The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Graham44]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The voice quality on 3G and more so on 4G is much better. But the European 2G GSM (not USA CDMA 2G) is a more reliable connection. At worst the data is 14.4 K, or 28.8 K on 2 channels. If the signal is good then EDGE mode and 245 K is possible using only 200 kHz. The 3G uses a 5MHz channel and the faster 4G uses a 20 MHz channel.

Ahh thanks for explaining that Quoth, so 3G and 4G sound better/ clearer, 2G more reliable

[Quoth]

The latest ChaptGPT (5) from OpenAI still produces plausible nonsense and uses more electricity to do it.
Current ordinary users are wasting the electricity of about 1.5m USA homes (which is usually a lot more than homes elsewhere), if they were using ChatGPT 5.

https://historians.social/@denschub@...96915822747632

OpenAI doesn't want to talk about the energy consumption of the model 5.

EDIT

Now blogged https://overengineer.dev/txt/2025-08...ther-llm-rant/

[ownedbycats]

AI Vent and Rant Thread

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The latest ChaptGPT (5) from OpenAI still produces plausible nonsense and uses more electricity to do it.

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/...iled_And_Wrong

It's always a good day when I can reference that.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[cc_in_oh]

Interesting - makes me wonder how much energy Copilot requires to tell me my probability of hitting a certain poker hand is -6%?

[j.p.s]

Web pages with line wrap disabled and that full screen on a 40 inch monitor still clip the text and have gigantic margins.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Web pages with line wrap disabled and that full screen on a 40 inch monitor still clip the text and have gigantic margins.

I first read that as a 40 column monitor, which were common in 1980. I bought an 80 column card and a CP/M Z80 card for my Apple II. Obviously I bought the wrong computer.

But what resolution is the 40″ screen? I like my 4K 23″ LG so much I wanted another, but I can't find any that small now.

There are no actual professional qualifications required for people to code web sites.

Web standards are also increasingly created by an advertising company.


Irrelevant: I got a S/H projector for €70 with a 5 year warranty. It's claimed to be able to downsample 4K to the native 1080p, but doesn't. Still, it's fine for VHS, DVD, BD, TV and Satellite. Spent €32 on a 1.8m white black-out blind held up by two mic stands. No bulb to fail and the LED backlight is OK indoors.

Anything that does 4K (like a PS5?) usually does HD anyway?

I see loads of projectors advertised on Amazon as 4K that are all really HD and now the supermarket has loads of TVs advertised as HD but are only 720p. Local TV and Satelllte is all either 576 or 1080. Europe DVDs are 576 (unlike USA 480) and BD are all 1080. How can they claim 720p is HD? They used to call it HD Ready which also was a lie as none of those TVs could receive Terrestrial HDTV, and 1080 is HD. Though I did once see a big plasma TV advertised as HD (it could accept an HD signal) but it was only 480 lines!

[j.p.s]

3840x2160

I doubt many web page authors are coders anymore. I blame authoring and hosting platform components (which they proably don't get to choose) and even browser quirks, bugs, and misfeatures.

(of course, professional web page authors with creative control have been making amazingly bad design decisions for many years.)

(On available display choices, I'm somewhat encouraged that laptops and monitors with 16:10 aspect ratios are stating to turn up.)

[Renate]

My laptop is 1920 x 1200, 16:10
My 29" ultrawide is 2560 x 1080, 64:27 or 21-1/3:9
I like that it can fit multiple windows but is short enough to see over.
More pixels wouldn't really do my eyes any good.

As far as ranting goes, I don't see why brightness control for desktop monitors doesn't work like a laptop.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

(of course, professional web page authors with creative control have been making amazingly bad design decisions for many years.)

(On available display choices, I'm somewhat encouraged that laptops and monitors with 16:10 aspect ratios are stating to turn up.)

"Professional" in the sense that they are paid. Which is the original distinction between Amateur and Professional.

Also QHD laptops.

My April 2002 laptop was 1600 x 1200. My last two were 1920 x 1080, which IMO is an inferior format for documents. You do need at least something by 1200.

