The multiple lenses in a traditional professional photograph setup are stacked in front of each other, so they stick out a lot. The multiple cameras on a back of a phone are a workaround for trying to get good image quality and versatile zoom without making the lens stick out too far.

Each physical lens has a single focal length. “Wide” lenses have a wide field of view, and “telephoto” lenses can make very far away things look big in the screen. Have you ever tried to take a photo of the moon with your regular cell phone camera at default zoom? The moon itself is tiny, because the angular diameter of the moon from the surface of the earth is only about half of a degree (out of a 360 degree circle). So you need a very high focal length lens to be able to get the moon to fill up a photograph. Often, in sports, the sidelines have photographers with huge lenses trying to capture intricate detail (beads of sweat, texture of a ball) from 50-100 meters away.

You can stack multiple lenses in front of each other and vary the difference between them to “zoom” to different focal lengths. That versatility is great, and zoom lenses are very common on cameras. But because this feature requires the stacking of multiple lenses, the lens assembly as a whole will end up sticking out pretty far. Bad form factor for a phone.

So cell phones use a bunch of single-lens cameras to make the lens protrude less from the body of the phone, and use software to choose between the cameras: wide, medium, telephoto, or maybe even a super telephoto.

And once they had that in place, there were a few tricks that could be used where the software would evaluate 2 or more cameras simultaneously to try to capture more information with less blur to fill in more image detail than one camera could have, with that sensor hardware. So there are a bunch of computational photography tricks that make cell phone cameras look better with small, limited hardware.

My theory is that there is quite a few servers that are chosing to defederate. The number of total servers continues to drop according to fedidb.

Or admins are just finding it not worth bothering with administering their own server and turning them off.

You can have the code to my kernel, sure. You don’t get a login on my machine, though, and you’re definitely not on the sudoers list.

It sounds like you want a way to collect articles, including full text offline, and organize them in a searchable way. Why do you need RSS for this? Just use a blogging platform where you can organize each post, list/sort/filter by date or topic or original source, and use the search functionality in the actual blog platform.

Dedicated units were available from brands like TomTom in the early 2000’s, and cell phones started getting it around 2007 or so (I remember very expensive blackberry plans had it around then). Android launched with it in 2008, and iPhones started allowing apps like Google Maps with turn by turn navigation by around the end of 2012 or so.

when you ask a computer to sort things for you, it will automatically order things correctly when the date follows this format

I’d go even further than that, and point out that the reason why computers sort things in this order is because that’s the most logical way to convey specific dates.

Most significant digits on the left, descending left to right, in order, is how we do all other numerical representations. It’s only dates that we have different norms.

They weren’t the ones to come up with the name, so they have to follow what everyone else calls it.

It’s why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.

No forum, email or word processor (even WordPerfect for the c64) or Notepad uses this

I think the convention of 2 newlines for each paragraph is a longstanding norm in plaintext. The old Usenet, list servs, plain text email, etc., was basically always like that, because you could never control how someone else wraps their text. 2 new lines would be a new paragraph no matter what, while single new lines could create ambiguity between an author’s intentional line break versus the rendering software’s decision to wrap an existing line.

For lists and the like, you’d want to be able to have newlines without new paragraphs, but you’d generally want ordered lists or unordered lists at that point.

For an obvious example of markup languages where newlines and carriage returns don’t have syntactic meaning, look at literally the most popular one: HTML.

So markdown was essentially enforcing the then existing best practices for pure plain text communication, to never use single line breaks except in lists.

Most UIs don’t even have a preview option, let alone need one, because they don’t require you to have a stick up your ass to ‘get’ using them.

It was pretty common before Markdown took over that forums and other user-input rich text fields used raw html (or a subset of html tags), or something syntactically similar to html’s opening and closing tags (BBcode, vBulletin markup, etc.).

Markdown was basically the first implementation that was designed to be human readable in plaintext but easily rendered into rich text (with an eye towards HTML). It’s not a coincidence that it took off in the early days of the “web 2.0” embrace of user-submitted content in asynchronous forms.

I get the complaint. But I think markdown makes a lot of sense as a way to store and render text, and that one compromise is worth it overall.

That dude was fired.

This is exciting. Having another player in the cutting edge fabrication space is a good thing, and can help keep pressure on Samsung and TSMC and Intel to innovate and continue to make progress.

soldered RAM across the board

More than soldering, it’s actually packaged, physically placed into the same single black package as the CPU and GPU and storage, and then that whole single package is soldered to the board.

Lots and lots of people went on the 98 to XP to 7 to 10 path, skipping Me, Vista, and 8. No reason that pattern can’t continue.

Intel’s packaging doesn’t seem to be that far behind TSMC’s, just with different strengths and weaknesses, at least on the foundry side. On the design side they were slow to actually implement chiplet based design in the actual chips, compared to AMD who embraced it full force early on, and Apple who rely almost exclusively on System-in-a-Package designs (including their “ultra” line of M-series chips that are two massive Max chips stitched together) where memory and storage are all in one package.

So what IS their strategy now?

I think they need to bet the company on regaining their previous lead in actual cutting edge fabrication of semiconductors.

TSMC basically prints money, but the next stage is a new paradigm where TSMC doesn’t necessarily have a built-in advantage. Samsung and Intel are gunning for that top spot with their own technologies in actually manufacturing and packaging chips, hoping to leapfrog TSMC as the industry tries to scale up mass production of chips using backside power and gate all around FETs (GAAFETs).

If Intel 18A doesn’t succeed, the company is done.

Foxconn had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company.

You’re thinking of Fairchild, not Foxconn.

William Shockley led the team that invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, and then went on to move back to his home state of California to found his own company developing silicon transistors, ultimately resulting in the geographical area becoming known as Silicon Valley. Although a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was an abrasive manager, so 8 of his key researchers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of a camera and imaging company with close ties to military contracting.

The researchers at Fairchild developed the silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit with germanium, but it turns out that semiconductor material wasn’t good for scaling and hit a dead end early on), and grew the company into a powerhouse. Infighting between engineers and management (especially east coast based management dictating what the west coast lab was doing) and Fairchild’s policy of not sharing equity with employees, led Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who had been 2 of the 8 who left Shockley for Fairchild) to go and found Intel, poaching a talented young engineer named Andy Grove.

Intel originally focused on memory, but Grove recognized that the future value would be in processors, so they bet the company on that transition to logic chips, just in time for the computer memory market to get commoditized and for Japanese competition to crush the profit margins in that sector. By the 90’s, Intel became known as the dominant company in CPUs. Intel survived more than one generation on top because they knew when to pivot.

They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80’s through the mid 2010’s, so probably closer to 30 years.

AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We’ll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.

I’m personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.

Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel’s struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn’t get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.

Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.

Meanwhile, TSMC’s 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They’ll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they’re going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.

So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they’ll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It’s a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.

How do you wake a Mac Mini? Is it enough to just press a keyboard button? If so, does the keyboard have to be wired, or does Bluetooth work?