adrian_b

52 ms·

811.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
That was definitely a defect of the monitor, not a serious mistake of the programmer. Any damaged monitor should have been paid by whoever had approved such a monitor design, even in the case of a monitor integrated in an all-in-one compute
812.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
As a proxy for the total size of the parameters, you can just look at the download size of a model on Huggingface.co. Because for most models the weights are provided in many *.safetensors files of approximately the same size, you can estim
813.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
For that, you just need to not make the transition from 100% duty cycle to 0% duty cycle instantaneous, but to ramp down linearly the duty cycle over a large fraction of a second or even an entire second. As another poster said, the oversho
814.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
On the other hand, for online transactions I frequently do them outside the usual hour range. However, before going to a distant country, which was also in very different time zone, I warned the bank that issued the card that I intended to
815.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
I do not know if this is still used anywhere, but in the past there were places, e.g. hotels or car rental services, where the validity of a credit card was tested by a $1.00 transaction, before booking a room or renting a car.
816.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
This is not completely certain. There are similarities between the warm-bloodedness of mammals and birds that might not be coincidences. An alternative possibility is that some ancestor of all extant amniotes already had some kind of warm-b
817.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Intel 8080 already had DAA, so it could add BCD numbers. Because there was no BCD subtraction, that had to be done by an indirect method, e.g. by doing a nines' complement before a BCD addition. Zilog Z80 improved this, so that on it D
818.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Batteries must always be talked about while mentioning both the stored energy and the maximum power. These 2 battery parameters depend on different constructive details of the batteries. The stored energy depends on the volume of the electr
819.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
The ability of English to easily incorporate loanwords is because it has lost almost all word flexion from Old English, with very few exceptions, like the plural marker "-s". Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositi
820.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
The answers to some questions must be known in order to be able to write a correct program. In the vast majority of the programming languages, the order of evaluation for the actual parameters passed to a function is undefined. In the few p
821.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
In this case, "millions of years" actually means "hundreds of millions of years". The earliest fossils of centipedes, which were similar to the present house centipedes, are from the late Silurian, more than 400 million
822.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Exceptions are not the only alternative to error codes. Many early programming languages handled errors by providing multiple return addresses to functions. Thus a function returned to the place of invocation in the normal case, otherwise i
823.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
As you say, any widely used language gets fundamental changes from time to time. But most such languages handle much better the compatibility with legacy applications. Python is the main culprit in most cases when I see conflicts between va
824.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
I agree that it was not the best introduction when that would be seen from the perspective of "ill-advised" companies. What I meant is that for rational companies there would be no reason to be happy about this development, becaus
825.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
The part with "cannot be explained by current knowledge" is an exaggeration, because the abstract of the research article explains it very well, based on the current knowledge. However, "a counter-intuitive discovery" is
826.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
But the slots on such Sun-synchronous orbits are limited and many applications want them. A few datacenters could occupy some slots, but it would be difficult to accept a large number of datacenters obstructing such orbits.
827.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Aurora is the Latin name of the Goddess of the Dawn, one of the very few gods that have been inherited since Proto-Indo-European times. After migrations, the Indo-European people have adopted most of their gods from other populations, prese
828.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Nope. Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries. For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but
829.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
A bonus is that manganese is one of the cheapest metals, so this method for increasing the corrosion resistance of stainless steel in salted water and oxidizing conditions is very inexpensive.
830.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
There are some plausible arguments that the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey are not the same, even if they must have been closely related. For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyss
831.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
TFA is correct with about 400 years later. The current form of the Iliad is estimated to have been composed around the middle of the 8th century BC. The destruction of Troy is estimated to have happened around the beginning of the 12th cent
832.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
I have found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48045174 The study paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03546 Look at Table 3, where the cheating rates of Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus and Gemini were
833.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Actually the original qmail still works fine. However it has some compatibility problems with modern practices, the most significant being that it does not know TLS. Having to use TLS is the main reason for running a qmail fork instead of t
834.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
The article is good. Nonetheless, while several pieces of audio folklore are rightly criticized, one is reproduced with little comment. > And the bipolar transistor configured as a current gain stage is completely linear, at least as far
835.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
This is exactly what I have already said. Typical transistor-based audio amplifiers are different enough from traditional vacuum-tube amplifiers, but when the cost does not matter it is possible to design transistor-based amplifiers that ar
836.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
As a child, I have used some very good vacuum-tube audio amplifiers, which had been built by my father, at a time when they were still the cheapest solution, instead of being a luxury product. They were excellent, so I feel nostalgia rememb
837.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
A couple of days ago there has been another thread about an experiment with many LLMs, where especially the Anthropic models were found to "cheat" in a large percentage of the coding tasks that had been benchmarked, by searching t
838.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Among amplifiers that are not perfectly neutral, vacuum-tube amplifiers subjectively seem more pleasant.
839.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
Interesting. While I agree that for a powerful audio amplifier the only good choices are either a state-of-the-art switching amplifier made with gallium nitride transistors or an archaic amplifier with vacuum tubes (while the intermediate h
840.
by adrian_b 6mo ago
IIRC the older Microsoft Basic for CP/M was significantly more powerful than ZX Basic. This is not surprising because the Microsoft Basic was intended for computers with 8 inch floppy disks (the much larger predecessors of the 5 1&#x2F

More ›