Facebook is advertising me a department in Malaysia where the designer went overboard. Each interior photo is an illustration of “and then Ostap was carried away”. An approach completely opposite to the concept “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away”. Here, it seems the designer worked until there was simply no space left to add anything. Try to find the button (the only one) on the third screenshot.
Do any of my friends or friends of friends happen to be SwiftUI (Mac) programmers? I recently created a useful little app for myself, but the damn thing won’t work on the M3. It doesn’t show any errors or anything. It just doesn’t work. There’s no one I can ask for advice.
UPDATE: recompiled it, and it started working. But that didn’t reduce my number of questions. Looking for someone who wouldn’t mind sparing some time for me and my app. The app seems potentially useful for everyone in general.
First impressions of the MacBook M3 Max:
1) Cool screen. Very black black.
2) Hibernate on my M3 Max starts up in 31 seconds. On a MacBook with an Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU 2.40GHz 32Gb with SSD, the same code took 173 seconds. That’s 5.5 times slower. This is really cool.
3) The battery discharges much slower. I’ve been putting load on the CPU for over an hour, and 100% has turned into 91% 🙂 This is probably more of a contrast effect with a three-year-old laptop whose battery is already dying. The old laptop would have nearly drained by now.
Came back from the store. This is how we get delivered a MacBook 16” M3 Max 36Gb
Stole a picture from Pasha Kosenko. He bought purple tomatoes and was amazed. Pulling probably interesting stuff for my audience out of the comments.
This is a special breed of tomatoes, developed through genetic editing. Essentially, these are GMOs “on steroids”. But it’s one of the few examples where a GMO looks genuinely useful, not just pretty. Specifically, the Del/Ros1 and AtMYB12 genes (among others) have been introduced to induce the biosynthesis of anthocyanin, which not only gives a dark blue color but also acts as an antioxidant. Essentially, one tomato more or less equals a handful of currants of the same weight. The genes were taken from the common houseplant “snapdragon”, which produces a lot of it. The project was carried out by the John Innes Centre in Norwich.
We’re talking about anthocyanin. This pigment is found in various lilac and purple plants and berries (currants, blackberries). It has powerful protective properties. There are breeds of mice that die from cancer at 3 months old. If these mice are fed large doses of anthocyanin, they do not die from cancer. That is, if they eat anthocyanin, they do not get cancer. Ilya Kolmanovsky once said in an interview with Shikhman that one such tomato contains as much of this substance as a bucket of blackberries. My research shows that it’s not quite a bucket, but a good handful indeed, yet the point is, it’s quite beneficial (specifically, there’s 283.5 mg per 100g, in black currant – 190-270 mg/100g. But there are tomato varieties with up to 5000mg/100g, which is still far from a bucket of blackberries. There’s also a black crowberry or bearberry, where it’s about 4180 mg/100g). It’s also claimed that anthocyanins protect against bacteria, which is why such tomatoes don’t spoil for a long time.
Decided to set up my phone to record and ended up with a minute-long clip about how to quickly whip up a delicious lamb soup. From the moment of “maybe I should make some soup” to “there we go, it’s cooking, I can get back to work,” it takes less than 10 minutes, and another half hour until it’s a bowl on the table. The multicooker really is a cool device. There’s also a potato peeler and an onion slicer in the video 🙂 Someday I’ll add a carrot-potato slicer to save yet another minute. True, all these gadgets need to be washed afterwards.
Just a crazy demo of the StarEngine technology from Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), specifically from Chris Roberts, who is the “father” of Wing Commander. “Everything you see was captured in-engine in a single continuous shot with no loading screens.” The game Star Citizen, on which the demo is based, is criticized online, but our focus here is not on the game, but on the progress made.
The only game I play every day is chess, but it seems to have reached the limits of graphic capabilities, whereas here it’s simply leveling up.
