They want to make money off of services, every service they offer requires a Microsoft account to purchase and use. Everyone that they force to make an account during setup is one step closer to paying for a Microsoft service.

There are obviously tradeoffs (less sales of these versions of windows and some users pushed away from Windows altogether among others), but the motivation is clear.

Just looking at the numbers, they are spending $5G and losing $1G. Their subscriptions are growing. So if they grow another 25% they are making money. (Ignoring infrastructure costs which are most likely a tiny fraction of per-user revenue.) They also just launched an Android app. So I think their story is looking pretty good. Not even considering that it raises the value of Apple TV hardware, their other devices and gives them more lock-in for customers in general that seems like a great investment they made.

Actually I would pick GIMP.

1. Says what it is, an image editor.
2. No popups and random interruptions.
3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.

Huh?

I’ve used Vim for a decade and I would be offended if it made any noise.

Is the limit 2 VMs or two macOS VMs? I thought it was technically a “licensing” restriction.

Why fail when you can just do the wrong thing “successfully”?

It would be wasteful to upload the full size image only to throw most of it away. JPEG compression is very cheap, especially at low resolutions (I assume that image search uses a pretty low-resolution source image). Doing it this way is actually what I would do for best user experience. (Not saying that they aren’t doing other malicious things, but doing the resizing on the client is actually a good idea)

It is mostly about giving users tools to do moderation. So managers of communities can effectively apply policies and make it easy for people to share moderation decisions so that the work can be shared among communities that trust each other’s moderation decisions.

I’m very exited for this. Just boosting a post always seems so impersonal and out of context. I almost always want to add my own message to my followers. I regularly decide not to boost because of this. I would do it a lot more if I can add my own message/context.

It’s really nice of them to collect the best piracy sites into an easy to navigate list! They even have proper linking between the index and PDF pages, that is some quality work.

Pacific Mall, Toronto

You know, they aren’t wrong. (Well at least this was well known when I was younger. IDK I thought it was cleaned up a bit in the last decade.)

Yes, that is why I said “Sounds great”.

Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.

there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality

In theory this is true. If you had a nice high-bitrate 1080p video it may look better on a 1080 display than any quality of 1440p video would due to loss while scaling. But in almost all cases selecting higher resolutions will provide better perceived quality due to the higher bitrate, even if they aren’t integer multiples of the displayed size.

It will also be more bandwidth efficient to target the output size directly. But streaming services want to keep the number of different versions small. Often this will already be >4 resolutions and 2-3 codecs. If they wanted to also have low/medium/high for each resolution that would be a significant cost (encoding itself, storage and reduction in cache hits). So they sort of squish the resolution and quality together into one scale, so 1080p isn’t just 1080p it also serves as a general “medium” quality. If you want “high” you need to go to 1440p or 2160p even if your output is only 1080.

the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.

But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).

Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codecs and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.

The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.

100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making up the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.

You could also just plug in the 10 amp cord and plug the device into it. The chaining doesn’t change anything here.

The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.

GMail could actually use more competitors. However I definitely won’t be trusting Musk with my email.

“Residential IPs” are quite valuable for web scraping. Many scraping prevention tools and services use the source IP as the primary metric. If you come from a public cloud provider like AWS, GCP or DigitalOcean you get blocked 99% of the time. If you come from a US residential ISP then you get much more relaxed screening.