nwallin

5 ms·

31.
by nwallin 9mo ago
These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then
32.
by nwallin 9mo ago
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects,
33.
by nwallin 9mo ago
It's only there for color printers. A tiny yellow dot on white paper is basically invisible to the human eye. Yellow ink absorbs blue light and no other light, and human vision is crap at resolving blue details. A tiny black dot on whi
34.
by nwallin 9mo ago
OK now do the math for someone who has 200 tabs open. Remember that basically all browsers these days spin up one process per tab.
35.
by nwallin 9mo ago
> Did they actually need all variables to be stable at the point of any memory access? One of the most important optimizations that a compiler can do is keeping a variable in a register and never even bother letting it hit memory in the
36.
by nwallin 10mo ago
This article is not about that. This article is about the AMD Am9080, which was a unlicensed clone of the Intel 8080. The licensing deals that legitimized AMD's unlicensed clones came later.
37.
by nwallin 10mo ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if their code is also vibe coded slop. That's my takeaway from this too. I think they tried the first thing the LLM suggested, it didn't work, they asked the LLM to fix it, and ended up with this
38.
by nwallin 10mo ago
> non-technical people It's also better for the technical people. If you self host the DB goes down at 2am on a Sunday morning all the technical people are gonna get woken up and they will be working on it until it's fixed. If
39.
by nwallin 10mo ago
Trivially. Zip file headers specify where the data is. All other bytes are ignored. That's how self extraction archives and installers work and are also valid zip files. The extractor part is just a regular executable that is a zip dec
40.
by nwallin 10mo ago
At work, our daily build (actually 4x per day) is a handful of zip files totaling some 7GB. The script to get the build would copy the archives over the network, then decompress then into your install directory. This works great on campus,
41.
by nwallin 10mo ago
"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break."--Bruce Schneier There's a corollary here with LLMs, but I'm not pithy enough to phrase it well. Any
42.
by nwallin 11mo ago
I would recommend Fedora only hesitantly. Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install
43.
by nwallin 1y ago
They're called NPUs and all recent CPUs from Intel, AMD, or Apple have them. They're actually reasonably power efficient. All flagship smartphones have them, as well as several models down the line as well. IIRC linux drivers are
44.
by nwallin 1y ago
In Southern California it costs $120 just for a guy to come out and look at your HVAC. Not fix anything--not install anything--just to look at it and give you an estimate for how much the repair is going to take. I went to the website for a
45.
by nwallin 1y ago
No he meant 20kmAh. It's rated for a 5km hike, delivering 2 amps the whole time, taking 2 hours. 5*2*2 = 20. (I wish batteries were just rated in Joules)
46.
by nwallin 1y ago
> The only valid battery capacity unit of measure is watt hours. I would also accept Joules. But yes, the unit should be a unit of energy.
47.
by nwallin 1y ago
One of the demos was printing a thing out, but the processor was hopelessly too slow to perform the actual print job. So they hand unrolled all the code to get it down from something like a 30 minute print job to a 30 second print job. I th
48.
by nwallin 1y ago
I've thankfully never had my house robbed, or a cell phone or laptop stolen. I have had my car broken into. The thieves chucked a paving stone through the window, grabbed a backpack sitting on the passenger's seat, and ran off wit
49.
by nwallin 1y ago
> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. John C. Fogerty famously got sued by John C. Fogerty for sounding too similar to John C. Fogerty. https:/&#x
50.
by nwallin 1y ago
> The universe [...] doesn't require infinite precision, Doesn't it though? What happens when three bodies in a gravitationally bound system orbit each other? Our computers can't precisely compute their interaction because
51.
by nwallin 1y ago
1/sqrt(x) is complicated. Imagine instead of computing 1/sqrt(x), imagine instead that you wanted to compute exp_2(-.5 log_2(x)). Also imagine you have an ultra fast way to compute exp_2 and log_2. If you have an ultra fast way to
52.
by nwallin 1y ago
Accept-reject methods are nonstarters when the architecture makes branching excessively expensive, specifically SIMD and GPU, which is one of the domains where generating random points on a sphere is particularly useful. The Box-Muller tran
53.
by nwallin 1y ago
Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was com
54.
by nwallin 1y ago
When you look at, for instance, a bowl, or even one of those egg carton mattress things, and you want to find the global minimum, you are looking at a surface which is 2 dimensions in and 1 dimension out. It's easy enough for your brai
55.
by nwallin 1y ago
> 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers". You realize that'
56.
by nwallin 1y ago
In 2020, China had 253GW of total solar capacity. In 2024, China installed 277GW of additional solar capacity. In June, they were up to 1,100GW of total solar capacity. In 2023, 60% of the global solar installation happened in China. Chin
57.
by nwallin 1y ago
It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and acce
58.
by nwallin 1y ago
> they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" "Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.
59.
by nwallin 1y ago
Yeah. There've been a laundry list of innovations over the years that people will invent, show how it improves how a scene looks, and then for the next few years everyone turns it up to 11 and it looks like shit. Bloom, SSAO, lens flar
60.
by nwallin 1y ago
No. When you see "artist's impression" in a news article about space, what you're looking at is a painting or drawing created from whole cloth by an artist. This article is about how sensors turned signals into images. W

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