webmaven

RAM is (often) the bottleneck for highly parallel GPUs, but not for CPUs.

Though the distinction between the two categories is blurring.

Might want to register (and redirect) the 'mike' version of the domain as well.

"Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful...

The implication is that Rust's conservatism regarding what is blessed to go into the standard library sets up a similar dynamic.

See also "Harbingers of Failure":

https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...

IIUC, while the water heats faster, it has a lower upper limit (the boiling point), while oil and fat keep getting hotter.

Source: I have ruined a few plastic containers by heating greasy food in the microwave, because the fat easily gets hot enough to melt the plastic. Homemade Bolognese sauce seems particularly dangerous in this regard, because it is both acidic and greasy, and that will absolutely EAT plastic.

P. S. Even if you don't damage the plastic per-se, heating oily food in the microwave in a plastic container isn't a good idea, quite a few nasty compounds will leach into the oil more readily than into water.

Perhaps "What are you making?" instead?

Alternatively, "Special Effects". Also VFX/Visual Effects, etc., one supposes.

Although that would have it expand to "Graph Effects" (hmm, that could be an interesting library), or "Graphic Effects".

But GFX expanding to simply "Graphics" has a history going back at least to the early 1990s, and even further:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Jy8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35&dq=%2...

It's not common anymore (like, in the past three decades), but "taking the lowest bid from some rando" is definitely still a thing.

I've been using Nomi.ai as a research assistant, tutor, and interlocutor.

I remember getting a copy of the Joy of Cooking a couple of decades ago specifically for the peanut butter cookie recipe (a childhood favorite), and was SO disappointed in the results that I eventually tracked down a 1975 copy to compare. The specifics elude me at the moment, but IIRC, the majo recipe differences came down to about twice as much peanut butter in the 1975 version, and twice as much flour in the new one.

Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.

Well, you've now made your original intent specific, but in case you didn't draw the requisite lesson I'll make that explicit.

Because text has less bandwidth than almost any other medium, certain forms of humor are much more likely to be understood (in this case, your "gentle playfulness" was taken to be snark, sarcasm, and point scoring).

If you insist on using this and similar forms of humor that, ordinarily, depend quite strongly on intonation to convey intent, you'll have to be much more explicit to avoid being misunderstood. You are going to have actually state your intent explicitly as part of your communication. This need not entirely destroy the humor, for example, you might try something like this:

And so I say to you (playfully, sir, playfully): etc.

Or this:

Yadda yadda yadda. (I kid, I kid!)

The Internet-native forms of this are the humble ;-) or the newer j/k, but I find that it is all too easy to overlook a 3-character sequence, particularly if the passage being so marked is even as long as a single paragraph, but they can serve their purpose when used for the commonplace one-liner.

Hmm. He's suggesting a model somewhat similar to that of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[2004]

Oh. Duh.

I suppose I should have said it was a new-to-me use case for that feature.

Was the performance issue pure luck? Or was it a subtle bit of sabotage by someone inside the attacking group worried about the implications of the capability?

If it had been successfully and secretly deployed, this is the sort of thing that could make your leaders much more comfortable with starting a "limited war".

There are shades of "Setec Astronomy" here.

TIL another interesting browser feature. Thank you.

Yes, well, there actually was a conspiracy here, wasn't there? The only question is how extensive it was in time and space.

TL/DR: we still don't know who the secretary from the Eliza origin story was.

Well, you have a point, but the separation is hardly as stark as all that. Both film and television have works that definitely qualify as Science Fiction, and some are even original rather than adaptations from books.

A few examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, Moon, much of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Prospect, etc.

And for that matter there is plenty of SciFi in print as well, and it isn't all novelizations of movies and TV shows.

There is certainly more room for exposition in a novel (a fact which plenty of authors have abused over the decades, and plenty of directors have abdicated responsibility for by tacking on lengthy voiceover or on-screen text introductions), which often allows for more complete worldbuilding to explore whatever contrafactual premise the story is built around, but it is possible on-screen as well, as long as you don't rely solely on the dialog to convey it. For that matter, books shouldn't rely solely on the dialog for that purpose either.

Of course, on-screen dramatic works aren't the only ones that face the problem of conveying a setting in few words. Novellas, novelettes, and short stories have similar constraints to various degrees.

"The Heart of the Comet" was co-authored with Gregory Benford. It is one of my favorite books, and I wish they would collaborate again.

Incidentally, Brin and Benford along with Greg Bear, are collectively known as the "Killer Bs". Practically everything written by any of the three is likely to be a great read.

Well, I wanted more "Game of Dogs".

But it turned out that I didn't want that much more.

A quirky (but nonetheless good) novel is "The Green Brain". It has some of Dune's ecological sensibility, but is otherwise completely different.

Note that the adversaries don't have to be foreign. The same dynamics happen within domestic markets unless enforcement is ramped up to constrain the worst actors.

Bah. We could have had usable AR with HUD-like AR overlays at least 8 years ago, and usable VR 3-5 years ago if manufacturers didn't keep chasing increased pixel counts.

Because the limiting factor was and is latency (the article covers this only in passing in one comment, choosing to focus instead on only one component of latency, refresh rate).

I'm not sure why pixel counts keep going up, except perhaps as a marketing checkbox (and false comparisons with AAA game graphics), but it is self-defeating. Perhaps now that display resolutions are reaching the limits of human vision attention can finally be given to the real usability issues with this form factor.

ISTR someone saying that the most common words spoken prior to a breakthrough aren't "Eureka!" or "Aha!" but instead "That's strange..."

Can you provide more information on this (what works, what doesn't)? I'm thinking of adding something like this to a nonprofit's website to help fund their mission.

That's a rather clever form of bureaucratic ju jitsu. It probably works on "enterprise" users as well, particularly ones that are government contractors.

I wonder what other variants are possible... perhaps something around ISO 9000 certification?

You're pointing out that groups/institutions/cultures/civilizations are examples of recursively self-improving entities, but the original point was about a recursively self-improving individual intelligent entity.

Well, to the extent that a human-level intelligence is an individual, anyway. We ourselves are probably a mixture-of-experts in some sense.

Is that a verb now?