An anytime algorithm monotonically improves some evaluation metric. For a sort, the evaluation metric is usually the number of inversions in the list. At completion, there will be zero inversions. If at time 0 there are N inversions, then at time 0 < t < completion time there will be ≤ N inversions; that is, the list is "more sorted" than it was before. As the various examples about games and animation elsewhere in the comments show, this can be interpreted as "somewhat smoothly moving towards sorted over time," which is an (occasionally) ((rarely)) useful property.
Okay, but it gives you a mostly good answer! Unlike many other sorts where if you interrupt it before the last step, you get total nonsense.
It's basically asymptotically approacting the correct (sorted) list instead of shuffling the list in weird ways until it's all magically correct in the end.
> Unlike many other sorts where if you interrupt it before the last step, you get total nonsense.
which ones you have in mind? and doesn't "nonsense" depend on scoring criteria?
selection sort would give you sorted beginning, cocktail shaker would have sorted both ends
quick sort would give vast ranges separation ("small values on one side, big on the other"), and block-merge algorithms create sorted subarrays
in my view those qualities are much more useful for partial state than "number of pairs of elements out of order" metric which smells of CS-complexity talk
Is it just me or is the total amount of funding at the Sovereign Tech fund (https://www.sovereign.tech/faq) hilariously small? 11.5 mil eur right now? 17 mil next year? Better than nothing of course, but...
yes, though perhaps stating the obvious: it depends what they do with it.
Ladybird currently has 8 full-time devs [1] and is making impressive progress on delivering a browser from scratch. Wise investment in small, focused, capable teams can go a long way if they're not chasing VC-driven Unicorn status (or in stasis as a Google anti-trust diversion).
That's not challenging your point though: in the face of competing budgets at US tech giants, EUR17Mn still barely registers above noise level. Nevertheless, it's a start. We can only hope it grows and doesn't get shut down by some political lobbying by the aforementioned US behemoths. A modest budget might actually help there - not yet big enough to cause concern to incumbents.
What is the point of a new browser engine? What will be the advantage over WebKit/Blink/Gecko?
Sure it “isn’t monetized”, but nothing stops you from making non-monetized forks of chromium or Firefox. And nothing stops company from forking Ladybird and monetizing it, either.
Hopefully new independent voice in the questions of platform features, development and future.
Google could do pretty much anything with the platform if it were not for Apple and iOS. And that's a big if because if they align on something it will get to the platform.
Firefox unfortunately seems to be infected by Silicon Valley people that seem to be quite obedient to the status quo.
Ladybird is at least developed by people from all around the world.
Plenty of progress in models that can use tools and search. Would love to see how one of these tool/search-enabled models do at this kind of a task. In my experience, they don't fabricate things anymore, just sometimes occasionally misrepresent the content of citations (put a citation somewhere where it doesn't actually support what is written).
A few days ago I asked GPT 5 for links to news on the Charlotte murder before the story got reported by the mainstream media. It gave me five different links, including AP and Reuters. Every one, five out of five, was a hallucination.
It hallucinated complete documentation to the tech we asked it about just 2 weeks ago. Completely made up documentation with only vague relationship.to how it really works.
I asked GPT-5 for updated literature survey for a paper I was writing with search enabled and explicit asked to use google scholar arxiv etc and yet most papers were non existent and in some cases even pointed to some GitHub repos which were private.
Would require decompilation of the Animal Crossing game code for the Switch. I believe DRM has gotten a lot better since the Gamecube days as well. Hypothetically possible maybe but good luck haha
I actually think now that I've gone through the process, memory scanning and writing will be enough... Except, they probably have different control codes that I'd need to reverse engineer.
You should be able to run Cheat Engine on your emul*tor of choice to tweak New Leaf "and newer" titles.
And if you're a stickler for pissing Nintendo off in very specific ways, LayeredFS + Atmosphere opens up some modding opportunities right on the console itself. Not sure how easy it would be to pull something like this off though...
I think my 'old man shakes fist at clouds' thing is this. The social media platforms that censor you do it to make your content easier to sell ads against. It's actual corporate badthink correction that is rebuilding the English language. STOP VOLUNTARILY DOING IT WHEN YOU DONT HAVE TO. You should not sacrifice your free thought on the altar of quarterly results. Say the whole fucking word.
I doubt a star will make Nintendo lawyers go "ow nose, they didn't spell out emulator in full, we can't attack them! Damn those star armors!". I don't think it changes anything technically.
The only thing this kind of censoring does is countering basic censor bots I think, and somehow making swear words publishable in the US.
Look; if you want to risk your chipper little lifestyle explaining the various ways to run New Horizons, be my guest. I've insinuated enough already, anyone who cares about the discussion on-grounds wouldn't have anything else to ask.
