Looks like my 5500M GPU draws 10W fewer when I change my external 4K monitor from Scaled (to accommodate for every OS UI element being minuscule) to the display's native resolution. It makes the OS barely usable from a UI standpoint, but the fans are now a lot quieter. I'm on a Dell monitor.
I just tested it on my 2017 rMBP (Radeon 555), and I saw an immediate drop from ~15W to 11W. The total power usage is around 30W, so it's an immediate ~15% drop in power usage.
I experience this 100% with writing music. I suspect most of it is around the need for your creation to be good, versus allowing it to be child-like play. If you're able to suspend the need to be good for a moment, you can start to experience again the joy of playing, inventing, letting go. Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery is a great reference for this.
Thanks for reference.
I find music inexplicably easy unti it needs to be directed.
If I am just exploring whatever has come out then it just follows a natural path.
If I must write to a brief or to another’s melody then that is a different beast!
I would love something like this for the longer, boring, predictable drives.
For example the I5 drive from LA to SF. That's a pretty straightforward, predictable and mostly uneventful 6h drive that seems straightforward to delegate to a machine. There are no pedestrians, no intersections, nothing crossing the street. The main dangers would be around objects on the road, other vehicles getting in a crash or doing something unpredictable next to you, animals running onto the path of the vehicle. As a human you might actually be worse equipped to react to in time compared to a car.
That one use-case alone where the car drives itself on the I5 while I read a book or watch a movie would be worth something. The human can handle the quirks of the more treacherous local roads. I'd still prefer a bullet train of some kind, but in its absence, this would be a decent climate-friendly alternative that doesn't require a giant plane getting up in the sky for a 50 min flight.
I've done enough really boring driving to find that about once in every N hours (depending on the road) a very NOT boring event will occur, requiring immediate and correct response. I don't think any road exists without that happening.
Yes this is making the assumption that, when the unexpected occurs, an experienced human driver still outperforms whatever self driving code may be running.
Not even Tesla is saying their system could or should be used that way. You're making quite a few assumptions about the capabilities of the system and going outside of the instructed and permitted use of the system if you are going to go read for 6 hours while the car drives itself.
Unexpected situations can and will happen. They are not at all as simple as "well the car will just detect it and break faster than me" by a long shot. What if there is debris on the road and the car misreads it? What if there are actually pedestrians because somebody got into an accident and decided it would be a bright idea to take a little walk?
I could go on, and I'm sure you or somebody else could answer every hypothetical I could come up with. That's not the point. The point is that even a "boring, predictable drive" is anything but. We put in a ton of processing power that makes that drive (usually) seem boring and predictable. A level 2 system is not designed to be let loose even in these circumstances.
You'd be required to pay attention continuously and be able to do immediate takeovers at all times for that LA-SF drive at L2. You simply wouldn't have to actually drive. L3 is where your attention is "allowed" to wander. Quoting NHTSA guidance:
> Therefore, the L2 driver is expected to be alert and monitoring the road continuously. The L3 driver is not expected to be paying attention to the road at all times, but is expected to be takeover-ready with advance notice.
The included autopilot seems good enough for this usecase, many report it makes long drives less tiring.
Level 2 FSD honestly seems worse from a human UX standpoint that it seems like an anti feature to me. I'm a fan of tesla and I've come around on autopilot being a nice feature but I think this FSD focus is silly and overhyped at least in regards to providing any value to customers anytime soon.
That would be a level 3 system (ie one where the driver can disengage but be ready to react immediately when the car tells them to). This is a level 2 system; ie you must be alert at all times in case the car tries to kill you. You can’t watch a movie in a car like this.
Another example of how bananas the system is: when I go to order prescription refills through my health care provider, it is currently unable to tell me how much it's going to cost me. You're expected to say "Ok, charge me whatever these cost" and then, I suppose, call customer support if you don't agree with the price you were charged that day.
