It's definitely not necessary. It can be convenient.
It wouldn't be very high on my list of wants, but I'll use one if available.
My problem was not using the thing for long periods of time and it kinda jamming in place. They have a little quarter-inch hex key hole on the underside that you can use with a hex key to get 'em going again if that comes up.
If you've got a local Stable Diffusion setup and a GPU that can handle it, sure.
Some other folks might be able to give recommendations for sites.
I'd try doing upscaling using the upscaler models, probably SwinIR_4x, which I use for general-purpose upscaling.
I'd do so using the SD Ultimate Upscale extension, which can do the upscaling in tiles so that it doesn't use VRAM proportional to the size of the image you want to upscale.
I don't know what you have installed. I tend to use ComfyUI, which is more powerful, but I'm pretty sure more people have the older and somewhat-simpler Automatic1111 installed.
Once you've got Automatic1111 up and running:
If you don't have the SD Ultimate Upscale extension installed:
Go to the Extensions tab.
Click the "available" tab.
Click the "Load from" button.
Install "ultimate-upscale-for-automatic1111"
Restart Automatic1111.
Click the img2img tab.
Either drag the image you want to upscale to the "Drag image here" square or click on it and select the image.
Click the little yellow right triangle next to the "Resize to" area, which will copy your image dimensions to the image size fields.
Set "Denoising strength" from what I think is 0.75 by default to 0.16. The 0.16 is a bit arbitrary, but it's roughly what you want when upscaling an image rather than regenerating it; 0.75 is too high. Feel free to try playing with it if you want.
Go down to the "Script" drop-down menu and choose "Ultimate SD upscale"
Check the "SwinIR_4x" upscaler. You can play with others, but this is one that should be reasonable for photographs.
Change "Target size type" to "Scale from image size". Set "Scale" to "4".
Click "Generate".
Eventually your image will show up in the right hand square.
ComfyUI works pretty much the same way: I'd also use the SwinIR_4x upscaler with the SD Ultimate Upscale node there. Can walk you through if you want, but at a high level:
I'd install the ComfyUI Extension Manager. ComfyUI doesn't have the built-in ability to automatically download nodes, so you gotta manually install this one. You can also manually install and update nodes, but I'd recommend having the manager to make updates easier.
Use the ComfyUI Extension Manager to install the SD Ultimate Upscale node.
Set up a workflow that loads the image and runs it through the SD Ultimate Upscale node and then saves the image.
I haven't set up batch image processing of pre-existing images with either Automatic1111 or ComfyUI; my only batch-processing has been on generated prompts. However, I believe that that's also possible, so you can just feed it a large number of images and then let it run until completion. I couldn't off-the-cuff give directions to do batch upscaling, though.
Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data...
You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn't a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren't those occasions.
That's not a completely reliable fix, a third party library could still call setenv and trigger crashes, there's still a risk of data races, but we've observed a significant reduction in SIGABRT volumes.
Hmm. If they want a dirty hack, I expect they could do a library interposer that overrides setenv(3) and getenv(3) symbols with versions that grab a global "environment variable" lock before calling the actual function.
They say that they're having problems with third party libraries that use environment variables. If they're using third-party libraries statically-linked against libc, I suppose that won't work, but as long as they're dynamically-linked, should be okay.
EDIT: Though you've still got an atomic update problem with the returned buffer, doing things the way they are, if you don't want to leak memory. Like, one thread might have half-updated the value of the buffer when another is reading the buffer after returning from the interposer's version of the function. That shouldn't directly crash, but you can get a mangled environment variable value. And there's not going to be guarantees on synchronization on access to the buffer, unlike the getenv() call itself.
thinks
This is more of a mind-game solution, but...
Well, you can't track lifetime of pointers to a buffer. So there's no true fix that doesn't leak memory. Because the only absolute fix is to return a new buffer from getenv() for each unique setenv(), because POSIX provides no lifetime bounds.
But if you assume that anything midway through a buffer read is probably going to do so pretty soon, which is probably true...
You can maybe play tricks with mmap() and mremap(), if you're willing to blow a page per environment variable that you want to update and a page of virtual address space per update, and some temporary memory. The buffer you return from the interposer's getenv() is an mmap()ed range. In the interposer's setenv(), if the value is modified, you mremap() with MREMAP_DONTUNMAP. Future calls to getenv() return the new address. That gives you a userspace page fault handler to the old range, which I suppose -- haven't written userspace page fault handlers myself -- can probably block the memory read until the new value is visible and synchronize on visibility of changes across threads.
If you assume that any read of the buffer is sequential and moving forward, then if a page fault triggers on an attempted access at the address at the start of the page, then you can return the latest value of the value.
If you get a fault via an address into the middle of the buffer, and you still have a copy of the old value, then you've smacked into code in the middle of reading the buffer. Return the old value.
A given amount of time after an update, you're free to purge old values from setenv(). Can do so out of the interposer's functions.