My point is that you don't take any more risk if you write emulator instead of emul*tor. You already took the risk explaining what you explained. One character swap doesn't change anything to this.
I'm insisting because if you care about not being sued, the stars are not an adequate defense despite what you seem to believe it is, and false sense of security is dangerous.
Not that I think that what you wrote here is remotely likely to cause you troubles, but it won't protect you the day you actually document something illegal.
To rub it in:
> I'm covering my ass
No, not at all, and it's important that you realize this.
Low-level emulators can be legally identical to a virtual machine, but often isn't. Most modern consoles can't be emulated that way, and most require you to dump a bootrom from your own console hardware, alongside game keys and other dubious digital paraphernalia.
Switch DRM, running custom code and interacting with RAM is a solved problem on the Switch (1). There are some really impressive mods, like a multiplayer implementation for Super Mario Odyssey
There's something about taking old games and injecting new life into them that just seems so fun and exciting! Also very interesting to know that the Animal Crossing codebase has been decompiled into readable C code. Fascinating! So many opportunities to mess with it.
Unfortunately both the 12 Mini and the 13 Mini did terrible numbers sales-wise. People say they want small phones but not enough of them actually buy them when they are available. :(
we remember that there was a phone released with a name "mini" which was just as large as an iPhone 6: which many people considered to be a large phone; and those who didn't were perfectly serviced by the same sized SE from 2020- which was the size of an iPhone 6...
I genuinely don't think I've seen that sentiment? "I really want a smaller phones, these gigantic bricks are too big" is a common sentiment but I don't think anyone disputes the sales figures of the mini
By expressing disappointment with the absence of a mini on every single new iPhone announcement, you’re basically ignoring the fact that Apple and other phone makers understand that small form factor phones are dead as a mainstream product.
Small phones are dead as a mainstream product, sure.
Screenreaders are also dead as a mainstream product.
Phones with a German language setting are dead as a mainstream product.
However, there are various people with severe disabilities like being blind, being german, and having small hands, so we should produce phones that are appropriate for all of those groups, and yet only the former two are serviced (even though there are more people with small hands than there are germans).
Sent from an iPhone mini, which is already about an inch too big for my hands.
No phone company is releasing a flagship SFF phone because there simply is no mainstream consumer demand for one. In fact, demand has been dead for many years now.
Good for you that you have a iPhone mini, but I would wager you won’t be seeing a new mini model anytime soon. Unless of course mainstream consumer demands shift, at which point HN dreams will become reality once more.
What is for certain is that complaining about this on every phone-related HN thread will not help change anything.
The iPhone SE 2022 was in the top ten smartphones of the year by sales figures. It may not be as astronomical as flagship phones, but it's simply a lie to say it's "dead" as a "mainstream" product.
People don't buy phones every year. People don't want to pay 95% price for 80% of performance / features.
Smaller phones as an idea isn't the problem here. Companies just don't want to make equivalent smaller phones. Making a new phone every single year is a stupid trend that causes min-max effects. A good small phone will eat into profits that's harder to make up in a yearly cycle. People will not buy nerfed smaller phones which is a positive feedback cycle.
True, also mini phones are usually of an incredible value, you can buy them very cheap. Because, surprise, actually not everyone wants them. And they are seen as crippled gimp phones. E.g. a child had this phone, then pressed their parents to buy them a normal phone. That’s how I ended up having my mini, for basically bananas. Was upgrading from SE1, so it was still a bigger phone. Yet, I’m not willing to go back, modern iPhone is still better than an obsolete one. Almost. Some bugs aren’t there in the old one.
Just checked and if I want an unscratched iPhone 13 Mini I'll be paying about $600 in Sweden. (That's for the places that have it, everywhere seems to be sold out that's cheaper).
That's for a used, 4 year old phone...
For a device that's "cheap to pick up", it's holding it's value more than any other iPhone.
I’m not very sure about the unscratched one, but I remember researching this a couple of months back, in Ukraine. And there were tens of good options (nice condition), for below $200 or $300. Which I consider a pretty decent value. I have no idea whether the war affects this, but pre war this situation was the same, more or so. Maybe that’s because the internal market is quite huge (40 M population pre-war, perhaps 30 M now), plus the country is literally the biggest in Europe. As compared to relatively small(er) Sweden, population of 10 M if I’m correct. I guess there might be cultural aspect as well. More wealthy countries and their societies (like Sweden) might actually be much less obsessed with things like newer iPhones. While they are wildly popular in Ukraine (pre-war). They may be even more popular these days, since we had very massive electricity blackouts just a year ago. And for many people their smartphones is the way to stay connected, and to check in with their loved ones. Plus, the ‘what if I’d be killed tomorrow?’ factor, I see people’s attitude is a bit different because of this either. I know at least one local friend, who said just recently he thinks of updating his 15 Pro Max (which he bought after the realease of the 16 models, saying they’re mostly the same) for the Air. He’s just a middle class guy, nothing too impressive. Other folks I know, they’re wealthy, and it looks like they won’t even think twice, and more likely to upgrade. I bet their logic is a mix of YOLO, plus they’re constantly invest into military equipment and drones for the army, so that $1K for themselves look a minute amount compared to that. All that creates pretty good market conditions for the used phones, so the folks like me could get something of a value for cheap, because others upgraded for no real reason. Personally, I see little difference after the 12th models.