There’s an engine called CryEngine, which originates from the 2004 shooter Far Cry and has undergone many iterations of development. With the right skills, projects developed with its help can surpass any games on Unreal Engine 4 or Unity in terms of picture quality. Amazon bought the licensing rights to CryEngine and created Lumberyard based on it.
Technologically, CIG’s brainchild is essentially CryEngine/Lumberyard on steroids. Their vice president of technology, Marco Corbetta, one of the original creators of CryEngine, and CIG essentially gave him and his team carte blanche in 2015 to expand the engine’s capabilities to the maximum. It seems to have paid off. But now they have legal disputes and issues with CryEngine. Formally, they transitioned from CryEngine to Amazon Lumberyard, a fork of CryEngine.
Today we sit behind the wheel, but the car won’t start. The new battery drained completely for no apparent reason. Friends helped jump-start the car, I reached the official dealer, where they charged me 200 bucks for diagnostics + firmware update.
It turned out that indeed, the firmware T-SB-0089-21 does fix some bug related to battery discharge. They assured me that I was not the only one, and now everything would be “hunky-dory” (as well as “nifty”, “tip-top”, etc.).
Buying your own home puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of the owners. In a condo, you simply call the office, a technician comes over, and fixes the leaking tap or replaces the broken dishwasher, sometimes without even figuring out what’s wrong with it. Of course, this convenience does cost a few hundred dollars a year (including access to the pool, gym, cleanliness in common areas, and equipment maintenance). In your own home, you are responsible for any breakdowns, whether it’s gas, water, electricity, plumbing, or appliances.
Usually, the washing machine and dryer come “with the house.” Sure, you could replace them immediately, but if they work fine, why bother? Each costs between $700 and $1000.
In the last eighteen months, we have had the following breakdowns: 1) two toilet tanks in the bathrooms, 2) air conditioner 3) dishwasher 4) kitchen faucet 5) and just recently – the clothes dryer.
The typical American in such cases would call a professional. That’s what I did with the air conditioner. I paid $200, but I learned where everything is and how things are connected. They also told me that the price was much below the usual because my device was under warranty, and as I understood, they were still billing the vendor. I included a screenshot from a forum where almost the same job was billed at $1300, but the person declined their service and fixed it themselves for $89. There are plenty of such stories. But generally, a normal price for something like this is around $200. Or buy the part for $15 and install it yourself. Being an engineer really pays off 🙂
Of course, there was zero documentation with the house. None at all. I tried to request documentation for the electrical wiring – there isn’t any. It seems like no one ever has it. Eventually, the capacitor in the external unit of the air conditioner (which is a big dummy bigger than a cubic meter) failed. It costs $15 on Amazon.
And now the dryer breaks. I went to check how much the repair would cost. I read a recent story from our area on Reddit. Yesterday, an appliance repair technician visited a woman, charged $100 for diagnostics, and reported that it was necessary to replace the timer and the thermostat. The next morning, she received an email offering: $195 for labor, $165 for the timer, and $18 for the thermostat. The total comes to $378. Thus, the total cost (including the initial visit) is $500, which is just under the price of a new dryer. She asked if this was even reasonable. Maybe it would be better to just buy a new dryer then.
When our dishwasher broke down a year ago, I tried fixing it myself. Just on a whim, maybe it was something simple. I found the water inlet valve was not working. I bought a replacement on Amazon, General Electric WD15X10015 Water Inlet Valve Dishwasher. The cost was $15. About the same price as the parts for the toilet tanks. Well, the kitchen faucet was a bit more expensive. Back to the dryer.
The thermal fuse had failed. But it didn’t just fail — the ventilation pipe through which the dryer “spits” lint and dust and blows humid air outside was clogged. The cost of the thermal fuse was the same $15.
It’s worth noting that neither the thermal fuse for the dryer nor the water inlet valve can be bought in stores. They are only sold online, but with next-day delivery. Surely in the pre-internet era, various repair companies must have been making money by the shovel.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 