tal

On the plus side, he said, both parties shared the same fundamental analysis: that Spain has a basic lack of housing.

rewinds a decade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_property_bubble

In 2013, Raj Badiani, an economist at IHS Global Insight in London, estimated that the value of residential real estate has dropped more than 30 percent since 2007 and that house prices would fall at least 50 percent from the peak by 2015.[10] Alcidi and Gros note; “If construction were to continue at the still relatively high rate of today, the process of absorption of the bubble would take more than 30 years”.[11]

In the period for 2007-2013, Spanish house prices fell by 37%.[21] Each year almost a million homes were built in Spain, more than in Germany, France, and England combined.[22]

I guess that housing oversupply issue got solved despite Spain's population size being pretty flat since then.

That's frame scaling in real-time, rather than offline texture scaling.

The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.

Microsoft is still positioning Muse as an AI model that can help game developers prototype games. When Muse was unveiled in February, Microsoft also mentioned it was exploring how this AI model could help improve classic games, just like Quake II, and bring them to modern hardware.

Okay, here's a much-less ambitious use of existing AI technology that I think would be vastly-more-useful than whatever they're off doing: how about just going out and using existing AI upscaling techniques and limited human interaction to statically-upscale the textures by maybe 2x to 4x, take advantage of more VRAM on newer hardware?

There's another article up saying that "Germany is going back to the 1930s". While I think that that's probably over-the-top, what happened in Germany in the 1930s was in significant part that the US had the Great Depression when German industry was desperately dependent on US finance. Then it was followed up by US markets closing up, which exacerbated things. Germany ultimately was hit harder than the US economically.

I don't believe that Germany in 2025 has the same degree of extreme exposure to the US economy that it did in the 1930s, but I do think that there is a general problem that Trump's tariffs, if left in place for any length of time, are probably going to produce a lot of wealth destruction, not just in the US, but also other places. Economic hardship tends to breed political extremism, so it could encourage political extremism in countries other than the US.

Apparently in addition to Trump probably producing a recession and thus clobbering oil demand, OPEC decided, for some reason, to increase production.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-extends-sharp-drop-surprise-061831274.html

Oil’s rout was triggered Thursday by US President Donald Trump deluge of tariffs, which threaten the global economy and energy consumption. Hours later, OPEC+ tripled a planned output hike for May, in what delegates called a deliberate effort to lower prices to punish members that were pumping above their quota.

West Texas Intermediate futures have fallen about 14% in just two days — settling near $61 a barrel in a move similar to steep losses seen during the pandemic — while Brent also ended the day at the lowest since 2021. The declines were exacerbated on Friday by China’s retaliation against the US duties, including a 34% tariff on all imports from the US starting within a week.

Both are bad news if you're a major oil exporter.

It will most likely make Europe, along with the US and most of the world, poorer than would otherwise be the case.

With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption.

I mean, for something like an LED, maybe, but a lot of computing devices can vary power consumption based on what they're doing.

I do agree that it's pretty ridiculous that anyone is selling a power bank without a watt-hour rating.

I mean, that splitter device cannot be USB compliant, if it's giving more than 5V to a device that never negotiated more than 5V.

I'd also guess that if it's just silently feeding the second device from what the phone has negotiated, it's probably not compliant in that it's probably drawing more from its power source than the phone has negotiated -- USB devices are responsible for indicating what they'll draw.

You could make that multiport device USB-compliant, but it'd require having the splitter be a DC-DC power source and having it negotiate some PD draw sufficient to power both devices.

I use my computer for so many things and I have about 200 applications on my computer. I don’t know why, but it bothers me that everything happens on this one machine as well as seeing so many app icons (even grouped into folders).

If what you want is organization from a workflow standpoint, I think that you'd have an easier time just using some form of launching system that doesn't show a single monolithic menu of all your installed executables. Either have a launcher that permits breaking up stuff by task and lets you customize those groups, or just use a non-menu-based launching system.

I mean, /usr/bin on my system has 2694 entries. I don't see them, though, since I'm launching software via bash or tofi, so...shrugs

VMs can have uses, but I'd mostly either use them for software compatibility, or to isolate things for security reasons. They wouldn't be high on my list of tools to organize workflow.

If I ever need to unload 40 tons of illicitly-obtained meat, I'll be going to you, Mr. Semi.

Ooh, I didn't know that someone had developed a mechanism to move issues and PRs.

I remember commenting on the fact that while it's easy to move the source repo itself from location to location, as git makes that easy and self-contained, issues and PRs didn't enjoy that.

Panamá should ban all military ships from all nations from going through the canal. That would go a long way towards promoting world peace and easing trade.

That's a critical passageway for the US. It'd be something like the Strait of the Gibraltar being severed for Europe, cutting half of the entity off from the other half by water and requiring their Med-based and Pacific-based ships to go around Africa to reach each other.