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Robadob

938 karma · joined March 22, 2013

Research software engineer at University of Sheffield (UK). Spend most my time developing FLAMEGPU2, a CUDA based framework for large-scale complex simulations.
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Robadob··on 5M item limit for Google Drive: File unable to generate or upload due to 403
I work at a university that is fully invested in Google Apps.

We did have unlimited storage, however last week they announced that's soon to change:

> A quota will soon be introduced on the amount of data that staff and students at the University can store in their Google account. This is part of a larger piece of work being carried out by the Google Workspace team in IT Services, to review the overall amount of storage being used by the University.

Makes me wonder if the timing is somehow related.

Robadob··on Nature photographer John Fielder donates life’s work to public domain
It's a real shame there's not a built in way to get notified in 6 months to check this stuff out. Guess I'll add it to my calendar.
Robadob··on Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment (2020)
There are still inconsistencies between NHS dentists, visual assessment of cavities and what justifies treatment is inherently subjective.

My first dentist retired after I'd had no fillings to date, their replacement on first appointment said I required two fillings and it continued in a similar manner.

Later on I had moved city, but was still travelling back for dental appointments. The second dentist said I needed another filling doing, but I ended up moving to a new NHS dentist in my new city. They disagreed about the filling, saying you can't fill teeth if it would go below the gum line. Pulled the tooth instead.

Even with NHS appointments, you can go 'private' a-la-carte if you can be convinced to have white fillings or similar extras and pay slightly more.

Robadob··on A Yubico FAQ about passkeys
I have two yubikeys too, but I definitely found services which didn't allow me to register more than one when I first set them up (a couple of years ago now).
Robadob··on Complete Introduction to Particles in Japanese
My favourite example of this in English is adjective order.

Native speakers learn that it should be "big red bus" rather than "red big bus", however most couldn't list the ~7 adjective types and order they should be used in, yet will know straight away when they're wrong.

Robadob··on Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying
I received this email about an hour ago, so it must be being sent out progressively.
Robadob··on Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do?
If I refresh the page twice in quick succession, the same image comes up. By refreshing on my pc/phone at the same time, I managed to get the same image come up too. So it's probably seeded by time.
Robadob··on Inventor harvests methane gas from ditches and ponds to power his moped
My parents regularly throw out spare food (bread, meat, fruit) onto their lawn, local wildlife (birds, foxes, hedgehogs) always take it all within 24h.
Robadob··on AWS BugBust
The $769 is referring to the estimated money saved by fixing bugs, rather than the trade in value of the points.

> For information on how points are awarded, see the Official Rules. Actual savings may vary.

Section 5 of the official rules document states approximate retail value of the prizes as; reInvent:$4000, Resin Trophy:$60, Hooded Sweatshirt:$27, tshirt:$12

https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/bugbust/AWS_BugBu...

Robadob··on Orbit Tessellation developer diary for Kerbal Space Program 2
It's not that GPUs don't support fp64, it's that for domestic gamer GPUs fp64 arithmetic is normally ~1:32 performance of fp32 arithmetic.

e.g. 1080gtx

    FP16 (half) performance
    138.6 GFLOPS (1:64)
    FP32 (float) performance
    8.873 TFLOPS
    FP64 (double) performance
    277.3 GFLOPS (1:32)

e.g. 3090rtx

    FP16 (half) performance
    35.58 TFLOPS (1:1)
    FP32 (float) performance
    35.58 TFLOPS
    FP64 (double) performance
    556.0 GFLOPS (1:64)

Only generally 'tesla' class cards targeted at super computers have a 1:2 ratio (e.g. v100, A100, Titan V). Note, I believe Titan V is the only Titan series GPU with good double performance, as the Volta architecture was never available to Geforce GPUs.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1080.c2839

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3090.c3622

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/tesla-v100-sxm3-32-gb....

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/a100-sxm4-80-gb.c3746

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/titan-v.c3051

Robadob··on AstraZeneca boss is in the “hot seat” over vaccine delays, France says
All UK AZ vaccines are being manufactured in the UK, the UK government funded these. The UK did not take part in the EU vaccine procurement program.

It's my understanding that only Pfizer/Biontech vaccine doses are being imported from the EU.

https://www.ft.com/content/662ab296-2aef-4179-907c-5dba5c355...

Robadob··on AstraZeneca boss is in the “hot seat” over vaccine delays, France says
> The suggestion we sell to other countries to make more money is not right because we make no profit everywhere.That's the approach we took and we agreed on that. That’s the agreement we have with Oxford University. It's actually even written in a contract we have with Oxford University: that we will be at no profit. We have slightly different prices from one geographic to the other because the cost of goods may be different. We have a supply chain in Brazil, we have another one in Latin America, another one in South Asia. We have one in Japan. Of course, you know, local costs are different. So you've got slight variations, but more or less, it's about three to four dollars, more or less everywhere.

This was an interview with the AZ CEO when the EU delays first kicked off: https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/01/26/news/interview_...