I got a portable "matt" screen with USB-C power/video and HDMI video that's 16″ QHD (2560 x 1440). An 18″ would be a bit better, but it does sit in front of sad 1920 x 1080 laptop screen, or the even lower resolution ex-ChromeBook now running Linux Mint + Mate natively. I did buy the QHD screen at about €230 for the Raspberry Pi4b.

https://xkcd.com/732/

Though actually at normal TV viewing distance* and less than 65" we don't need QHD or UHD/4K, better frame rate would be better. Actually I have zero access to any 4K media. The sat boxes and disc players are all HD max. The streaming 4K I've seen elsewhere seems like marketing as some seems no better than HD or even decent DVDs upscalled.


Edit:
[* for viewing movies, TV content, not reading or editing text]

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Renate

As far as ranting goes, I don't see why brightness control for desktop monitors doesn't work like a laptop.

I've laptops where the brightness control is rubbish, but a script applied to a couple of media keys is OK.

The phones, tablets, monitors and TVs I have seem to have working brightness controls.

[nana77]

@Quoth: imho a technology's rant might go to the annunced ARM based laptops, that didn't took the fly, too .
For what I'd read, it could had been a nice opportunity to have (the first ones seemed pricely thought) a more secure platform, less battery demanding, and so as to help all of those projects that are in there, or to port them (the only company that did the entire port of its applications on ARM is Apple, if I recall it correctly).

I wasn't to know there was plasma TV @720p, or others than the Viera, and by checking it again, discovered that there was "152" 2160p 3D plasma" also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_display#2010s
(I'd kept mine just during the Covid time, then resold it at the same 300$ price: had an LCD unplugged for 10 years before, also ).

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by nana77

it could had been a nice opportunity to have (the first ones seemed pricely thought) a more secure platform, less battery demanding, and so as to help all of those projects that are in there, or to port them (the only company that did the entire port of its applications on ARM is Apple, if I recall it correctly).

Linux is mostly fine on ARM. Windows on ARM is pointless as the main reason to have Windows is business / corporate programs where the companies barely keep up with Windows releases (except MS, see Office 95 vs Office 4.3) and 30 years have shown little inclination to make their applications run on Mac, never mind anything other than Windows. Windows used to support more processors and a Desktop ARM had RiscOS and maybe UNIX by 1987.
Linux was viable by 1998 as a desktop.

Mac has had: 68000, PowerPC, Intel x86, AMD x86-64 (adopted by Intel) and now ARM. Apple first used ARM in the Newton. The iPad and iPhone (2007) run iOS which is derived from MacOSX, which is from NextStep, which is from BSD UNIX.

Win2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 & 11 are NT (Win2K, XP, and Win2003 Server are NT 5.x). NT has variously run on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, Alpha64 and Itanium (short lived). Win CE was at one stage a cut down NT and ran on ARM. HOWEVER, there has never been decent application support for anything other than x86 / x86-64 and in the days of NT 3.51, NT 4.0, Win2K and XP a lot of the business applications were hastily recompiled Win 3.x to Win9x applications ignoring NT security features and other NT features such as Named Pipe Creation. Often had to be run as Administrator.

The worst thing for small businesses and NT was the release of Win9x as a PC OS rather than dedicated gaming console. Set back quality and security bay maybe 10 years.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by nana77

(the only company that did the entire port of its applications on ARM is Apple, if I recall it correctly).

Kinda but not really. Apple have been running a version of macOS on ARM since 2007. You know it as "iPhone". So they had a big head start moving into the desktop space. But ARM -- Acorn RISC Machine -- has been around since the 1980s, predominantly in the "pocket" computing space: PDAs and mobile phones. Symbian, from the early 2000s, is one of the best but yes, Microsoft dabbled in ARM with Windows/CE. It... wasn't one of the best.

Linux kernel has had ARM support since before iPhone's launch because Android among others, but its been steadily gaining traction in the server space starting with credit card boards like Raspberry Pi and expanding into proper rack-mount servers. Pick a distro with an ARM port and it's going to run mostly the same as it does on AMD64.

Microsoft Windows... is an outlier. Partially because Microsoft largely abandoned everything but AMD64 after Xbox 360 (PowerPC), partially because of their half-baked dive into progressive web apps. Probably other reasons as well but long story short, Microsoft are playing catch-up to the rest of the industry.

[Quoth]

ChromeBooks are ARM and x86. Only makes much positive difference having x86-64 ChromeBook if you are wiping BIOS for native Windows or Linux (and not possible with all of them). Otherwise ARM Chromebooks are better. The screens tend to be poor.