You can never eliminate that chance that a thread has read the first N bytes of an environment variable buffer, then gone to sleep for ten minutes, then suddenly wants the remainder. In that case, you have to permit for the possibility that the thread sees part of the old environment variable value and part of the new. But you can expend temporary memory to remember old values longer to make that ever-more unlikely.
I think that Trump Term 2 is likely to look a lot like Trump Term 1.
Whether-or-not one calls that "that bad", of course, involves some matter of perspective. The article here is about a Term 1 guy coming back for Term 2, which is pretty much in line with things being like Term 1. I expect a lot of the same stuff that I didn't like the first time. I expect him to make outrageous statements, violate a lot of Presidential norms, probably do some questionable things legally to try to benefit himself. I expect him to play into conspiracy theory where he thinks it might benefit him. I expect him to make a lot of self-contradictory statements. I expect him to bluster and make crude statements. I expect him to be constantly in the news for doing something outrageous.
I expect that a lot of his outrageous statements are going to just be political theater, the same way they were the first time around. A lot of very firey talk about immigration and free trade agreements, making sure that he's seen by supporters saying things, not a lot of dramatic actual effective change in most policy.
I don't expect some of the predictions that are often thrown around here about the end of democracy or the free press or a long list of other things to come true.
One of the points that I want to see is what happens on Ukraine policy. This isn't a major popular issue for Republican voters the way policy on Israel is. Vance has been pretty vocal about opposing support for Ukraine, but I also don't know (1) the degree to which that is an actual concern for Vance, (2) the degree of influence that Vance will have, as the VP's power is usually almost entirely dependent on what the President wants to delegate to them and listen to them, and (3) the degree to which the bureaucracy will affect this, as politicians don't simply go craft foreign policy on their lonesome, and there are going to be a lot of the same domain experts that were present under Biden. It's possible that there could be very material impact for Ukraine, but I could also believe that the impact is muted.
My guess is that four years from now, I'm probably going to be pretty happy to see the last of him. But that was pretty much the case in 2020, and I remember no shortage of dire predictions in the opposing press and social media all through his first time through that didn't pan out.
I don't know how viable it'd be to get a viable metric.
https://www.goldeneaglecoin.com/Guide/value-of-all-the-gold-in-the-world
Value of all of the gold in the world
$13,611,341,061,312.04
Based on the current gold spot price of $2,636.98
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$227 billion as of November 7, 2024, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[3]
So measured in gold at current prices, he'd have about one-sixtieth of the present global gold supply.
However:
It's hard to know what the distribution of gold hoards are. One dragon might have an exceptionally large hoard.
It's hard to know how many dragons we're working with.
It's likely that a world with dragons has a different value of gold.
That gold in our world isn't actually accessible to Bezos at that price. If he tried buying that much, it'd drive up the price, reducing the effective percentage of the global share that he could afford to buy.
When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.
If that's true, that it's simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a "premium publisher" or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop -- it's not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can't think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.
I think that there's more to it than that.
My own guesses are:
I won't buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don't want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That's not due to unwillingness to pay for games -- I buy many games on other platforms -- but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don't know how widespread of a position that is, and it's probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that's a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.
Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a "gaming rig" being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you're aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.
This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers' desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]
They aren't perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can't lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you've multiple of those platforms available.
So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that's accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they're willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it's pretty common to get kids smartphones these days...but to some degree, that "replaces" having a computer. So if you've got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don't have a lot of cash floating around, they're probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.
kagis
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Smartphone dependency over time
Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.
Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.
I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It's got a small screen. It's got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren't terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can't rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.
Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can't expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.
Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user's either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.
I remember commenting a couple months back on one of those "Arab-Americans not voting for Harris" posts, something along the lines of "it's your vote, but I think that you're going to find that you'd rather have Harris than Trump" and listing some past policy moves like the embassy in Jerusalem, and then someone downvoting and responding something along the lines of "identical candidates".
I know that modern dryers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it's maybe hard to project that.
But I don't know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.
kagis
Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it'll do that.
My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)
Funny... Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:
This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.
The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should've taken a minute or two, took 15.
A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don't even know they have one, much less how to clean it.
In MOST modern washers, it's behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter...
The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that's collected on it.
Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.
If they have a display capable of it, might be a good idea for washers to suggest to the user that it's draining slowly and that checking the filter might be in order.
We whitened them.
Well, time and nature did.
We kind of adopted the idea of them being white as normal.
I think that the age data there is the most interesting bit.
There's very little difference in perception for the 18-29-year-old demographic, with 16% of Republican/lean-Republican voters saying that the economy is excellent/good, and 21% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.
But every time the age cohort rises, so does the separation in perception of the economy. For 65+ year-olds, it's down to 7% for Republican/lean-Republican voters, and up to 55% of Democratic/lean-Democratic voters.
That specific keyboard may take some doing, but I suspect that you could get Cherry key caps in those colors, if it's the color aesthetic you like.