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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life

    Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.

    The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

    I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons

    • I lose about 5% charge/day with my laptop asleep. It does wake up very quickly, but 5%/day feels like a lot. At this point, I don’t think Microsoft has a strong incentive to really optimize the kernal for efficiency
    • Historic massive variability in hardware across devices also makes it hard to optimize efficiency, although the current crop of snapdragon x laptops seem to have less variability
    • One of the strengths of windows is that it can run applications written 20+ years ago fairly reliably. There’s a ton of software that’s still floating around that hasn’t been actively supported in years. I don’t see all of these software companies desiring to port their code over, especially without guarantees that the market will adopt ARM (the Apple approach) or until they see the ARM adoption rate go up (the current Windows approach)

    All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.


  • I own a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x Gen 9, which is powered by a Snapdragon X. It certainly checks the “good enough” box. I use it primarily for photo culling/editing (I’m a holdout dedicated camera user). It is more than fit for purpose there, stays cool, is slim, and although I know the fan has come on a few times I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t on my lap. When I bought mine, it was also one of the better deals - you could upgrade to 32 GB of memory and a SSD for under $125 in total. The SSD also isn’t soldered, but the memory is. The 3k OLED display is amazing, but if you want the ultimate battery sipper it’s probably not the best choice. I still get tons of runtime per charge, but am somewhat sad that I lose about 5% charge per day thanks to the laptop not really being off while asleep.

    The biggest downside is linxu support is very hit and miss depending on the laptop in question, which means you’re tied to windows 11. I don’t have the time to tinker with it, so I haven’t looked much further into it than this.










  • lol. Amusingly, my wife’s Dell Latitude 7400 with an i3 has much better stand by battery life than my 7x slim. The slim does wake up a ton faster - by the time the lid is open it’s already doing facial unlock and it it sees me it unlocks immediately and is “fully awake”, but I suspect this is achieved at the expense of more battery consumption while sleeping.

    The 7x slim loses around 5% / day when asleep :(


  • Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.

    When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn’t do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do “AI stuff” in photos, but don’t think that was local.

    Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they’re trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.

    /Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff




  • As a parent of younger kids, we’re sorry. We come armed with as many activities as possible and will take our kids outside if they’re too excited until food gets to the table. That will help them focus on eating.

    We very rarely went out to eat when they were toddlers due to fear of our kids bothering others and understand that our desire to experience some level of normalcy shouldn’t come at the expense of others.

    All that said, if the parents are trying to keep their kids occupied, please extend some grace. Being a parent can be extremely isolating and we’re simply trying to pretend like we still get to do normal things once in a while.



  • Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

    1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
    2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
    3. Put strained rice in your pot
    4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
    5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
    6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
    7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

    We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

    Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

    Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.