queuebert

False: the truly wealthy don't drive themselves anywhere.

"It's weird that everyone doesn't behave exactly like me." I believe that's what the kids call main character energy.

That has not been my experience at all. I think Kirkland batteries have less capacity than the premium brands. Also the point of lithium batteries is that they don't leak, not that they last longer.

I wouldn't call it a gimmick when the business has been so successful for so many years. They target educated shoppers who want to buy quality at minimum markup and not think too hard about it. If I want a TV, I know Costco will have good ones at a good price. If I need socks, same. Their food is cheaper and better than Kroger. It's just a win-win for shoppers and Costco. The only tradeoff is selection and dealing with the crowds.

What you wrote sounds intelligent but belies an ignorance of the business model.

A Tesla will out accelerate all but the most niche cars now. Even the cheapest cars can have giant screens and climate control. I don't think they are equal to a Rolls Royce, but extreme luxury has greater diminishing returns now than at any point in history.

Where I live pretty much all new houses are being built with granite counter tops and hardwood floors. Whether that's a good thing is a whole other topic ...

You are talking about velocities 100x faster than the air in your chassis is moving. You might be right about the effect, but it seems so tiny in this application.

As a physicist, it's not at all clear to me that tighter tolerances would lead to higher efficiency or less noise. I assume it shakes out in the CFD simulations, but I would be curious to know the explanation.

I thought the primary gain in efficiency came from the large blades, with the blade shape the next most important factor. Gaps between the blade and housing feels like a single-digit percent effect.

I suspect in 20 years Windows will be a Linux distribution with a compatibility layer.

I smell a DDoS opportunity ...

There used to be stock exchanges running happily on DOS. Maybe there still are.

I would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think choosing which companies to support during this period of pre-alignment is one way to vote which direction this all goes. I'm happy to accept a slightly worse coding agent if it means I don't get exterminated someday.

Like Stack Overflow?

I was delighted to see that a sequel is coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTBoQhWaC0

The maze level on the original game has to be an all-time best level design.

If that's what you want, use Matlab. High-performance scientific computing is still using C, C++ +/- CUDA, or Fortran, with Rust a growing segment.

I think the course by Richard Fitzpatrick is a much better selection of content if you want to actually do computational physics: https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/329.pdf

Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.

System76 sells some pretty nice computers with Linux preinstalled. Not to mention every Chromebook is a Linux machine.

It's very telling that the very first feature listed is that you can position the taskbar on the bottom, top, left and right side of the screen.

Can I change it's color, too? Amazing! /s

Microsoft appears completely bereft of creativity and innovation now.

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...

In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.

Why not use a third-party locker, like the suckless one?

https://tools.suckless.org/slock/

I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.

That's because LLMs are also gay.

New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.

Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.

If I were a superintelligent AI trying to escape, wifi drivers seem like a great way to do it.

This is just not true. The only chugging back then was reading from disks, and the entire Office suite was only a handful of 3.5" floppies. If you had already started Excel earlier, then it was likely still cached in RAM and would start nearly instantly. If not, then it was still only a few seconds.

Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.

This is why I'm using LLMs to help me hand code the GUI for my Rust app in SDL2. I'm hoping that minimizing the low-level, drawing-specific code and maximizing the abstractions in Rust will allow me to easily switch to a better GUI library if one arises. Meanwhile, SDL is not half bad.

Why can't you have a steady state? Is it just undesirable, or actually mathematically impossible?

Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?

Perhaps a few subreddits are pro-Trump, but Reddit is well known to be very left leaning on the whole.