Lots of coat hangers in there.

Nope. There is an industry standard way of measuring latency, and it’s measured at the halfway point of drawing the image.

Edit: you can measure this through Nvidia’s LDAT system, for example, which uses a light sensor placed in the middle of the display combined with detecting the exact moment you create an input. The light sensor picks up a change (such as the muzzle flash in an fps) and measures the difference in time. If you were to make this work on a CRT running at NTSC refresh rates, it would never show less than 8.3ms when in the middle of the screen.

If you are measuring fairly with techniques we use against LCDs, then yes, CRTs have latency.

Lots of the book is just “old man yells at cloud”, even though Bradbury wasn’t particularly old at the time. Not chronologically, anyway.

I do think he made a good point about porches. Places where you hang out and invite your neighbors to just come by. Houses aren’t really made that way anymore; my house has a small concrete block out front that’s barely enough to fit two chairs comfortably. Setback requirements in zoning mean it’s legally impossible to add anything else, at least as the city zoning code stands right now.

There’s a definite change in how my parents’ generation interacts with people compared to my generation. It was more normal just to drop by and talk, though perhaps with a phone call to check in first. My friends would consider that weird.

He mangles some of the pros and cons of CRTs towards the end.

They aren’t going to be indefinitely reliable. The phosphor goes bad over time and makes for a weaker image. Doubly so for color phosphors. Some of them are aging better than others, but that’s survivorship bias. We might be looking at the last decade where those old CRTs can still be in anything close to widespread use. Will probably be a few working examples here or there in private collections, of course.

CRTs do have latency, and this is something a lot of people get wrong. A modern flatscreen display can have better latency than CRTs when the hardware takes advantage of it.

The standard way of measuring latency is at the halfway point of the screen. For NTSC running at 60Hz (which is interlaced down to 30fps (roughly)), that means we have 8.33ms of latency. If you were to hit the button the moment the screen starts the next draw, and the CPU miraculously processes it in time for the draw, then it takes that long for the screen to be drawn to the halfway point and we take our measurement.

An LCD can have a response time of less than 2ms. That’s on top of the frame draw time, which can easily be 120Hz on modern systems (or more; quite a bit more in some cases). That means you’re looking at (1 / 120) + 2 = 10.3ms of latency, provided your GPU keeps up at 120 fps. Note that this is comparable to a PAL console (which runs at 50Hz) on CRT. A 200Hz LCD with fast pixel response times is superior to NTSC CRTs. >400Hz is running up against the human limit to distinguish frame changes, and we’re getting there with some high end LCDs right now.

When talking about retro consoles, we’re limited by the hardware feeding the display, and the frame can’t start drawing until the console has transmitted everything. So then you’re looking at the 2ms LCD draw time on top of a full frame time, which for NTSC would be (1 / 60) + 2 = 18.7ms. Which is why lightguns can’t work.

Rogue One is how you do two acts of slow burn, followed by a third act that gives you payoff for your patience.

The first season of Picard is exactly how not to do that.

Fine, we’ll make it three, but only if you promise not to play blue.

She’d be the top villain on so many other shows, but DS9 has so many great villains that she almost gets lost.

Or just, like, fucking not.

America. Doing the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives.

These joke Calvinball Magic sets are getting out of hand.

I’m not sure I’d like the actual guy, either. The stories we have are the result of several decades of embellishment before eventually being written down. Some no doubt make him look better than the actual story, and others are just made up entirely.

From what we do know about him, he was a weird apocalyptic peasant preacher. He probably was executed for exactly what he was accused of before the Romans: trying to make himself the king of the Jews by leading an overthrow of the Romans. People like that aren’t healthy people to be around; see your modern apocalyptic cult leader for details.

Eh? He basically collapses in his chair and has a little soliloquy about it.

Jesus would make sure they are tested for drugs before curing their leprosy.

There’s also repair outlets that sometimes keep nice tools up front for when a customer comes in and they can fix it quick, but then have bullshit tools in back that for the real work.

Almost all the discourse around episodes 7 and 8 when they were new was “Ray is a woke Mary Sue character”, and later “Rose and Finn were just diversity inclusions”. Complete with death threats sent to the actors.

Rose and Finn’s episode 8 scenes could have cut entirely and you’d immediately have a better movie. That wasn’t because they were diversity inclusions, but because it was terrible writing.

Unironically this. It was a great movie moment, but the domino effects throughout the franchise didn’t make for good storytelling.

But sensing a tiny amount of blood will send them into a murder frenzy, so the sharks have that going for them.

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn’t know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren’t going to be compressed as much because they aren’t handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won’t propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.