oofabz

But drug companies do make effective pharmaceutical derivatives of Vitamin D, such as Calcipotriene.

Erdős took amphetamines, so he was cheating too.

Erthos claims 2.5 acres per MW, so to generate 12 TW of solar, you would need an area the size of Pennsylvania.

If anyone is interested in lossy PNG compression, please check out my project at https://github.com/foobaz/pngloss

It doesn't compress as well as JPEG or other formats that are designed to be lossy. But if you need PNG for some reason like alpha channel or application requirements, or if your image is particularly well-suited to my compression algorithm, it might be a good choice. For many images it does compare favorably to an 8-bit indexed PNG.

That used to be true, but these days there are many sites selling legal FLAC downloads, like HDtracks, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Bleep.

I wish employers did not provide health insurance, even though I have a chronic medical condition. The choices of plans offered by companies is far, far smaller than the choices available to me on the open market. I don't want to have to find new health insurance if my employment situation changes, possibly leaving me with a gap in coverage. The expectation that employer-provided benefits are at no cost to the employee is a fallacy - if companies did not offer health care as a perk, they would be able to offer higher salaries instead.

The only reason American employers are in the business of offering health insurance is because they get a federal tax break. This makes health insurance cheaper to the employer than to individuals. Given this, if my employer stopped offering insurance, they couldn't increase my salary enough for me to purchase the same plan myself. I think this is unfair - I would like to get the same tax break myself, or at least eliminate the tax break altogether so I am on an even playing field with businesses. This would allow me to purchase my own health insurance at rates comparable to what I'm offered at work.

Considering the tax situation, it's curious that Intuit would not choose to take this tax break. It seems like a short term move that allows them to cut costs while exploiting the economic stickiness of employment. This move makes them less competitive for employees in the labor market, but that only affects them in the long term. In the short term, the employees they have will be hesistant and slow to find new jobs.

Very nice! My own programming folder would have included MPW and Resorcerer.

The USSR was not a "despotism of the proletariat". Soviet propaganda portrayed their government as the will of the people, but in fact it was an autocracy. The actual despots during the space race were Krushchev and Brezhnev.

I agree that null pointers are a bad idea and I try to avoid them in my code as often as possible. I go out of my way to avoid returning null to indicate an error condition. I use value types instead of reference types whenever possible, since a value type can't be null. Instead of using null to indicate an error condition, I use a second variable or throw an exception.

Just because your programming language supports null pointers, doesn't mean you need to use them. You can avoid the pitfalls discussed by Tony Hoare by simply refraining to use them. You will still need to handle null pointers coming into your code from outside, like from libraries, but your own code does not need to generate them.

I use MySQL (and increasingly, MariaDB) because I prefer the tooling. I use software like PHPMyAdmin and mycli, and when I need to use Postgres or MSSQL the tools available do not live up to the same high standards.

I'd like to recommend another podcast on the subject, 12 Byzantine Rulers by Lars Brownworth: https://12byzantinerulers.com/

It's a short one, 17 episodes of about 20 minutes each. But these episodes are information-dense and have surprising depth. Also, this was one of the first podcasts ever published, starting in 2005.

It was an attempt to decrease demand for the cards, thereby reducing price.

The simplest market solution to high demand and inadequate supply would be to raise the price of the cards. This would maximize short-term profits but Nvidia felt it was not the right strategic move. Why not? Here are some guesses:

- pricing gamers out of the GPU market would damage Nvidia's historical market - video games

- pricing AI users out of the GPU market would damage an exciting new market Nvidia is working very hard to cultivate

- tying a large fraction of your business to cryptocurrency is risky given the volatility of that market

I think Nvidia sees gaming and AI as viable long-term markets and feels very invested in maintaining the health of those markets and Nvidia's participation in them. They are much less interested in cryptocurrency mining customers because they don't see a long-term future for themselves there. Nvidia is willing to take a short-term hit to profits to get more of their products into the hands of gamers and AI researchers.

However Nvidia has not completely forsaken short-term profitability. They have substantially raised the price of GPUs and they are making considerable amounts of money selling GPUs to miners. They are trying to take a middle path and balance competing interests.

Russia is the legitimate successor state of the Soviet Union. The article implies that the correct procedure for succession was not followed, but this is not true. When a country splits up, as the USSR did, the legal precedent is for all of the resulting states to come to an agreement on succession. They did, recognizing Russia as the successor. Yugoslavia followed the same procedure, although they came to a more complex agreement with multiple successors.

