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queueberton Structuring Competency-Based Courses Through Skill Trees

> Like that physics guy who can also write good sci-fi.

Stephen Baxter? Or someone else?

queueberton My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

I agree with this. We had multiple windowing environments, all arguably superior in various ways, and we had multiple office suites, all with better technology than the Microsoft versions. Then I wonder how much worse off are we because Windows and Office came to predominate instead of one of the others? How much rent seeking has gone into building Gates' fortune? How much has been lost financially by innocent users to Windows security vulnerabilities?

On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.

queueberton My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

I didn't realize Xerox had so many employees.

queueberton Migrating away from Rust

> ... big bag of mutable data that lives for relatively unknown amounts of time. This is the antithesis of Rust.

I'm sorry, but I still don't understand. There are myriad heap collections and even fancy stuff like Rc<Box<T>> or RefCell<T>. What am I missing here?

Is it as simple as global void pointers in C? No, but it's way safer.

queueberton Migrating away from Rust

> The ownership model of Rust can not represent the vast majority of allocations.

What allocations can you not do in Rust?

queueberton Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent

I agree with this.

For the completely uninitiated, taking the most critical code paths uncovered via profiling and asking an LLM to rewrite it to be more efficient might give an average user some help in optimization. If your code takes more than a few minutes to run, you definitely should invest in learning how to profile, common optimizations, hardware latencies and bandwidths, etc.

With most everything I use at the consumer level these days, you can just feel the excessive memory allocations and network latency oozing out of it, signaling the inexperience or lack of effort of the developers.

queueberton 2,031-HP Hennessey Venom F5 Evolution Claims 0 to 200 MPH in 10 Seconds

For the ultra-wealthy, buying these types of cars is more or less free, since they usually appreciate in value, and he already has copious garage space.

queueberton Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

What were their reasons?

queueberton Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

It probably wouldn't hurt for languages to steal more ideas from APL.

queueberton Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent

This is really cool. As a high-performance computing professional, I've often wondered how much energy is wasted due to inefficient code and how much that is a problem as planetary compute scales up.

For me, it feels like a moral imperative to make my code as efficient as possible, especially when a job will take months to run on hundreds of CPU.

queueberton CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds; experts note uncertainty

If it's any consolation, a sinus CT is tuned to have a very low radiation dose compared to typical body CT scans.

queueberton CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds; experts note uncertainty

The "almost certainly" that you brush off is the entire point of the calculation. Is it 95% certain or 99.5% certain? The exact balance between benefit and risk in medical procedures is exactly how it is determined when to use them in the standard of care.

queueberton Social Security Administration Moving Public Communications to X

Same here. When I hear people talk about how awful some platform is, knowing that it optimizes for their engagement, it feels like an accidental admission of their secret desires.

queueberton Social Security Administration Moving Public Communications to X

My private employer requires us to login with our credentials to view communications from our CEO. Seems shady to me.

queueberton Better typography with text-wrap pretty

You would think, but Word has some serious efficiency problems that I can't explain. For one, it is an order of magnitude slower at simply performing word counts than tools like wc or awk. Besides that, the problem does not parallelize well, due to the long-range dependency of line breaks.

Zooming in a bit, Word also does not kern fonts as well as LaTeX, so it might be missing some logic there that would trickle down into more beautiful word spacing and text flow.

queueberton Better typography with text-wrap pretty

Text wrapping is actually a difficult optimization problem. That's part of the reason LaTeX has such good text wrapping -- it can spend serious CPU cycles on the problem because it doesn't do it in real time.

queueberton Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against antibiotic resistance

The residents of Flint, MI, might disagree with you.

queueberton Microsoft’s original source code

Maybe Bill has really taken an interest in Javascript. /s

queueberton Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

They must have a bug, because my System76 laptops drain way less with the lid closed than my Macbooks.

queueberton Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

As a former Mac user, I'm really happy with my System76 linux laptops. The only tradeoff is the terrible built-in speakers. My Lemur is lighter and has better battery life than my Macbook Air and has been bulletproof despite my ill treatment. Each of my Macs, however, have had various hardware failures or the famous keyboard recall on the horrible touchbar Macbook Pro. I also prefer matte screens to glossy, so that's a win for me, but ymmv.

queueberton Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

Oops, my read was that you can opt out of systemd with OpenSUSE without much trouble.

queueberton Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

I just realized this today. When trying to upgrade an EOL-ed Ubuntu machine using 'do-release-upgrade', it completely shat the bed. Now I'm in search of an alternative distro that has good GPU support, rolling releases, no systemd. Maybe OpenSUSE?

If there are any SV billionaires out there, can you fund CUDA on OpenBSD please? :-P

queueberton Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

I think one issue is less extant Rust code to train on. As more Rust is written and published, LLMs should in theory get better.

queueberton The Continuing Crisis, Part IX: Inside the NIH Now

> Even twenty years ago getting an NIH R1 was considered an important career accomplishment.

R01

queueberton Crew-9 Returns to Earth

You (and others apparently) applied an incorrect emotion to my unemotional comment. Typical text only communication. The whole point of the "genuinely asking" part was to show I wasn't trying to "gotcha" anyone.

I have barely followed the issue but had heard the astronauts confirmed Musk's side. How else was I supposed to ask about that? What magical wording could I use so that all of you don't try to put me in a belief box?

queueberton Crew-9 Returns to Earth

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1897470032612851893

(Note: I don't know anything about the X account. It was just the first result I found.)

Edit: Also it sucks that I can't ask a genuine question on this website without getting downvoted to oblivion. Whatever the answer, it would be nice to get it without being judged.

queueberton I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

No, I meant religiosity:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/04/26/in-america-d...

queueberton Crew-9 Returns to Earth

If that's true, why did the astronauts confirm Musk's version of the story in an interview? Genuinely asking ...

queueberton I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

Technically, that's not what the separation clause is about. That was not, however, professional behavior for a nurse, but I see extremely religious nurses on the reg. Much less so with doctors, but then again religiosity is inversely proportional to education.

queueberton I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

> Why the fuck would anybody with any amount of dignity cause it upon themselves willingly?

Presumably because their home country treats them even worse? At least that's the point of the refugee program.