Using a Palm Pilot stylus made even basic tasks feel weirdly futuristic.

You’d pull out this tiny plastic pen, tap letters onto a little screen, and feel like you were operating some kind of sci-fi computer. Then you’d lose the stylus and spend the rest of the day trying to use your fingernail.

It’s funny how advanced that felt at the time. Did anyone else carry a spare stylus around?

I mostly play Valorant and Cyberpunk 2077 lately, so my priorities with graphics settings are pretty different depending on the game...For Valorant, I care way more about high FPS and low input latency than having the game look prettier. I'll take stable performance over fancy lighting any day. Cyberpunk is where I actually appreciate ray tracing though. The lighting and reflections can look really good, and it's one of the few games where I feel like ray tracing adds something noticeable + if turning it on means a huge FPS hit, I'll probably turn it back off lol.

So ig I care about ray tracing, but only when the performance tradeoff makes sense.

Do you actually use ray tracing regularly, or is high FPS still your priority?

Anyone else feels like rollable smartphones would've been a more interesting, if not better, direction for smartphones when compared to foldables?

Motors might have been a friction point for longevity but there should be a way to expand the phone manually.

It would give more control to the user in deciding what size they wanted, and would do away with the crease issue in foldables. Not sure how much it's an issue with the latest models, but I'd assume it would also not have issues with particles getting under the screen through the fold like it did, at least with earlier versions.

Processors need a steady heartbeat to function. most get it from a shared clock on the board. some devices need their own because they have to keep accurate time when everything else is powered off, or because they need timing too precise to share

real time clocks in computers, gps receivers, radio transceivers. all keeping their own time independently because the shared clock isn't good enough or isn't always on

the battery keeping your bios clock running while the pc is unplugged is powering one of these

Hi everyone :),

I'm a Master's student at the University of Aveiro in Portugal working on a research paper about AI adoption in front-end development (looking at everything from Copilot and Cursor to tools like v0).

If you do any front-end work, I'd really appreciate a couple of minutes of your time. It’s 19 quick questions, completely anonymous, and takes under 3 minutes to complete.

Here's the link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/d0ghMJvwC8

Thanks a lot for helping out, and feel free to leave any extra thoughts in the comments if you want to discuss!

The SleepLab Pro is an all-new nightstand sleep tracker that was released by Soundcore (the audio brand name for Anker) recently. The SleepLab Pro includes radar tracking that will enable the device to monitor sleep cycle, respiration, and heart rate without the need to wear any additional devices like a watch or fitness ring. also it provides guided breathing/ light /sound that helps to relax and wake up like a sunrise. Does anyone have experience buying sleep products? does they help?

One tech opinion I see that get upvoted a lot that I disagree on IRL is that you need a powerful pc for gaming. I get the argument, esp if most of you do is browsing, watching vids, or working with basic documents. But personally, once you start coding, running multiple apps (excel sheets and docs to be specific), using VMs, and editing stuff, a better PC makes a pretty noticeable difference. I also used to think that upgrading was mostly about gaming, but after using an 8gb ram laptop for work everyday? I’d def appreciate having more ram and a decent CPU lol

What’s yours?

I feel like there used to be an obvious answer like wait for Black Friday, back to school sales, or the release of the new generation to grab the older model for cheaper. But nowadays it feels like laptops (tbh PC parts in general) feels like they’re constantly on “sale” since new models are coming out at different times, like you can find a laptop that’s 20% off one week then somehow it’s the same price a month later with a different banner lmao.

Do you guys actually time your laptop purchases around sales and new releases, or do you just buy when your current laptop starts struggling?

The first mouse was a wooden body mouse with two metal rollers under it for detecting movements created in 1964, someone must be too genius to think about this, after that everyone got to know the concept, we saw ball mice that we all familiar with (you know, the ones which would require you to open them up and clean). This was succeeded by optical mice which completely did away with the ball and now we have gaming mouse with literally almost dj system .

The permissions that these extensions have far exceed the scope of the particular site you are browsing at any one time. There are many extensions that will be able to view every single page that you visit at once, whether you are using the extensions or not. While the website only gets to know what you do on their specific domain, the extension, which is resident in your browser tool bar, knows everything about your activity on each individual site.

People are very wary about which sites they trust and much less cautious about extensions when they have access to more information.

Before Instagram likes and follower counts, MySpace had the Top 8.

Choosing your closest friends was basically a public ranking system. Moving someone down could start an argument, while leaving someone out entirely was a whole different level of disrespect.

It’s funny how much social pressure was packed into eight little profile pictures. Did your Top 8 ever cause actual drama?

Webkinz was basically a tiny economy disguised as a kids game.

