> Plus the fact you can "record" them from a real-world physical environment without ever having to "model" it opens up a lot of utility too.
This is the big thing imho. Sure, you can do traditional photogrammetry to capture meshes and textures but getting the shaders exactly right is afaik non-trivial etc, and if you want real-time rendering then you likely need some further post-processing of the assets. With 3dgs you can pretty much bypass all that complexity and the whole pipeline from photos to rendered frame is much more straightforward.
That is very rose-tinted view of the era. In reality in early 00s lots of software had their own wacky UI toolkits. MS Office is of course the most notable example, but also iirc all of Adobe/Macromedia or every 3d modeling (Lightwave, Maya etc) and audio production software. In the enterprise realm people were doing Java AWT (and later Swing) UIs. And then there were the classics like WinAmp with its iconic theme support, or Mozilla with XUL (and themes).
fyi zyxel has some reasonably priced 2.5G/10G base-t switches with or without poe++. I got myself XS1930-12HP when I updated my home network to wifi6 and 10G. The biggest annoyance was that some features are gated behind "advanced" license, but iirc nothing too critical. Small things, but I like that it has integrated power supply so it just has standard iec connector in the back instead of needing a power brick. I did replace the standard 40mm fans with 120mm noctua; the airflow might not be optimal but I think it'll survive.
> Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks?
Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftUI is Swift, Flutter is Dart so on; spewing some terminal escapes to stdout is something that can done from basically any language with relative ease.
Qt and GTK has bindings for a lot of languages. calibre is Qt built with python. And GTK has GI which allows to basically autogenerate bindings. It’s not plug and play, but it’s not difficult either.
A macOS AppKit/Cocoa app uses like 30mb memory and is quite nice to develop or vibe-code. But the whole UX of it is the opposite of a TUI you can run in yet another pane of your terminal emulator next to the other panes you're working in.
GUI apps certainly have their place. But sometimes you want a UX like lazygit where you can launch it in cwd and be done rather than alt-tab to a GUI, open pwd inside it, then alt-tab back to the terminal.
USB 4 includes more than Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt was not compatible with USB, despite using the same connector.
All features of Thunderbolt 3 have been inherited by USB 4, like also all those of USB 3, including the ability of Thunderbolt to emulate Ethernet interfaces when you interconnect 2 computers with a cable through their USB 4 ports, like it was already possible with Thunderbolt ports.
This is the big thing imho. Sure, you can do traditional photogrammetry to capture meshes and textures but getting the shaders exactly right is afaik non-trivial etc, and if you want real-time rendering then you likely need some further post-processing of the assets. With 3dgs you can pretty much bypass all that complexity and the whole pipeline from photos to rendered frame is much more straightforward.
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