After my iPhone 6 stopped getting updates I got the SE3, criteria was smallest feature phone without tonnes of shovelware and spyware pre-installed. It is still top of the list in 2025 though I will probably get another 5 years from this one.
“Terrible numbers sales-wise” is a bit of a distortion when talking about iPhones - the number that went around in 2022 was the 13 accounted for 3% of iPhone sales in 2021, which indeed sounds terrible - except Apple sold somewhere around a quarter billion iPhones that year, which means ~7.5 million iPhone 13 minis in 2021 alone. Those are numbers that anyone else would kill for. That’s just about the entire population of New York City buying an iPhone. There’s 35 states with fewer people than that. Ford sold fewer F-150s in the last decade than Apple sold iPhone 13 Minis in 2021 alone.
3% of sales means a sub-par experience for those users. Every app developer will say “oh yeah let’s test on the pro and normal sizes. Mini might break but that’s ok.”
UX cannot possibly be why Apple axed the mini since they have scalable layout APIs that did work on it. Even video-heavy social media and games worked in it just fine. It’s really just business—they make more sales out of bigger phones, so bigger phones it is.
This is false. The mini logical screen resolution still exists as the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max and the Pro. Developers would still need to test for those resolutions even if the mini never existed.
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
And Instagram (or any other "fake universe" which pushes video-quality as a minimal requirement) algos, favor content made with a newer/better/bigger (thus more expensive) phone.
How come there's close-to-0 improvements about audio quality (both recording and listening) with respect to visual technologies?
Make the audio counterpart of Instagram/Tiktok and I'll chime in right away.
But pop-people (and markets) are mostly interested in visuals at the moment.
And for audio-sensitive people like me, it's almost a blessing.
I was extremely interested in a small phone back when the 12 Mini came out, but I didn't dare to buy it without seeing how it feels. This was during the height of the COVID lockdowns, so I couldn't go to a store and feel it in person. Ended up buying the regular iPhone 12, since that seemed like the safer choice to buy blind.
When it was time for another phone upgrade in the iPhone 15 era (because phones really don't change enough anymore to warrant more frequent upgrades than that), there was no mini option anymore. I wonder if others were like me. The Mini came out at a time where people were hesitant to try a new form factor because they couldn't try it in stores.
I think what happened here is that the target audience are people that do not feel pressure to upgrade to the latest mini every year. They do not look to have the lastest-shiniest-ohlookAI-snapdraxxon22pro phone. Just a phone that is a bit cheaper but gets the job done.
Why would you go from 12 mini to 13 mini, or to the concurrently released SEs if your phone still works?
I am also still holding on to my 13 mini. I would not have upgraded to the 14, 15 or 16mini even if they existed. I will upgrade at some point, and that point is when it either dies, or important apps stop working on the last iOS version supported by the hardware.
I do wonder if more people would buy a smaller phone if it had the same cameras and features as the pro? Time will tell if thinner sells better than shorter and less girthy.
I for one hate how even the 17 pro is creeping up in size compared to the 15 pro.
I was one of those people who bought an iphone 13 mini. When someone sees it, their first question is, "what phone is that?", unless they too own an iPhone 13 mini or owned a small iPhone before that.
People do think that being able to use the phone with just one hand is cool, but most people, even small-handed people, like to have a big screen to watch stuff on.
This meme needs to die. Normal-sized iPhones account for tens of millions of sales per year.
The fact that Apple was absolutely schizophrenic about its non-phablet market, introducing the iPhone mini 13 and iPhone SE 2022 at the same time, is utterly irrelevant to that point.
we will never really know for sute because the minis were gimped compared to the max options that had an extra telephoto lens and better ram/storage options
That's the tradeoff with a smaller phone. You can't fit as many features. And despite cutting out so much, there still wasn't enough space for an acceptable amount of battery.
This is especially surprising to me given several providers still only support physical SIM or weird half-support (e.g. Fizz, that I'm with, allows you to open a new line with eSIM but not transfer an existing line from physical to eSIM).
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