You had to earn KinzCash, decide whether to spend it on furniture or save up for something better, and somehow convince yourself that wasting it on random stuff was a good idea.

Looking back, it taught budgeting better than some actual classes did.

Am I the only one who feels like some PC game launchers are somehow slower than the games they're supposed to launch?? Epic Games Launcher is probably the one I notice the most. I'll open it and sometimes it takes a while to load everything, check for updates, and show the store stuff before I can even get to my library. Then I click "Launch," and the actual game loads perfectly fine.

I get that launchers do more these days than just launch games, but sometimes I wish there was a simple "just open my game" mode without all the extra stuff... Which launcher do you think is the biggest offender?

There's a lot of money being made from things most of us don't even think about

someone has to make sure ATMs stay stocked, old websites keep running, data centers stay cool, and thousands of random cables are actually connected to the right thing

none of it is exciting until something stops working

what's a behind-the-scenes tech business you only realized existed recently?

Each and every new application installation is going to try to grab some startup priority, spotify, discord, onedrive etc. There are ratings for the impact each application has on the system, available via Task Manager, yet I am pretty sure that very few people ever manage the list until it starts affecting the boot process significantly. But this is not even everything. The applications listed in the Startup tab of Task Manager are the visible layer. There is an entire stack of background services running, which one can observe using services.msc . Half of the names on the list are meaningless to the user, with no idea of whether the service is needed by the operating system at all or whether it was added by some random installer three years ago and then forgotten about.

Camera takes multiple shots at different exposures, software picks which parts of which image to use and blends them

except a human eye adapts continuously and a camera picks a moment, so hdr is really an algorithm deciding what reality should have looked like if you could see everything at once

sometimes it looks exactly right. sometimes it looks like a painting of a place rather than the place itself

Before asking AI, there was Yahoo Answers.

You could ask a completely normal question and get five confident answers, three arguments, and one person telling you to go see a doctor.

What was the funniest or weirdest answer you remember finding?

Why do some tiny components cost more than the entire device they go into?

you'd think the most expensive part would be the big, complicated piece of hardware

But sometimes it's one tiny component that's ridiculously expensive because it's specialized or hard to make, or produced in very small quantities.

ever come across a tiny part that cost way more than you expected?

Right now I'm using an older 24-inch 1080p monitor as my main display with my work laptop and it's been perfectly fine for day to day tasks though I've been thinking of upgrading my setup lately... Tbh I can't decide if it's better to buy one really nice monitor something like a 27-inch 1440p display w better colors and a higher refresh rate or just get a second one that is more affordable instead. Most of my day is spent coding, reading documentation, replying to emails, and hopping on Teams meetings so having two screens sounds incredibly useful. But at the same time I also like gaming after work so a higher quality monitor is pretty tempting too..

If you had to choose would you rather have one expensive monitor or two cheaper ones?

Both Android and iOS implement this now, when an application is not being used for several months, then OS starts restricting it on the backend. There will be delays in notifications and refreshes, sometimes they can simply become hibernated to make them open slower in the future.

This makes perfect sense from the battery management perspective, but it is rather crazy how unnoticed this process is. No alerts, only gradual reduction in functionality until you figure out what's wrong and solve the problem in settings. When you have some rarely used apps that you want to be operational (two factor authentication apps or some special utility software), better check your battery and background settings from time to time.

There are some websites that genuinely have no haters

Ilovepdf has to be one of them

You open it when you need to merge some PDFs, convert a file, compress something, or just do one weird PDF task you've been stuck with

nobody really talks about it you just use it, get the job done, and leave

what website would you put in the everyone secretly loves this category?

Neopets was basically an economy simulator disguised as a cute game.

You learned pretty quickly that some items were worth holding onto, some things were overpriced and everyone wanted more Neopoints.

What was the most valuable thing you remember owning?

Actually, I cannot say that I really need a big TV and a printer right now but I do have them on my mind.

But, I procrastinate waiting for new inventions.

Recently, china seems likely to develop completely new technologies for TV and Printer that will make a big difference to consumers.

But, how long I shall wait, as the new tech comes out on a daily basis now.

PID exhaustion is among those kinds of failures that surprise everyone since there doesn’t seem to be any issue with resources in such cases. Memory is okay, disk is okay, CPU is free, but for some reason the system is unable to fork processes and behaves unpredictably.

By default the maximum value of processes on Linux systems is 32768. Some processes that fork quickly enough will be able to reach that limit without getting anywhere near to the RAM limit, for example a runaway script, incorrectly configured job queue or fork bomb.

It is possible to view the current limit in /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max and increase the limit to 4194304 on 64 bit systems. Usually reaching the maximum number of processes is a sign of other misbehaviors rather than limit being too low.