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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Sounds like you have caterpillars! Little green caterpillars decimated my petunias one year before I realized what was going on. They eat holes in the flowers, bigger and bigger, and then move on to the buds, eventually eating everything. The best thing to eradicate them is something called “Bt”, and it works fantastically well. It’s a spray you can find at garden stores that contains Bacillus Thuringiensis. You can read more about it, but it is 100% effective against caterpillars.






  • The amount of creativity Adobe products unleashed upon the world is staggering. Decades ago they were groundbreaking. Just about any piece of media you have ever seen from the past 35+ years has been touched by them in some way.

    The Adobe we know now was not the Adobe of back then. Just like the Apple of 1985 is not anything like the Apple we have today. Back then it was about actually developing useful technology, and not just coming up with innovative ways to squeeze every last dollar from every possible customer for the same bloated and tired piece of software.

    Back then you had a problem (eg. people wanted to create artistic stuff), and then you had a solution (powerful software to help you). Now software like that is everywhere, so the only way for companies to “compete” is by adding bloat and jacking up the price. Hence the Adobe we see today, full of pointless crap and complex licensing schemes.



  • Thank you for appreciating my contribution. :) And to answer your question, because it happens too fast. Everything powers on, the voltage drops below a critical point, the CPU forgets who it is or where it is, and the reboot begins. I’m sure nowadays they make efforts to anticipate this. But back then, the industry was busy cramming increasingly powerful hardware into devices, and no one had really given any thought to how the batteries would react after years of use. Then environmental factors could make everything worse - coldness can suck dozens of percent off even a healthy battery.


  • Sadly, very few people seem to understand this. I’m all for seeing a big company have to take responsibility, but the way people just blindly follow this is very disheartening. You can’t have true accountability without accuracy. They hear “throttling old phones” and assume the rest. The supreme irony is, throttling was the only way to keep older devices running longer. When I was doing kernel development on the Note2 and Note4, people constantly reported sudden reboots or otherwise rapidly depleting battery while using the camera. The old batteries just couldn’t handle the sudden spike in demand for near 100% CPU/GPU utilization + full display brightness + camera hardware powered on + heavy RAM/IO use, all at once. So the voltage would drop, even for just a few milliseconds, then the CPU would starve, and the device would reboot. Just like pressing the reset button on a PC. Limiting the CPU was the easiest solution for everyone. Do I think they should have done it silently? No. Do I think they did it to avoid being thrust into the spotlight when more and more of their users were reporting reboots? Yes. I think modern devices handle this much better because they learned from the past. Manufacturers didn’t realize back then what the degradation curve would be years into the future against acute spikes in battery demands.