snappyl's recent activity

  1. Comment on Brazilians flock to Bluesky after court bans Elon Musk’s X in ~tech

  2. Comment on US athletes are taking full advantage of free healthcare in Olympic village in ~sports

    snappyl
    Link Parent
    I've had to call the IRS a couple times and each time they've been ludicrously helpful and accommodating. That said, there is an obvious need for more agents. My wait time was measured in hours....

    I've had to call the IRS a couple times and each time they've been ludicrously helpful and accommodating. That said, there is an obvious need for more agents. My wait time was measured in hours.

    If you have to call the IRS, the one piece of advice I can offer is this: realize the agent isn't at fault for any of this and treat them like a normal person. If you're the one person not yelling at them that day, they will move heaven and earth to help you with your issue.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Apple Intelligence in ~tech

    snappyl
    Link Parent
    Fair and a good call out. I was assuming that at some point the font rendering was handed off to Windows and they could leverage that, but I also know about 0.0% on how that actually works.

    They could probably integrate with their own reasonably well, but win32, MFC, WPF, UWP, and WinUI

    Fair and a good call out. I was assuming that at some point the font rendering was handed off to Windows and they could leverage that, but I also know about 0.0% on how that actually works.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Apple Intelligence in ~tech

    snappyl
    Link Parent
    First I have to say that I don't actually know how these two systems work -- I only know "how they work" based on statements I've seen from the two companies, so this could be wrong. That said,...

    First I have to say that I don't actually know how these two systems work -- I only know "how they work" based on statements I've seen from the two companies, so this could be wrong. That said, from what I understand, I think there's actually a pretty big difference between Microsoft Recall and Apple Intelligence.

    The difference that I see between the two is that, in the case of Apple there's no more data kept by the system than what you already have there today, but in the case of Microsoft it keeps everything that's on your screen and an analysis of everything that has ever been on your screen unless you disable Recall. So, if I don't explicitly save a file on my Mac or create a note in Notes or add a new synthesizer in MiRack, Apple Intelligence wouldn't have any idea I did anything at all. By contrast, a thing needs to merely appear on my screen for Recall to be aware of it. So I could open a Notepad window and start typing and that's now saved for eternity (or until I run out of Recall space) without needing to even save the note.

    I think both systems sound neat and I'm excited to see where they go, but I am much more apprehensive with having an actual history of everything I've ever done on my PC than I am with simply having a supercharged search mechanism into what's already there. That's not to say that Apple's system is without issue. I still haven't processed how this might affect victims in abusive relationships for example, but in my use case and for people in my family I see Apple Intelligence being safer than Recall specifically because

    • there isn't a centralized database that can be uploaded when we get a virus
    • there isn't a database that contains all of our passwords and credit card numbers scraped from every entry field everywhere
    • there isn't a stupid screenshot OCR tool running in the background, wasting power all the time

    And, as an aside, on that last point from what I understand from the Apple State of the Platforms presentation, when you activate Siri/Apple Intelligence it'll analyze the screen using the actual UI components. So it knows there are text fields, images, and windows etc. It doesn't take a screenshot and OCR everything, but rather it uses the actual object tree so there's no lossy conversion nonsense where it tries to understand low contrast text somewhere -- it just gets the text from the presentation layer directly. When I heard Microsoft is probably just running everything through OCR, it hurt me a little. Apple's implementation isn't like some super fantastic implementation or anything -- it's just correct. Microsoft's implementation is just bad. I can only hope there was some huge hurdle preventing them from just grabbing the text that was already there because running screenshots through OCR just seems wrong. Especially when you're doing this every few seconds.

    So for me personally and for my threat model, I'm fine with Apple Intelligence but I'll probably only keep Recall on systems that I use for like beta testing operating systems or whatnot. It won't be on my daily driver. Of course that all changes if we find out Apple feeds our data into ad targeting systems or Microsoft makes strides in blocking out sensitive data and truly securing their database. So we'll see how they develop over time.

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Rumor: Insider claims Xbox handheld under development in ~games

    snappyl
    Link Parent
    You'd probably have to change your graphics settings every time you dock/undock, but this sort of set up does already exist with the Asus ROG Ally. They have a few eGPU you can plug into the ROG...

    You'd probably have to change your graphics settings every time you dock/undock, but this sort of set up does already exist with the Asus ROG Ally. They have a few eGPU you can plug into the ROG XG port or whatever it is and add a mobile RTX 4090 if you like.
    Theoretically, you could also do something similar with upcoming handhelds running Intel internals that I suspect will expose a thunderbolt port.

    Downside though, at least for the Asus solution, is it is ludicrously expensive. I've made whole PCs to game on for the same cost as their eGPU.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Starfield - what are your thoughts? in ~games

    snappyl
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    In my experience on my beast of a rig, performance has been good and I have had no crashes yet. I'm only in about 8-ish hours. I'm seeing over 100fps most of the time on a 13900kf with a Radeon...

    In my experience on my beast of a rig, performance has been good and I have had no crashes yet. I'm only in about 8-ish hours. I'm seeing over 100fps most of the time on a 13900kf with a Radeon 7900xt on ultra 1440p. One thing that could potentially get a bit annoying are load times, though. I have a crazy disk array setup so my load times are around a second or two, but for comparison my XBox Series X takes 3-5 times as long and over a play session does get a little annoying if I'm doing a lot of zone hopping. That'll probably calm down though if I keep playing and learn where things are better.

    Performance-wise on an XBox Series X, the framerate holds 30fps most of the time, but it'll have occasional dips. I haven't tried any gun battles on XBox yet -- I just did some shopping -- but I would expect they would be fine and hold steady at 30 the whole time. Graphics quality is obviously cut down, though. A hazard of the Zen 2 architecture and 16GB of total system memory I would suspect. Still, equally enjoyable as my PC I would say and definitely playable. Also I experienced no crashes here either.

    For giggles I'll probably also try the game on a 13400f with an Intel Arc A770 16GB in the coming days. Should prove interesting.

    Edit: It's unplayable on a ROG Ally on low 1080p. In the lodge I get a VERY inconsistent 10fps. Once leaving the lodge I get a crash to desktop.

    2 votes