Text-based UI can be super clean! Not great for small screens though

Eww, the examples… There’s Copilot twice but no FOSS apps I recognize (perhaps there’s open source ones that come with AOSP in the System section…)

Of course. You need about 1 hair per 2x2 pixels on a 1080p screen and 4x4 on a 4K screen. That totals about 10,000 hairs per icon in the simulation, which can be precomputed into animations. Third-party icons will be 2D (or 2.5D if the FG/BG layer of the icon is handled separately, doubling the animation data). Now it’s “just” a matter of drawing 10,000-20,000 lines with precomputed shading and textures from the icon’s 100x100 bitmap render.

Also, the GPU is only used by apps while they’re in the foreground, so the launcher might be able to use all of its power. And it could cache animations for existing icons (who cares if the system uses 32 GB of storage? Buy the higher option, peasant!)

Fluffiger Yaerno

Are you living in 2010? Nope, full hair simulation. Gotta optomize the impressions of people trying demo units at the store, multitasking be damned. The base model has 4 GB of RAM btw.

And leave threads lying in directions you touched them in. Yes, it’s a lot of RAM but who needs multitasking? Impression at the store is what drives sales.

Come on, at least cowsay or robotfindskitten. I once hacked into a Linux kiosk and found the former in a “games” directory.

With a hair simulation running, applying force every time you interuact. They have to justify the GPU and the best ROI is to maximize first impressions. Yes, it will make the launcher RAM-hungry and super unresponsive when multitasking but usability is secondary.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-do-they-call-it-oven

A microwave oven, no matter the dimensions, uses microwaves. If the wavelength increases tenfold, it becomes a radio wave device. Also not an oven, because it’s no longer good at heating water molecules so you don’t of in the cold food and of out hot eat the food.

There is no good spot in a microwave for a human

(The half-wavelength or distance between hot spots is about 6 cm. You’ll get burns of internal organs and most likely cataracts because the proteins in your eye’s lens, which gets very little cooling due to lack of blood flow, coagulate at high temperature.)

So they probably didn’t output .raw images, I think those are more recent. That would have been a weird use of the file format!

FWIW, pixels don’t have to be square or in a grid.

Are autochrome starch particles subpixels? How many are there in a pixel?

Some professional cameras take photos with hexagonal pixels, for example

Really? I thought the Bayer filter was near-universal, and Wikipedia does not list what you just mentioned.

Anyway, older LCDs in portable color TVs, cameras and camcorders did use that pattern but that’s on the display side.

Pixel purists say pixels have to be in a square or rectangular grid. Stitching is a good analog example. Yet others think that 2-subpixel “pixels” (RG and BG, alternating in a checkerboard pattern), as seen on some OLED screens, should be counted as half-pixels, like on Bayer-filter cameras (one RGGB period of the repeating pattern is one full element, not two).

Anyway, there are digital systems with other layouts:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q137757955
Early pocket color LCD TVs, cameras and camcorders would use hexagonal grids similar to shadow mask CRTs’ phosphor dots.

By the way, neither color CRT phosphor dots nor stripes are pixels because they’re not individually addressable. In fact, depending on the beam’s position, a single phosphor dot can represent a gradient, and on B/W CRTs the whole screen is a single phosphor-covered surface.

You’re still being reductive. An indicator LED can work without any part of it more than 10 °C above ambient temperature. No incandescent light bulb can achieve this.

And yes, there are indeed lighting systems that use many low-power LED chips spread over a large area, none of which get hot even by human standards. These cost a lot of money but last extremely long.

Power density of the Sun is approximately 276.5 W/m³. That’s counterintuitively little. A classic LED 3mm plastic package has the volume of less than 40 mm³ and some white ones can handle about 100 mW without a heatsink. Even leaving space for connections and airflow, you can easily overpower the Sun by volume by orders of magnitude.

A fun article mentioning that 276.5 W/m³ is about a reptile’s metabolism (and they famously produce little body heat): https://what-if.xkcd.com/148/

On replacing the Sun with another light source: https://what-if.xkcd.com/151/

Basically, as this Stack Exchange discussion correctly states, human intuition is quite useless when thinking about things orders of magnitude outside our experience.

Meanwhile, you say “hot” because that’s what your finger felt. Not really convincing of your ability to think in cosmic proportions.

I’m trying to get you to stop reducing temperature scale to “anything over 60 °C is hot” because it’s not useful: a clearer distinction should be made between something that regularly causes house fires and something I unscrew while it’s on to put under my blanket when my toes are cold. Human perception of temperature (classic 0-100 °F) just does not allow comparing things an order of magnitude higher (in Kelvin ofc). There’s also more to heat, its effects and how it’s perceived than a single measurement of temperature: thermal mass, conductivity, color (exchange via radiation differs between black and white bodies) etc.

Also, it’s indeed ad hominem but you did choose the username yourself.

Nah, too cold. It stopped moving and the computer can’t generate any more random numbers to pick from the LLM’s weighted suggestions. Similarly, some LLMs have a setting called “heat”: too cold and the output is repetitive, unimaginative and overly copying input (like sentences written by first autocomplete suggestions), too hot and it is chaos: 98% nonsense, 1% repeat of input, 1% something useful.

Username checks out

Boiling hot, as opposed to METAL-MELTING REMOTELY-SCORCHING HELL-BLAZING INFERNO

How long before you admit there is a point to calling them “cold light sources” because their color temperature is higher than what black body radiation (incandesce) can do?