I don't know if there's some kind of a "price of the day" marketplace calculation that needs to happen for the provider to find out the current prices, but that's pretty odd. It's like buying stocks or a Dungeness crab dish at a restaurant.
I clearly remember burning CDs up until around 2010, but I never realized that the technology was already around 30 years earlier.
I still have rose-colored glasses nostalgia of the days of PC games in large cardboard boxes containing multi-CD jewel cases and elaborate manuals.
I bet you the CD will come back as a vintage retro format in about 10-15 years when the kids who never grew up with them learn to treat it as a cool hipster format. Just like my generation did with vinyl, which I never experienced myself back in the day, having arrived too late on the scene.
Friendly plug for LGR and 8 Bit Guy channels on Youtube who often dive back into these antique devices.
The interesting thing about vinyl compared to any other format is that not only is it analog, it’s also mechanical! I think that gives the technology an aesthetic that can’t be matched by other analog formats, it also works without electricity! The whole idea of engraving sound into a physics object is a still pretty wild and something that’s been going on for over 100 years!
I also think perhaps we over estimate how "digital" CD playback is.
I repaired a CD player recently and learned that the control system which guides and powers the laser is entirely analogue. Only the audio pickup was a digital signal.
I'm sure designs vary, but it made a great deal of sense when you consider a design from the 70s and 80s.
A CD is digital, but a CD _player_ is a surprisingly analogue device.
You should see how tiny the MicroLine diamond is on my Audio-Technica MM cartridge. 90% of the cost is in that replaceable, fragile part of an MM cartridge: the stylus.
MC cartridges typically don't have replaceable styluses. Bust an AT-ART9XA, and get ready to lay-out 1.3k clams.
Is the AT-ART9XA the MM stylus?
I’ve heard a bit about the MM stylus, though never used one myself. Just getting into vinyl gear for DJing soon, but will be starting lower end. Especially at 1.3k! What makes that stylus so good?
I'm saddened to hear the CD called a "retro format". Next you'll tell me the DVD is not the cool new thing from the future :(
(Seriously though, I have a hard time dealing with people calling the CD retro. To me not even the audio tape is really old... I grew up listening to music on tapes, the CD was the new thing!)
I guess I'd say CD is and isn't retro. It's looking close to being the ultimate physical digital medium for music, with vinyl being the ultimate analog medium. It's really only retro in the sense that there isn't much reason to keep physical copies.
I own that very sling and the attention to detail is exceptional. It's hard to put down. Their clip system is rather convenient as well, including its interoperability with the Manfrotto tripods. They're expensive products, but you'll keep them for a long time.
Is there anything today that feels like a underground scene that's "happening", that is acting as a technological vanguard, that is full of mystique, but that hasn't gone mainstream yet? The demo scene felt like absolute magic to me as a kid in 80s.
Making games used to be that in the 80s and maybe 90s, but now it's a well-rehearsed, mostly commercial dance with clear parameters and tooling. Yeah, there are game jams and all that, but I'm not sure how much new uncharted territories are being discovered these days anymore in it.
Making electronic music in 60s-80s used to be magical and now is also mainstream and commercialized. I don't mean this cynically, but more from the perspective that there isn't as much in it left now that hasn't been done plenty before. It's no longer a case of Vangelis buying one of the few outrageously expensive CS-80 ever produced and hammering away at it in his studio producing sounds never heard before. Or hearing a Buchla for the first time. It's all one small VST download away now, with super powerful tools to stitch it all together often available for free.
Where is the bleeding edge magic happening these days? VR? Crypto? Machine Learning? Generative art?
Crypto imagines themselves as this, but in reality it’s got all the creative spirit and intellectual rigor of multi-level marketing. It’s the most depressing computer scene ever.
There isn’t anything with the same mystique as the demoscene because everything is so accessible. You can consume endless pages about any topic at will. It’s not like 1992 when getting copies of demos might require legwork around town with floppies in hand.
