As a kid I did the math on all the lego sets, and came to the conclusion that the 500 piece bucket was the best bargain, beating out the 1000 piece bucket by a decent amount. Most other sets were an awful value in comparison.
As an adult, I realized buying new was idiotic when I could just buy used. I ended up buying a former lego employee's collection for $60, selling the monorail it contained for $1000, and keeping the massive washing-machine sized rest for myself. Too bad deals like that come once in a lifetime!
OSB is much more nuanced than particle board, often in a bad way. Many manufactures orient the chips along a single axis, meaning it shares the anisotropic properties of solid wood where the X axis has a different strength and expansion rate than the Y axis. And looking at the 3rd dimension, the Z axis is actually quite weak. If you glue something to the face of an OSB board, you can break the joint fairly easily because the individual chips pull out.
Something I realized recently was that you can just buy popcorn kernels in bulk and pop them in the microwave using a covered bowl. I don't think I'll ever buy instant popcorn baggies again.
That's how my wife does it: buys a bag of kernels and puts some into a brown paper sack for microwave heating. Alternatively, they still sell those air poppers[0], which tend to produce better results, so you can use one of those.
Using a paper bag is especially fun if you have young kids since a kindergartner can stir the kernels with oil in a bowl, pour them into the bag, add salt, and shake vigorously. I think it was almost as much fun to make as it was to eat.
I just use a pot. I put in a tablespoon or so of coconut oil, melt it over medium heat with a few kernels and when they pop add a bunch more to almost cover the bottom of the pot. Then I put a lid on it, canted so it lets the moisture leave but not the popcorn and remove from heat when the popping slows. Then I add salt and shake and done. It takes just a few minutes.
I do almost the same. But I use olive oil and toss the freshly popped kernels in cayenne pepper and some nutritional yeast. Delicious and fairly healthy snack!
You can also just put them in a brown paper bag to replicate the popcorn bag experience. Just fold and pinch the top, add whatever salt and oil you want. Corn kernels are crazy cheap too, it's probably $0.05 a bag.
Retro games used a ton of tables. Back then memory speeds were blazing fast, but processors were sluggish, so it made sense to pack as much computation as possible into tables. The more clever you were about it, the fancier games you could make.
Not always, though it might depend on what platform you mean with retro. Kaze Emanuar on YT does a lot of development for the N64 and it feels like half the time he talks about how the memory bus affects all kinds of optimizations. In Mario 64 he replaced the original lookup table for the sine function because an approximation was faster and accurate enough (or rather two approximations for two different purposes).
I love that channel, he reworked the entire Mario 64 code [0] to make it run at stable 60FPS...because he wanted his mods to run faster.
Back when I started I thought I would make games. I used a lookup table for cos/sin kept as an integer. I only needed enough precision for rotation on 320x240. It was something like 20-30 cycles faster per pixel. Even more if you didn't have a FP co-processor.
By retro platform GP meant Atari ST and Commodore Amiga and the like: LUT were the name of the game for everything back then. Games, intros/cracktros/demos.
Heck even sprites movements often weren't done using math but using precomputed tables: storing movements in "pixels per frame".
It worked particularly well on some platforms because they had relatively big RAM amounts compared to the slow CPU and RAM access weren't as taxing as today (these CPUs didn't have L1/L2/L3 caches).
The speedup from the approximation wasn't that much if anything. He made his real improvements elswhere. But your point stands that memory speed really has moved the goalposts on what is feasible to speed up through using precalculation tables and if you can do it with math then that is often much faster.
I remember the days of resticting rotation accuracy to 360/256ths of a degree so it would fit on a byte, which then would be an index into trig lookup tables :)
I miss the days when professional software development was more akin to this sort of thing, rather than gluing together 20 Javascript frameworks on top of someone else's cloud infrastructure.
Well, consumer reports is still kicking. I don't think an aggregate review service does much good though.
Reviews for physical items are super inaccurate. The average consumer doesn't have the money to buy 10 laptops and compare them, so they buy one and hold a biased opinion about it. In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.