In Firefox, you can change the default zoom level by going to about:config and setting the value of layout.css.devPixelsPerPx. If you want things larger, try 1.2 or 1.5. If you have a 4k or larger display, try 2.0.

I like the subject matter, but the bold italic typeface is very difficult to read.

Incorporating thread-safety into individual calls is not sufficient, because thread-safety is not composable. A sequence of calls to thread-safe operations is not itself thread-safe. Since you need locks in the outermost application level, it would be wasteful and unnecessary to also lock inside each individual call.

This non-composability is why multithreading is so difficult. A library can't abstract away these concerns for you, unless the entire multithreaded operation is one call to the library, which requires the library to know and design for your exact use case. If you want to do something a library didn't plan for, you are required to handle the thread synchronization yourself.

if only it were

The setup you describe, a default deny firewall, is in fact how consumer routers operate. It's not something you need to configure yourself - router manufacturers do this by default, as recommended by RFC 6092. The idea that IPv6 home networks are "wide open to the internet" is a myth.

My favorite IPv6 ping target is 2600::, a Sprint router. It's even shorter to type than 4.2.2.1 (or 8.8.8.8 for the youths).

The reason USB is so popular for charging is because it delivers low-voltage DC power, not because it can be used for communication.

>reason: to avoid NAT issues with home servers

Home servers are not quite as easy as the article makes it sound. Home routers block incoming IPv6 packets, the same as they do for IPv4. To make a home server accessible, you need to explicitly allow that incoming IPv6 traffic in your router's firewall. This is analogous to adding a port forward rule in IPv4 NAT. The only benefit IPv6 has here is you can use the same port (e.g. SSH) for multiple home servers.

My grandmother was prescribed cigarettes for anxiety in the 1950s. She quit in the '80s after developing emphysema, but it was too late. After years on oxygen her lungs were unable to sustain her and she suffocated.

I do a lot of cooking and I prefer electric. I'm sure it's because I've cooked on electric ranges my entire life, the kind where the pan sits directly on the spiral heating element. I only ever cook with gas when I'm visiting a friend or relative.

Gas stoves are great at bringing a pot of water to a boil. But they are not so good at very low heat, like leaving a covered pot to simmer. Most gas ranges don't go as low as I would like, and I need to watch the pot more carefully and stir more frequently than I would at home.

I'm sure most of my issues are familiarity. If I had spent my life cooking with gas, my techniques would have developed to work better with gas. But now that I'm set in my ways I will stick with electric.

Gagarin was a cosmonaut. The Russian equivalent to those mentioned would be Sergei Korolev.

There are tools for Go that detect non-optimal struct alignment. I use golangci-lint, available at: https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint

The struct alignment linter is not included by default. To enable it, run the linter with this command: golangci-lint run --enable maligned

I like the idea of renting out the house. This would ensure that the maximum number of people get to appreciate its beauty.

E cores are only present on the high-end Alder Lake SKUs. If you have a mid-range chip with only P cores like the i5-12400, enabling AVX-512 really is free.

Such P-core-only chips are attractive to Linux users. Intel Thread Director, their Alder Lake schedule software, does not work as well on Linux as it does on Windows. It has a tendency to schedule processes on the E cores even when P cores are available, which is bad for performance.

There is significant overlap between users interested in AVX-512 and users interested in Linux performance, making the mid-range Alder Lake chips especially appealing to this group. Unfortunately they top out at 6 cores with no ECC, so it's not a perfect match.

>nationalised industry has a chance of properly dealing with externalities

Do you know the history of the Soviet whaling program? They killed more whales for industry than the West.

There is, in fact, a good reason for a donor to use Bitcoin over ACH. If the donor obtained his Bitcoin through shady means, or does not want to pay taxes on it, spending the Bitcoin directly can allow the donor to avoid disclosing his identity. Converting to dollars and using an ACH transfer requires associating the money with his real name and identity.

Linux support for HiDPI is not great. GTK3 apps are scaled appropriately, but GTK2 apps are not, and there are still quite a few of those, like GIMP. Such apps are displayed ridiculously tiny on a 4k display with unreadably small text.

I've heard that if you use Wayland, these older apps get pixel scaled up, but most Linux distros have spotty support for Wayland, so getting it running can be labor intensive.