• 12 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t. It designs part of the chips that go into their phones.

    Google also designs chips that go into its phones, and Microsoft has also designed chips and security co processors that have gone into PCs.

    (Of course, I’d never consider a Microsoft “security co processor” secure, nor an apple or google one).

    [edit] I also do not see your point of apple being better (or more virtuous) than google or microsoft for designing their own hardware, for 2 different reasons:

    • Currently Microsoft and Google have immense control over the software of PCs and phones. Apple wants to have full control of both the software and the hardware, and making their own hardware is a big step towards that goal. It means they’re restricting you (the user) from using the hardware you bought for your own purpose.

    • Making custom hardware does not make a company more or less virtuous. Manufacturing/designing capabilities are just spending money in the respective industry. As I mentioned before, both Google and Microsoft have designed their own chips, and they also have designed chips for their servers. I would also argue that we should stop humanizing companies. They don’t have human traits, they’re not virtuous, they’re just there to take your money and go.



  • Yes, and no. No app will display the image if it wasn’t already capable of displaying webp, period.

    However, there are many places (mainly websites where you can only upload certain formats, but it can also be apps) where the underlying infrastructure supports webp, but they do a simple extension check first with a list of file extensions that doesn’t include .webp. In those cases, changing the extension to .jpg will get the image through the filter, and the underlying system will detect the format using the magic number at the beginning of the file.

    The same thing can happen when your OS has no associated app to open .webp, but the app it uses for .jpg can also display .webp.
















  • The launch was terrible, but there are some things that keep them apart from the rest of terrible launches.

    Cyberpunk 2077 was a really ambitious game, with a lot of new mechanics and incredible graphics. Beasts like that are really difficult to optimize for a large range of computers with different specs, so at first it ran poorly on some.

    The most notably buggy release was the PS4 one. And rightfully so. They were trying to run a truly next gen game on a console which was more than a decade old. They not only had to optimize the game, but they basically made a completely different game, with different assets and engines, which was really difficult to do. Still, it was too much for the console, especially old PS4s that were full of dust or had old fans and were overheating.

    Another important fact is that users were also pressuring CDPR into releasing Cyberpunk 2077. It was delayed at least once (maybe twice, I don’t remember), and people wanted to play the game. They probably had to choose between delaying it another time or releasing it without polishing it that much.

    I believe it was Cyberpunk 2077 that started the trend of “release now fix later” games. However, I don’t think they really did it on purpose. The game was too ambitious for its own good, and having to develop, optimize and test two basically different versions of it was too big of a task for a studio that in today’s terms wasn’t even that big. The rest of the AAA producers just realized that CDPR still won loads of money at launch, and decided to release incomplete games on purpose, after seeing that CDPR could make profits that way.

    But must importantly, CDPR did an amazing job at fixing the game, unlike many other studios releasing broken AAAs. They optimized the code, fixed most of the bugs, improved the AI massively and made the game really stable, to the point where I’ve seen it running at 40 FPS on 10+ year old overheating laptops. Even though it took a while, they still delivered the game they promised to their buyers.