unsigner

For energy: - if it's a bad thing, e.g. nuclear power, it's "megawatts" or "gigawatts" - if it's a good thing, it's "powering N homes"

Unless you know what you're doing, choose simplicity, relatively new hardware, and low power consumption, over good price.

The only thing that sounds exceptional about this system is the 4x12 GB GPU memory. Is that worth it over the inability to use modern CUDA? I don't know much about ML, but I doubt it. People tend to move very quickly in this field (and in others TBH), not caring much about supporting old hardware.

Stephen Ressler's lectures on technology, engineering and architecture in the ancient world:

https://stephenjressler.com/the-great-courses/

Very Spartan in presentation, yet very substantial.

Russia is trying to get an ammonia pipeline from Toliati to Odessa restarted despite the war - is this why articles like this started popping up? Like we got a lot of hand-wringing around impending world hunger right before the grain deal allow Russia to export a lot of stolen Ukrainian grain.

Came here to post this. The multiple cursors feature combined with the ability to open huge files with gracefully degrading performance turns a lot of what would be one-off programming tasks that would take dozens of minutes to an hour into interactive sessions that take seconds to minutes.

Also the low latency is amazing. Sublime on an old laptop feels batter than VS Code on a fancy new desktop.

Because the need for higher-level, easy to use environment is served well by middleware, the so-called "game engines", Unity and Unreal.

There's intermediate level APIs, like the old OpenGL 4 and DirectX 11, or slightly more modern portable alternatives like bgfx and sokol; on the web, there's three.js.

The subject field is complex, the applications are also primarily complex, so there's not much value in something that lets you "easily" drop a few cubes on an endless plain (like the VRML of old days). There's no 3D equivalent of "I'll make myself the web site for my barbershop" that started the Web 20 years ago. (or, to be more pedantic, "the page for my high-energy physics experiment" 30 years ago.) Nowadays even the Web is hellishly complicated. Maybe if VR/AR takes off (any moment now), there will be need for "simple 3D", but I suspect it will be handled by custom "easy" versions of Unity/Unreal rather than people writing to a "simpler 3D API". The way people aren't making barbershop sites in "simple HTML", but going to Squarespace.

My Argentinian friends tend to view everything that happens in Argentina as part of either some nefarious plot by the US government, or the glorious struggle of the brave Argentinian people against the US government. They would certainly view anything that happens with Binance, or even FTX/SBF as the US government trying to screw them over.

"Tall" is something that comes out of the genetic roulette, and there's little you can do (see the recent article about men going through painful leg bone extension procedures).

However, "being physically fit" is under your control (for the vast majority of people) and you can tip the scales quite a bit on "being good looking" if you make the effort.

I'd rather eat a falafel pita wrap, or a Indian spicy potato burger, or a bean burrito. There's plenty of great vegetarian food, no need to torture plants to become something else.

It’s on every pro-Ukrainian telegram channel I read (and I’m reading way too many), mostly in the context of comparing Iranian boldness to feeble Russian protests against the war.

Zstd achieves considerably higher compression on some kinds of data with little to no preprocessing. LZ4 hits a compression ratio ceiling at some point - algorithmically, it's "half of Zstd" (only LZ match/literal encoding, no entropy encoding at all).

Read the LZ4 format, it's very simple and educational, I'd say beautiful. It fits in half a screen of text.

I wouldn't go to the trouble of determining the privacy implications of standartized dictionaries built from user data.

I have noticed that bad things' energy output is measured in watts, and good things' energy output is measured in "homes powered". It's probably taught in journalism school nowadays, it's pervasive.

In a world where Putin's bombs fall nearby, and millions of Ukrainians are without electricity, the (propane-tank fueled) gas stove is another small step towards resiliance in the face of crisis.

Find a way to get semaglutide.

It will have some effect by itself, and it will make all the rest of the good advice in this thread much easier - eating less, eating one time a day, eating better (less carbs, esp simple carbs), walking a lot, strength training.

I've been on it for a few months and it's been absolutely miraculous. Ask me again in 10 years what the long-term effect is.

Yep, it’s the Three Seas Initiative. Bring it on! We’ll take on board some non-Slavic speakers from Hungary, the Baltics, Romania, and Albania.

You are right, of course. The Xboxes are better and better hardware-design-wise each generation, and the Surfaces are highly rated.

I should have been more specific - I was thinking of the CPU and GPU design.

The only thing they're missing is hardware design capabilities.

Blood sugar is blood sugar. You can do a lot worse than fruit, but that doesn’t make it harmless.

What was provided was a bill how to spend the money within about a year, not “solve world hunger”.

Eastern Europe is firmly on this path under the twin depopulation factors of abysmal fertility and powerful brain drain towards the West. Come visit a middle-sized town anywhere in the Three Seas region and you’ll see industry, infrastructure, housing built for a much larger, more successful civilization.

Plain text is inherently superior for collaboration (versioning, diffing, merging, blame etc.), maturity of tools (I'm thinking Sublime/vi here, not IDEs), and interoperatbility with other tools (e.g. how easy it is to generate/consume).

Munich has outrageous rents and brutal housing scarcity, yet no visible homelessness.

We should really have another word for “chip that runs OpenCL but has no rasterizer”.

I see the title was edited to call it a “GPGPU”, or a “general-purpose GPU” but it’s not a thing; GPGPU was an early moniker for when people tried to do non-graphics work on GPUs many years ago, but it was a word for techniques, never for a specific type of hardware. Plus it feels to me that “general purpose” should be something more than a GPU, while this is strictly less.

True.

If you're on your way down this rabbit hole, there's a bunch of old-machine-specific compression algorithms, developed by the emulator community, e.g. LZSA: https://github.com/emmanuel-marty/lzsa

LZ4 is amazing - it's basically the same idea as LZ77, only implemented carefully, with all the dozens parameters and tradeoffs made in a certain way. Couple this with modern amounts of brute force thrown in an optimal parser (LZ4HC) and you get something quite extraordinary, on the "Pareto frontier" of compression efficiency. There's a tendency to focus on algorithms and scoff at implementation details, but LZ4 was possible as an algorithm 30 years ago, yet the implementation details crystallized to perfection only, say, five years ago.

SPUs read memory asynchronously by requesting a DMA; GPUs read memory asynchronously too, but this is not explicitly visible to the programmer, and serious infrastructure is devoted to hiding that latency. The problem with SPUs was never that they are slow, rather than they are outright programmer-hostile.

It really isn’t - the individual elements in a GPU can access RAM directly, while you needed to wheelbarrow data (and code!) to and from SPUs manually. This was the major pain point, not the extreme (for that time) parallelism or the weird-ish instruction set.

But we are getting the drop in living standards before any significant effort is spent on the environmental crisis you are alluding to.

And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.

But this is the sensible thing to do, talent leaving or not. A universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because of business reasons is indistinguishable from a universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because "everyone left", so your hypothesis isn't falsifiable.