Sunday, May 10
Daily News Stuff 10 May 2020
Bigger Is Better Edition
Bigger Is Better Edition
Tech News
- Meizu has released the 17 and 17 Pro, the company's first 17" smartphones. (AnandTech)
Snapdragon 865, 6.6" 2340x1080 90Hz AMOLED display... Wait, I've been bamboozled.
8GB or 12GB RAM, 128GB or 256GB storage, four rear cameras ranging from 5MP to 64MP, 5G, and no headphone jack or, as far as I can tell, microSD card slot.
- Benchmarks for Intel's discrete graphics solution have leaked unless they haven't. (WCCFTech)
The DG1 is "faster than a PS4".
That puts it at about 40% of a Radeon 5500XT - but about 30% faster than the integrated graphics in a Ryzen 4800U.
- MIT Press has republished six of Stanislaw Lem's books. (Medium)
Lem is most famous for Solaris but in my opinion his best work is The Cyberiad, a whimsical tale of slightly - okay, not so slightly - insane robot inventors. And by robot inventors I don't mean they invent robots. Although I think at one point they did do that.
I will pick up His Master's Voice and Highcastle, both of which were translated by Michael Kandel, who is a goddamn genius at his craft. Read The Cyberiad, and then pause for a moment and reflect that it was written in Polish.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
- Speaking of books, I just picked up Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher. If that name seems slightly improbable, you're right. It's the nom de plume of Ursula Vernon - author of the Hamster Princess series - used when she's writing for an older audience.
Part fairytale romance, part police procedural, and part courtroom drama, with a dash of murder and palace intrigue. And dead gods. And zombie golems. Worth a look.
"Don’t mind me, ma’am, I’m a paladin. Just checking your dovecote for rogue perfume weasels, now that your neighbor’s been arrested on suspicion of poisoning a visiting head of state.â€
- C is supposedly the most popular programming language.
This seems unlikely.
-
Elon Musk says he's leaving Hotel California.
The crazies at Ars Technica are up in arms.
Or would be if they believed in them.
Disclaimer: And all things considered it may be a good thing they don't.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:57 PM
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1
In my admittedly limited (and now 19 year out of date) experience, C would be way less popular if there weren't so many languages that were The Next Big Thing, but are really just terrible at Not Being C.
Posted by: Karl Drexler at Monday, May 11 2020 01:06 AM (MP9/9)
2
Lem's Invincible is great, it really reads like a long-format Pirx the Pilot story: a simple problem that gets ever more bizarre the closer you look at it. He did a story I can't recall the name of that involves middled-aged men dying at a particular resort that follows a similar plan. And Hospital of the Transfiguration was an eye-opener when I read it a couple of decades ago. Definitely overdue for a reread.
Posted by: normal at Monday, May 11 2020 09:31 AM (obo9H)
3
And from what I recall, Kandel translated from the German translations of Lem.
Posted by: normal at Monday, May 11 2020 09:39 AM (obo9H)
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