I've had my eyes on this Asus for a while now, but the rtings review mentions aggressive matte coating that seems like it might negate the high PPI advantage by randomly blurring the result. What's your impression?
I bought the 6K ProArt on launch, replacing an older 4k 27" Dell monitor. The new monitor is definitely an upgrade, but not as great as I was hoping. Like you said, the matte coating is by far the worst part of this monitor. I would say that it isn't bad enough to return the monitor, but it's definitely noticeable on white windows.
I've definitely enjoyed having the extra screen real estate over the 27" monitor, and the extra resolution has been very helpful for having a bunch of windows open in Unity.
This year at CES there were a number of new monitors unveiled that compete in this space. There's a new Samsung monitor (G80HS) that is a 32" 6k with a higher refresh rate than what you'd find with existing offerings. Unfortunately it has the matte coating instead of glossy, so clarity will suffer.
Also of interest are the new 27" 4k offerings with true RGB stripe subpixel layout. This should fix text rendering problems, especially on Windows. Both Samsung and LG are making these OLED monitors with the true RGB layout. There will almost certainly be glossy coatings offered with these panels, and they'll have higher refresh rates than IPS. The main downside will be brightness for full screen white windows. I think the Samsung panel is a bit better than LG in terms of brightness.
This is akin to how I've (technically?) stepped back from a 5K 27" to a 4K 32". Likely due to scaling and how far I sit from the screen (about 24" -- average I think) things look the same? At least, I don't notice that the 4K is any worse.
Me being me, I can't help but think I should have a 5K or 6K or whatever, but the price is... high. So I figured I'd try a 4K 32" since the OLED was cheap and the result was this post because the subpixel pattern messed with me. But now for the replacement I'm looking at a simple (but nice color / high end) 4K 32" IPS LCD.
And having been using one for the last day, I'm pretty content with it. It's like everything I wanted from the OLED without the eye strain.
When I used to ride Caltrain to/from work, I would often have an uninterrupted stretch of 45+ minutes in a cozy single seat (I would always take an upper deck seat in the "gallery" car) to either doze off or use this time to focus on something. I would get so much done on those days if I managed to avoid the sun blasting too much sunlight on my screen/seat. This commuter rail experience is probably familiar to many of us, but it's specific to commuter rail - being a passenger on a subway or in a car/bus is too chaotic or bumpy to do this.
More generally, I find that switching up your surroundings is absolutely vital for your brain's ability to focus on hard tasks. I will hit a wall if I try to work multiple 10+ hour days sitting in one spot, but a comfortable spot in a different coffee shop or lounge can totally trick my brain into powering through.
> This commuter rail experience is probably familiar to many of us, but it's specific to commuter rail - being a passenger on a subway or in a car/bus is too chaotic or bumpy to do this.
I second this. It is hard for me to do anything productive on a bus because the stop/start frequency is too high and more physically demanding than a train.
Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.
It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.
Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.
That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.
Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.
It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.
"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"
This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.
And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.
We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.
We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
This was reported all over, but certain circles considered it politically incorrect to acknowledge that anything good happened in the years 2020-2024, so perhaps you can be excused for missing it. Some random web hits. Check out the graphs herein the massive investment in factories:
Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.
As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.
It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.
It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.
That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).
But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).
But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.
Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.
German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.
> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?
Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?
> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.
Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).
A self inflicted wound.
Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers.
And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.
Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US).
But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.
Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.
CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.
I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper.
Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense.
I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago
Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.
This is oversimplified view of the world and China.
China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).
> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.
Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.
In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.
There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)
This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.
That's a funny meta comment, where are you from? Are you consuming a lot of US based content? I ask because I mainly see Americans here writing about the "CCP" based on what they regularly hear from government officials and certain news outlets. It's rarely framed as "China" it's usually "the Chinese Communist Party" emphasizing "Communist" because that word carries negative connotations in the US given its history and in the EU. But maybe framing is similar in your country.
So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.
I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).
Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.
Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.
The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
Then you've had a very different experience than I have. If you don't mind me asking, where exactly were you in mainland China, and for how long?
Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.
I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.
> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.
That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?
> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?
Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.
I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.
> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?
He’s saying it as a realist.
China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.
Yes and no - yes it’s dumb to give up and let china have a defacto monopoly on the future of energy production. But no insofar as sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things. Because once you have them, they keep producing for you.
The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.
I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.
Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.
I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.
For real. I think there's a type of American that would rather hype up the evils of china than admit the distance the US has fallen from its purported ideals. This year I've seen students deported for criticizing Israel, mobs of poorly trained militarized federal police roaming neighborhoods violently disappearing people without trial, the number of homeless grow to 700,000, food kitchens with lines around the block and a president straight up selling pardons to drug dealers.
Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh
I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.
If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.