That said, VR is probably the closest thing. You need hardware and it’s immersive, which means it’s not something you can consume while switching between browser tabs. There are lots of creative people doing interesting things in the space, even at big companies.
> Is there anything today that feels like a underground scene that's "happening", that is acting as a technological vanguard, that is full of mystique, but that hasn't gone mainstream yet? The demo scene felt like absolute magic to me as a kid in 80s.
I think it is very hard to get the same feeling today with the internet.
The difference is that pre-internet, obtaining knowledge was a quest and often required a mentor or even a network, because a lot of knowledge was passed on by word of mouth, getting to talk with the people you admired from the demos you had watched, was a (long) journey (from being an observer to a participant), physical meetups were necessary for collaboration, etc.
I vividly recall my own journey, the people I met who taught me things, introduced me to other people, and of course the myths, like the first time I saw a demo with splines, and someone knew somebody who was at the university who could obtain a paper about splines…
I used to be heavily involved in the demoscene during late 80's/early 90's. (And still occasionally visit demoparties.) I think the best thing in making demos was the feeling of achievement when you managed to get a new effect working. Of course it was a bonus if this was something never seen before, or broke some record, or even placed well in a democompo, but the feeling of "I can do this" was the main driving force behind it all for me.
Recently I've got similar feeling of achievement in DIY electronics. Back in the day making PCBs was difficult and information on how to design them was hard to find. My best attempt was an audio digitizer based on instructions from a magazine, and I never got it working because my hand-drawn PCB was so bad.
These days one can design PCBs with open-source tools and get them manufactured professionally for very cheap. There is a wealth of various microcontroller modules and add-on boards that can be used as building blocks in projects. Internet is full of design resources, and all possible components one can imagine can be ordered online.
Although I haven't participated in any IRL meetings, I think there's also something similar to demoscene in these communities, both online and IRL. It's not as competitive as demoscene used to be though (but I think that's only a good thing).
Most of these DIY electronics projects would never be possible in commercial setting because there's no viable economy behind them. However, as it's relatively cheap these days to implement even fairly complex electronics projects, we are seeing stuff that's somewhere in this intersection of non-commercial / creative / cutting edge technology - just like the demoscene used to be.
VR done well is straight-up magical. But, being less convenient than seated distant-screen experience is keeping it fringe.
I've been glancing back at this image https://i.imgur.com/BT8rMuy.png of an on for a couple weeks now. Generated from the text "Little Red Riding Hood meet the wolf in the style of Beksiński"
I also find it really fun that the game emulation scene is moving into the consumer FPGA space with open-source-driven products like "MiSTer FPGA".
Absolutely this. What people are doing on the Pico-8 is nothing short of magical, the system is very limited yet people produce all kinds of crazy demos for it.
If you're doing any kind of composition where mixing and mastering are a mandatory component, you're strongly encouraged to have a proper set of cans, or even better, a decent set of monitors. The tech has gotten rather good these days, so you can get a decent pair for not that much. But if the class is primarily about the theory and the arrangement, and not so much about the final mix, then I don't imagine a good setup will be needed or even recommended.
I remember experiencing issues earlier last year with Zoom correctly transmitting the sub bass frequencies in a music production class I was taking.
Perhaps that was a user error, but in a craft where getting your frequencies right across the whole spectrum is paramount any kind of lossy optimization can lead to undesirable results.
I wonder if there are parts of Zoom's audio transmission that optimize for the frequency range of the human voice, and everything else gets mangled a little, along the lines of chroma subsampling optimization in the visual world.
I am not certain why you are being downvoted. It is fairly common for voice stacks to include a high-pass filter to remove breathing noises and other low-frequency artifacts, and this could cause exactly the issues you describe.
That seems true of many jobs, like programming. Become good enough and eventually you get promoted to manager, director, VP, C-level. You might have loved the joy of programming and making something yourself at some point, but sooner or later most career-successful programmers will become administrators or operators.
Is this by design?