Besides, a ton of reviews are fake these days. You just can't trust them anymore. And for many products, the manufacturer cheapens them oven time without telling the public. So a review from 2 years ago may not reflect the quality of today.
The internet used to be filled with nerds and people that are interested in things enough to seek information on the web. Now, internet is a marketing tool, filled with corp influence and mostly garbage.
I really miss the old days of niche forums, gaming communities with own servers and forums. You were actually able to get decent and reliable information, now internet is mainstream.
> The internet used to be filled with nerds and people that are interested in things enough to seek information on the web.
and/or actually do proper testing, and share their results, in a consistent manner, but the effort and time is simply no longer worth it. quality content gets buried under 10 second video clips, spam sites, and your content gets copied by large websites. 10 years ago I spent up to 200 hours testing one video card, having build identical systems to do proper apple vs apple tests. But all that time invested, even then, was barely worth it from a commitment point of view. And if you publish such an article now, your viewership is so limited to a very select few. New generation simply doesn't know how a computer actually works, where as 30 years ago, you had to learn more than just the basics to be able to operate it.
The real world used to be filled with these people too. They'd have brick and mortar shops to sell quality products, and customers could step in and get expert advice on what to purchase within their budget.
> In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.
Yep, and quality can vary quite substantially from one year to the next. I mostly like my 2015 MacBook Pro 15" with an AMD dGPU, but many people hated the 2016 MacBooks with the butterfly keyboards that quickly broke and touchbar that would freeze up.
It's especially an issue for products with bad model names. Is my experience with the MSI GE72MVR Apache Pro-080 going to be insightful for anyone considering a current MSI laptop? No idea. There were tons of MSI laptop models back then too with who knows what quality.
Automated lab tests can't perfectly represent real world tests, but I'd still like to see more of them. I remember seeing a machine fold and unfold the Samsung Galaxy Fold around 119,380 times before half the screen stopped working. [1] While it's a sample size of one and not a perfect representation of real world use, it's a lot better than nothing. I'd like to see similar tests for opening and closing laptops, plugging and unplugging cables into ports, pressing keys on a keyboard, etc. Some things can't be simulated, such as long term battery health, but there's a lot that could be tested but isn't in nearly all product reviews.
Something that'd be expensive but that I'd like to see is long-term automated tests to see how frequently a machine crashes. The machine should browse the web, play games, and use commonly used software: Adobe CC, Office 365, G Suite, Slack, Zoom, VLC, ffmpeg, AutoCAD, Blender, Unity, Unreal, and various Docker instances, IDEs, compilers, runtime environments, local servers and databases, etc. It should have automatic updates on and reboot only when required for an update, though sleep and wake-up should be tested regularly. Then, one could analyze how stable of a machine it is.
Personally I'd rather buy a slightly older machine that is proven to be stable than a brand new machine with better performance but questionable stability. Unfortunately, neither is currently an option for me, and with OS and driver updates, stability and performance can worsen at any moment with little (convenient) recourse (or in the case for phones, often no recourse at all.) If my work tools were available on Linux or worked through Wine/Proton/etc., I'd probably try an immutable OS like Fedora Kinoite just so I'd hopefully have more stability. I could automate stress testing the drivers after updates to make sure they were safe. Unfortunately, depending on your hardware, it may never pass driver stress tests even on a clean install (even on Windows, which the machine was designed for!), so may have to exclude certain tests.
Slavery ended as industrialized agriculture was taking off. While farmers are paid better now, there are a lot fewer of them.
Perhaps we will see the same with animation; there will be a few well-paid and highly-skilled artists that are automating with a bunch of AI. I doubt that will be the solution to equality though.
I teach driving lessons as a job. Adults usually become proficient a little faster than kids, as they take it more seriously and have learned the laws through osmosis. Most of the time the difficulty with adults is they have no one to practice with.
Regarding skill, I think it's genetic. Some people can get their license in a week, others it takes months. Video game skills probably help.
As an adult, I realized buying new was idiotic when I could just buy used. I ended up buying a former lego employee's collection for $60, selling the monorail it contained for $1000, and keeping the massive washing-machine sized rest for myself. Too bad deals like that come once in a lifetime!