11,691 karma · joined June 24, 2019
Interestingly, I recently completed a masters-level computer architecture course and we used MIPS. However, starting next semester the class will use RISC-V instead.
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...
I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as well.
For some students this approach works. But for people like me it turns what is supposed to be a personalized reflection into a sterile dissection.
I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". No, you must profess how elegantly written it is and how you now realize that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals.
I am not knocking anyone who actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby nor am I actually dismissing what the F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to convey. What I am saying, though, is that the heavy-handed approach the English curriculum took in trying to make me enjoy this book had the opposite effect. In fact, I remember virtually nothing about it, despite having read it cover-to-cover and having written a series of essays on it.
Rewriting CUDA programs to run using ROCm is expensive and time consuming. It is difficult to justify this expense when in all likelihood the ROCm version will be less efficient, less performant, and less stable than the original. In the grand scheme of things, AMD hardware is indeed cheaper but it's not that much cheaper. From a business standpoint, it's just not worth it.
Knowing what I know about how management thinks, even if AMD managed to make an objectively superior product at a much better price, institutional momentum alone would keep people on CUDA for a long time.
I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked.
I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues.
Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.
This sentiment is reminiscent to the attitudes around photography when it first became practical. People wondered how photography could be considered a form of art when all one had to do was point and press a button. The amount of effort is minuscule compared to what it takes to depict the same subject using traditional media. That being said, there is a lot of skill necessary to capture a photograph properly; lighting, composition, shutter speed, exposure, and so on. I agree that generative AI images will disrupt the market segment for stock photos and "clip art" used for articles, presentations, et cetera.
There will be a need to study and acquire skills related to the use of generative AI image creation. While technology will make simple prompts "good enough" for most outputs, just as our smartphone cameras make taking a picture "good enough", people will still need to study and practice in order to make high quality output.
Homo sapiens! Their only natural enemy is themselves.
Easier said than done. However for the vast majority of the people taking these drugs, these drugs enable them to finally do that.
However something to consider is that whatever biological material that ends up landing elsewhere probably wouldn't be able to survive and reproduce. I say that because even the hardiest microbial organisms on Earth still depend on the activity of other species in the ecosystem. For instance, only certain species of bacteria produce Vitamin B and I can't think of any species that is completely self-reliant. It's one thing to keep a cell from dying in a harsh environment, but it would have to bootstrap itself into metabolizing and reproducing in a barren environment with no prior life to consume building blocks from.
That being said, I'm not enough of a biologist to know if there are any extremophile bacteria which are completely self sufficient. If there are, we can rule out my layman's assertion/thought experiment.