Exactly - the author thinks all these tools just materialized fully formed in their software ecosystem instead of surviving years of competition with other, less memorable tools. It takes many years of work, luck, and yes, marketing to get to the point where any of these tools are, and a memorable name can absolutely make the difference between support and oblivion.
Pixels are very noticeable at 32" 4K. If you don't notice them, your eyes still do - they try to focus on blurry lines, causing eye strain. You might not notice, but it adds up over the years.
It's simple math. A 32" 4K monitor is about 130 PPI. Retina displays (where you could reasonably say the pixels are not noticeable, and the text is sharp enough to not strain the eyes) start at 210 PPI.
Subjectively, the other problem with 32" 4K (a very popular and affordable size now) is that the optimal scaling is a fractional multiple of the underlying resolution (on MacOS - bizarrely I think Windows and Linux both know how to do this better than MacOS). Which again causes blur and a small performance hit.
I myself still use an old 43" 4K monitor as my main one, but I know it's not great for my eyes and I'd like to upgrade. My ideal would be a 40" or 42" 8K. A 6K at that size would not be enough.
I am very excited about this 32" 6K Asus ProArt that came out earlier this year: https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proar... - it finally gets Retina-grade resolution at a more reasonable price point. I will probably switch to two of these side-by-side once I can get them below $1K.
> It's simple math. A 32" 4K monitor is about 130 PPI. Retina displays (where you could reasonably say the pixels are not noticeable, and the text is sharp enough to not strain the eyes) start at 210 PPI.
It's also incorrectly applied math. You need to take into account the viewing distance - the 210 PPI figure often quoted is for smartphone displays (at the distance one typically holds a smartphone).
For a 32" monitor, if your eyeballs are 36" away from the monitor's surface, you are well beyond the limit of normal visual acuity (and the monitor still fills a massive 42 degrees of your field of view).
Take a look at this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2 - the limits at "normal visual acuity" (18 observers ~25 years old) are far beyond what you imply. You need over 95 ppd to exhaust normal visual acuity.
> For a 32" monitor, if your eyeballs are 36" away from the monitor's surface
Why are you assuming 36"? Nobody I know uses 32" monitors at 36" away. Most people use less than half that distance for their laptops, and just over half for desktops.
> the 210 PPI figure often quoted is for smartphone displays
The 210 PPI figure is a minimum, it was used as marketing when Apple first started offering Retina displays. Apple's modern iPhone displays have far higher PPI. Apple's own marketing was challenged by critics who noted that visual acuity may top out closer to 200 ppd.
Perhaps Retina doesn't matter to you - that's OK. But for most of us, 32" 4K is nowhere near the limit of our vision, and by staring at these monitors all day, we are slowly degrading it.
> and by staring at these monitors all day, we are slowly degrading it
Yes, but that is probably accelerated more by sitting closer to screens than is healthy for too long, than it is by the resolution of the screen. It's anecdata so maybe truly everyone you know does sit 45cm away from a desktop monitor - but I can't say I've ever experienced that.
Of course if you do sit that close then higher resolution is resolvable. Perhaps what your statement actually should be is: "Perhaps Retina doesn't matter if you sit at a (perfectly comfortable and healthy) further distance away from the screen - that's OK", otherwise I can a reader may think you are trying to imply the OP is somehow inferior, but really the only thing that differs is your viewing distance.
> You need over 95 ppd to exhaust normal visual acuity
32" 4K at 36" is 91 ppd. Which I guess is good enough, seeing as I'm well the far side of 25 year old.
> Why are you assuming 36"? Nobody I know uses 32" monitors at 36" away.
36" is the point where I can see all 4 corners of the monitor at the same time (and significantly too close to focus on one corner and have the other 3 corners in view at the same time).
40 degrees of FoV is massive for a single monitor! I'm sitting here wondering how much you have to turn your head to use this size monitor up close
I actually have two more monitors, one on each side of my main one, in portrait mode :) And yes, I turn my head when I want to see them.
I'm glad the low resolution monitors work for you. I just don't want people to proclaim that everything about displays is solved - it's not. There are meaningful, physiologically relevant improvements to be made. It's been over a decade since 4k60 became the standard. A lot of younger people would really benefit from mass produced 6k120 monitors.
> You move your eyes, not your head. Plus or minus 20 degrees is a trivial amount of eye movement.
Maybe this varies a lot between humans, because I'm trying the experiment, and any closer than 24 inches requires physically moving my head to comfortably read text in the corner of the 32" display.
Even at 36" it's fatiguing to focus on a corner of the display solely through eye-movement for more than a few seconds.
> Your requirement to comfortably see everything with minimal eye/head movement is atypical
I don't think it's by any means an uncommon requirement. Movie-watchers want to be able to see the whole screen at once (with the exception of some intentionally-over-the-top IMAX theatres), gamers want to be able to see their radar/heath/ammo/etc in the corners of the screen. I'd like to be able to notice notifications arriving in the corner of the screen.
