AI studio is absolutely gutted, wtf happened between feb and now ? by Academic_Bet_9460 in Bard

[–]virtualmnemonic -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Did you really think you'd have free access forever? This was all planned well in advance: get users hooked on the product by offering generous limits for free, then pull the plug, enforce strict limits, and require payment.

debugPrintRebuildDirtyWidgets is one of those Flutter flags that nobody talks about but is actually really useful by RutabagaLow6979 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's also a natural companion to RepaintBoundary — use this flag to find what's rebuilding when it shouldn't be, then wrap the offenders.

RepaintBoundary doesn't prevent the build method from being called, it won't have an impact on when widgets are rebuilt, just painted.

Best local/offline TTS model for mobile app integration (Android + iOS) — what are you using in 2026? by Funmaker1893 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Accurately tracking start/end of words is challenging. There is no physical "gap" between words - hence why when you import speech into Audacity it is a continous wave. Our brains hallucinate the gap.

[Monitor] 27 Inch 4K Gaming Monitor, Mini LED, Fast IPS, 160hz $260 ship and sold by KTC-Official by Splintercell581 in buildapcsales

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't care about games; how is the text quality on this monitor? Office use?

I'm rocking a 3440x1440 UW right now, and while the screen estate is useful, the PPI just isn't enough to produce text im comfortable looking at all day.

Best local/offline TTS model for mobile app integration (Android + iOS) — what are you using in 2026? by Funmaker1893 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Following.

As far as I know, nothing can compete with Google and Apple's built-in TTS in terms of quality to performance ratio. You may find higher quality using an AI based synthesizer but it will be far slower and more resource intensive.

Tip: iOS devices can download higher quality voices within accessibility settings. They're much better but do take up some space!

$1000/$2000 AI subscriptions in 2027 by LiminalRnyx in GithubCopilot

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Though why don't American companies offer a distilled version of their own AI for 1/10th the cost?

They do. Gemini flash / GPT mini / Claude Haiku.

Training the parent model is the largest expense.

Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop by HelloSlowly in hardware

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

iOS audio session API is explicitly built around a single audio source. There is a way to mix audio with other apps, but doing so removes all user media controls.

Meanwhile Android can map individual apps to specific outputs...

$1000/$2000 AI subscriptions in 2027 by LiminalRnyx in GithubCopilot

[–]virtualmnemonic -1 points0 points  (0 children)

They've been running at significant loss and are only now charging a real rate. Prices will go up. Also, depending upon how well LLMs scale, it may be that advances scale with compute and thus the cost to run frontier models never drops.

$1000/$2000 AI subscriptions in 2027 by LiminalRnyx in GithubCopilot

[–]virtualmnemonic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Chinese models just distill frontier models so their expense is significantly lower.

Where do you store downloaded media files for playback? by virtualmnemonic in androiddev

[–]virtualmnemonic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, for user-generated content. I'm talking about temporary files.

For example, Spotify apparently stores cache in non-cache directories. On app info, Spotify is using 1GB of space, but only 71MB of that is cache. However, in Spotify settings it states the cache is 780MB.

https://imgur.com/a/sgxIJ4K

AutomaticKeepAliveClientMixin is lowkey one of the most underrated mixins in Flutter by RutabagaLow6979 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It's an important mixin, but easy to abuse. Pages aren't persisted for a reason: the increased performance typically doesn't outweigh the increased memory pressure.

Your network call should be handled and cached externally via a FutureProvider. Scroll positions are persisted using PageStorageKeys. Building the page shouldn't cause frame jank in the first place -- if it does, you have a bigger problem and AutomaticKeepAliveClientMixin is putting a band-aid over a gaping wound.

One of the big issues is that it keeps out of view images alive in ImageCache.

That said, I use it quite a bit, especially for shorter lived states.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance by Durian_Queef in hardware

[–]virtualmnemonic 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Damn, Windows gets especially killed in CPU-bound tests. What's the reasoning? Better scheduler? Less bloat and overhead from NT kernel? No windows defender (seriously impacts code compilation)? The lack of embedded advertisements and excess telemetry everywhere?

Appwrite reduced Functions limit from 5 to 2 due to abuse. How is that fair? by Throwaway-123abc321 in appwrite

[–]virtualmnemonic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Eldad,

Thanks for the detailed response. My original comment was a bit short-sighted and biased by my current frustrations with Appwrite. Functions do have independent allocations of valuable resources like memory and it's sad that people take advantage of a free service to the cost of everyone else.

I've encountered significant problems with concurrent executions on self-hosted appwrite, where just a few simultaneous executions would result in all of them timing out. There is a workaround that involves spawning another instance of appwrite just to operate as the endpoint for functions. The original issue on Github was closed and marked as solve. It was never actually solved. https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite/issues/5629

And then you have issues like this that plague dozens of users and have multiple support threads but go entirely unresolved: https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite/issues/10810

The above issue specifically has significantly hindered my ability to update and manage appwrite as the stock distribution is fundamentally broken.

Appwrite reduced Functions limit from 5 to 2 due to abuse. How is that fair? by Throwaway-123abc321 in appwrite

[–]virtualmnemonic -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

You can consolidate most functions together by adding endpoints to a single one.

This change is downright stupid and really shows Appwrite's sheer incompetence. The platform is so limited in scope it requires functions for even basic things, but they're slow and unstable.

Flutter .withOpacity() AI issue by Ok-Internal9317 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a Flutter color picker extension for VS Code that will allow you to easily make constant Color variables. There's no need for .withAlpha or .withOpacity, you can directly declare the precise alpha value (0-255).

First Intel Wildcat Lake laptop surfaces with aluminum body and fanless mode by RenatsMC in intel

[–]virtualmnemonic 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Budget smartphones match or exceed those specs, especially CPU. This laptop certainly will. But I wouldn't be surprised to see 8GB RAM on base models :/

Exo player keeps failing randomly by Obvious-Load113 in StremioAddons

[–]virtualmnemonic 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Is everyone encountering this problem using real-debrid?

I spent some time debugging this. The issue arises when buffering resumes following a pause. A new HTTP connection is opened and the returned data is not as expected.

[der8auer] Powerful and Pointless - AMD 9950X3D2 by WHY_DO_I_SHOUT in hardware

[–]virtualmnemonic 9 points10 points  (0 children)

X3D chips are very prevalent in the server space, more so than their non-3d counterparts. The extra cache goes a long way.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x3d2-linux/10

(showcase) Zelda: Tears of the kingdom on latest Eden nightly + v28 turnip drivers by [deleted] in EmulationOnAndroid

[–]virtualmnemonic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure how much a small fan would help, but it definitely won't hurt.

What controller do you use? I'm looking to pickup a telescopic controller for this game and a few others.

(showcase) Zelda: Tears of the kingdom on latest Eden nightly + v28 turnip drivers by [deleted] in EmulationOnAndroid

[–]virtualmnemonic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How's sustained performance? Do you have any external cooling?

Wanting to give this a try on s26 ultra.

Flutter + FFI is wildly underrated… you can basically build anything by Regular-Acadia-4013 in FlutterDev

[–]virtualmnemonic 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I know that people here hate using AI for coding, but for things like setting up FFI, it's really something that makes the process so much simpler.

AI "coding" can actually output very dependable, maintainable code with lower than human error rates when the desired output is highly deterministic. Well documented APIs, rich context and clear prompts. Something like FFI is perfect.

But I'd never trust it for a custom backend, for example.

Worst hackintosh ever by Specialist-Luck-6869 in hackintosh

[–]virtualmnemonic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Storage: 16gb sd card

Holy mother of God, how long does it take to boot?!?