I’m pretty sure a lot of it is simply because that sort of mixing style is pretty fashionable at the moment. If you mix movies like they were mixed in the 90s and 2000’s (i.e. very clear and distinct dialog) then they don’t ‘sound’ modern.

Even in cinemas the mix is awful and almost inaudible half the time. Extreme example but I saw Tenet at the cinema and had to guess at half of the dialog because Christopher Nolan is especially and increasingly fond of this.

Tension, mostly

And you can say no if you want to!

The same people who complain on Amazon reviews that the cable broke for “no reason”

In the mechanical keyboard community this even-larger-than-ISO-enter size is generally referred to, quite affectionately, as the “bigass” enter.

I recently swapped my Dad’s Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.

I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.

But of course, it’s running Linux, not Windows.

Next day he phones me up really happy that it’s “so much faster than the old machine!”

And it really is a lot faster, but it’s not the hardware. It’s just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.

Either way, mission accomplished.

I did buy a (secondhand) nvidia card specifically for AI worlkloads because yes, I realised that this is what the AI dev community has settled on, and if I try to avoid nvidia I will be making life very hard for myself.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it still absolutely sucks that nvidia have this dominance in the space, and that it is largely due to what tooling the community has decided to use, rather than any unique hardware capability which nvidia have.

Different experience for me. My mum was a lovely person who never pressured me into anything, and in retrospect I wish she had, just a tiny bit more.

She asked for example if I wanted to learn an instrument - and I said no, and she respected that and didn’t push. The truth is that I’d have actually loved to, but I was afraid of failing, and scared to start.

Now in my late thirties I finally bought an electric piano and started learning.

I don’t blame my mum at all, but I guess my point is that kids will very often say “no” to things, because no is the easy answer. If she’d said instead “try a couple of lessons, and if you don’t enjoy it you can stop” then the outcome would have been quite different.

Microsoft would absolutely love it if people had zero computer literacy and had to ask an AI for help to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks.

Because then the AI becomes indispensable.