I suppose it's still true that nobody you know uses monitors of that size three feet away, but I'm very definitely one of those people.
Why on earth would you put the monitor so close to your face that you have to turn your head to see all of it? That'd be obnoxious as all hell.
> ...by staring at these monitors all day, we are slowly degrading it.
No, that's age. As you age, the tissues that make up your eye and the muscles that control it fail more and more to get rebuilt correctly. I think the colloquial term for this is that they "wear out". It sucks shit, but we're currently too bad at bioengineering to really stop it.
Correct. At the risk of stating the obvious, indoor plumbing (and public sanitation in general) is not something required for you as an individual. It's something required for society as a whole to sustain value added activities that require dense urban areas without debilitating epidemics wiping out productivity (and any other measure of well-being) in those urban areas.
Always how it shows up too: someone says "I've been camping and it was fine".
That's not what a lack of indoor plumbing is like though. In fact going camping when indoor plumbing exists isn't even the same: when it's a few enthusiasts digging holes sparsely is very different to when the entire population is doing it.
They are quite inefficient (yes, even the vacuum insulated ones) and the Zojirushi one has plastic inside the lid that disintegrates if you always keep the water on the high temperature setting. That means plasticizer from melted plastic in your drinking water.
This is wrong by at least three orders of magnitude. Very roughly, a human requires 2000 kcal a day = 2 kWh a day so 75 kWh is enough to cover about a month, putting aside the upstream losses in the energy supply chain (which are far greater for humans).
In general, saying that biological systems are "wildly efficient" is... wildly wrong. Some biological processes are optimized by evolution... most are not. There are no bicycles in nature.
How old was your previous CPU? Different people have vastly different expectations when it comes to upgrading. I'm certain I can play all of the games that I'm interested in on my 3 year old Ryzen 7600x, and that I'm limited by the 5 year old GPU (which I dread upgrading because of the crunch). Would someone with a 5 year old CPU be well served by upgrading to a 9600x, absolutely. But some people think they have to upgrade their Threadripper every year.
(As far as work goes, I realize this directly contradicts the OP's point, which is the intent. If you know your workflow involves lots of compiling and local compute, absolutely buy a recent Threadripper. I find that most of the time the money spent on extra cores would be better spent on a more modest CPU with more RAM and a faster SSD. And more thoughtful developer tooling that doesn't force me to recompile the entire Rust work tree and its dependencies with every git pull.)
I think it was a Radeon 3600x, state of the art 6-7 years ago. Replaced with 9950x. I was surprised by how big of a difference the CPU update had on frame rates. (GPU: 4080)
I also do a lot of rust compiling (Which you hinted at), and molecular dynamics sims leveraging a mix of CUDA/GPU, and thread pools + SIMD.
Makes sense, yeah, a 3600x is far behind the curve now.
Edit: Took a look at AMD's lineup and realized they did something I got conditioned not to expect: they've maintained AM5 socket compatibility for 3 generations in a row. This makes me far more likely to upgrade the CPU!
> all AMD Socket AM5 motherboards are compatible with all AMD Socket AM5 processors
I love this. Intel was known to change the socket every year or two basically purely out of spite, or some awful marketing strategy. So many wasted motherboards.
Oh wow. Didn't save me though. I've never been able to drop a new CPU into a motherboard - it's always CPU + RAM + MB time due to the socket consideration you mention.
Even for compilation workloads, you need to benchmark beforehand. Threadrippers have lower boost clocks and (in the higher core count models) lower base frequencies than the high end Ryzen desktop CPUs. Most build systems are not optimized for such high core counts.
I've been a happy paying Spotify user since 2010 or so. I'm still mostly happy with what I get out of it... they did try to shove podcasts down people's throats, but backed off pretty quickly. One thing that recently infuriated me though, was something they call "smart shuffle". Like, you press shuffle on your playlist, it starts shuffling. You press it again, it should turn off the shuffle, and just keep playing in order, right? Not according to Spotify's amazing designer team. With Spotify it's a tri-state switch. If you press it again, it activates a "smart shuffle" which has nothing to do with shuffling, instead it adds extra suggestions to your playlist.
There is a way to turn this "feature" off on mobile, and they've been promising a way to turn it off on desktop for many months now. As a paying user, being treated like an idiot this way definitely makes me resentful and is the most enshittified thing I've seen Spotify do.
I have been paying Spotify for 5 or 6 years now, and while I love how much amazing music it has helped me to discover, the UI is absolutely atrocious. The way it puts together artists, albums, individual songs and playlists in the same list, or the way it mixes your personal selection with their algorithmic recommendations, is extremely confusing to me. I am seriously considering going back to the high seas.
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