaply. This was a room within an apartment of an old lady who was renting his son's (gone to university) bedroom.

It was a great experience, very kind, comfy and she even made me breakfast.

But nowadays, prices are crazy. A hotel room is usually only 10% higher (if higher). And I have also been victim of last minute cancelations.

If the room is unavailable, the hotel makes it its problem. But in the case of AirBnB, they make it YOUR problem. So that's worth 10% or more for me now. After they ruined a new year's eve vacation.

I no longer rent Airbnb. I might try if they hardened host's rules and gave me a cancelation guarantee of 'we will put you in the closest hotel if necessary ' . Kind of like car rentals: if the car is unavailable, we give you a better one.

The internet is over. We are going back to static htmls for public pages, and Point to Point VPN bases connections for B2B service provision.

B2C? too risky to publish services online haha.

That's a big problem with western so ieties. You know The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman? (Mexican prefers to take it easy)

There may be sone cultural truth to that. I'm a 44yo Mexican tech-bro; I've love coding/tech since i was around 10yo, to the point of getting a PhD and have worked in the industry for 25+ years.

But... i dont give a crap about my job. I mean, I am VERY professional and give my best, but I work to live, not live to work.

Right now I'm on the edge of retiring, if machines come and take all the jobs, it's fine, I'll go grow chickens and sell all my stuff to live on a small house in an extremely cheap village.

I come from modest roots, and those were some of the best years of my life. My wife also is pretty aligned. We in some way are what Americans would label "conformists", but darn, we are happy with little things, so when we happen to get big things, they taste amazing! (I just experienced my first American Football game in the Colts stadium, so cool!).

Westerners societies have to learn to be less overachieving