The core difference for the EU contract was that the EU wouldn't accept any/as-much liability for any harm caused by the vaccine (compared with UK/USA). Not sure the source of this claim.

Robadob··on Quibi Is Shutting Down
Vice posted a new video (about American Apparel) to their YouTube today, was tagged with Quibi at the start and end.
Robadob··on GPU Accelerated JavaScript
Historically there was an emulator mode, where you could build your CUDA code to run on CPU. However, it was removed a few years ago. I never used it, so can't really give you more details beyond that.
Robadob··on Revisiting the postcard pathtracer with CUDA and Optix
The video here talks about the difference between the two approaches. There's a comparison at 2:50.

"I think the computers are winning, because in the upper right you can kind of see that back wall, there's a little strip of green. It's kind of blurred out a little bit too much with the human version, but the neural network has picked up on that and kept the vertical stripes there."

https://news.developer.nvidia.com/ray-tracing-essentials-par...

Robadob··on The C++ preprocessor doesn’t understand anything about C++, including templates
We've come across this problem. The major testing frameworks seem to rely heavily on macros for tests. In particular, we were struggling to handle tests of thrown exceptions, as we couldn't trivially capture the result in a variable and place that inside the macro instead. The most versatile solution we found was to use a function pointer, so that the templating wasn't required when the function was called.
Robadob··on Risky hack could double access to ventilators
The video's here, in Italy, show the ventilators used with a bag over the patient's head to create a bubble of positive pressure (and quarantine off their head).

So presumably in a scenario like this it's less of a problem about 'triggering own breath'.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-they-call-it-the-apoc...

Robadob··on An Introduction to Modern CMake
Recent versions of CMake have also been growing the support for CUDA. There's still a number of edge cases (e.g. passing arguments to the device linker) that have open tickets on their bugtracker, but there's more than enough stable functionality now for CUDA projects and generally a number of relevant improvements with each new release.

We started using it about 6 months ago for a cross platform CUDA project, and have found it to be a big improvement over how we previously managed similar CUDA projects (e.g. manually). I'm especially a fan of it's ability to download external CMake project dependencies. As others have mentioned, some of the documentation is a little unclear for particular edge cases though so it takes some familiarisation.

Robadob··on Informer: A bot library that allows masquerading as real users on Telegram
It states that it's using telethon.

That appears to be an MTProto library.

https://docs.telethon.dev/en/latest/concepts/botapi-vs-mtpro...

Robadob··on Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
Fortnite has been criticised for it's store. Item's are only available for a limited time (24h?), with no guarantee of when they will become available again. This creates the 'Fear of Missing Out' incentive for people to spend.

I've not played it first hand though.

On the otherhand, this article is discussing someone addicted to the gambling element of TF2's crates (aka loot boxes).

Robadob··on DoNotPay's new service auto-cancels free trials
In the UK, 'TheGymGroup' literally tells you to cancel membership by ending your direct debit. They're not all that predatory.
Robadob··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
When developers generate Steam keys, it allows them to sell their 'game on Steam' elsewhere (their own website, HumbleBundle etc).

This means Steam doesn't take a cut of the sale price. But the developers still get the benefits of Steam community, Steamworks drm, and potentially having a unified update/distribution channel.

Similarly, some gamers prefer to have games 'on Steam' rather than DRM free so that they have a single unified game library.

Robadob··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
1. I was simply trying to clarify what 'shared account' likely actually meant.

3. This I didn't consider.

Robadob··on Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
Those shared accounts might be accounts hacked with known/breached passwords.

I previously had my mostly empty UPlay account hijacked by someone with a Kazakhstan IP. As I recall they renamed the account and added new friends and had been playing a game I'd received free, but didn't change the password. Mostly just spurred me to switch everything feasible to 2FA.

Robadob··on YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
The android app "Google Opinions Rewards" occasionally asks me to rate a video i've recently watched, then follows it with a binary choice of recommendation, which I subsequently have to rate the quality of the recommendation.

I'd assume that data is being used for training somewhere.

Robadob··on Telegram Traces Cyber Attack to China During Hong Kong Protests
When I visited Ukraine, a friend pointed out lots of graffiti advertising people that sell drugs on Telegram.
Robadob··on Lyft’s revenues double, losses quintuple and prospects darken
Uber has around 25 offices in the UK alone. Most are required for local regulation afaik. If this is scaled across the US and Europe that could easily run into hundreds of offices, inflating their employee count for relatively minor employees.

https://www.uber.com/en-GB/drive/resources/contact-us/

Robadob··on UK supermarket TV advert on palm oil banned for being too political
The video is at the top of the article directly below the subheading.
Robadob··on Accelerated “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” in CUDA
cuda error 48 is apparently "No Kernel Image available for execution on this device"

Make sure that you're building for the appropriate device architecture.

http://arnon.dk/matching-sm-architectures-arch-and-gencode-f...

Robadob··on How I hacked modern vending machines
I took the stock photo of coins to suggest that they disabled the App, leaving the only means to pay as the old fashioned method.
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