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peterfirefly

The lesson isn't always so bitter, after all.
Better machines make it so much easier to experiment. You could make things fast on a SNES or a N64 but you'd have to sweat for it and your code turned into write-only concrete. You don't have to sweat much anymore and your code can easily stay lithe.
Re:Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:41AM (#50316118)
Sulla even managed to resign and survive, which I think is even more impressive.
Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:56PM (#50311723)
> Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III

Ran?

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:35PM (#50311553)
Could your parents travel further and faster than a king?
Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:13PM (#50311357)
Selection effects are real.
Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:39PM (#50246745)
And then C++38's std::ui2 will solve that.
Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:37PM (#50246704)
It was already (accurately) described as "an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog" around the turn of the millennium.
Re:The result of the C++26 DIS ballot on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:32PM (#50246610)
I don't think you live anywhere close to the normal world. It's like saying "all my friends have phds". I mean, don't everybody know three languages and basic multivariate calculus?
Re:Attention Is Not What You Need on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:20PM (#50246400)
It might be someone who is quite active on bilibili or weibo.
Re:Attention Is Not What You Need on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:15PM (#50246296)
We know that the quality of the astrocytes matters a lot. It's not just about the quality of the neurons or their number or the way they are connected.

I'm afraid we don't know much more than that yet.

We have created frankenrodents with human astrocytes and they are a lot smarter than their unfranked counterparts. I bet we could learn a lot if we repeated the experiment with astrocytes from humans with different, known IQs.

> "ich" vs "ach"

Front vs back vowels. Not much different from "cinco", "gigolo", or "gelato"/"ragazza".

He should have written longer letters and duelled less.
Re:ZX Spectrum Next Laptop on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:49AM (#50178191)
Tiny display + a lot of them didn't have a backlight. This laptop has a big display.
Re:Bleached corals thrive within days on Sunday October 18, 2026 @01:56AM (#50138291)
> Luckily, since the 80s we've had the technology to generate energy without releasing greenhouse gases.

Longer. Nuclear power tech was pretty good in the 60s (outside of the Soviet Union).

Re:GLP-1 may slow biological aging on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:02PM (#50134007)
Not that easy unless you really try: shared IV needles and receptive anal sex without condoms (preferably repeatedly to really prepare the tissue). And you gotta find a willing donor who is not on modern HIV drugs.
Re:GLP-1 may slow biological aging on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:00PM (#50133988)
Did she try TNF-α inhibitors?
Re:I Love Software Rendering on Saturday October 17, 2026 @09:53AM (#50131200)
Modern "GPUs" have the ability to scan out from multiple buffers at the same time and do rectangular compositing during the scan out -- basically like a few giant sprites. It's got absolutely nothing to do with normal GPU work. Zero.

It lets a few unobstructed windows do animation without having to involve the compositor => lower latency AND lower energy use. They do NOT have to be full screen at all.

Oh, and they can also handle framebuffer formats that aren't RGB. This is very useful for video, as the natural format there is YUV or something similar. The YUV => RGB conversion step becomes unnecessary.

Re:I Love Software Rendering on Saturday October 17, 2026 @09:49AM (#50131179)
> had essentially their own processors to handle this stuff

Most of the benefit came from the sound card doing DMA from a memory buffer instead of using a high-frequency interrupt to have the CPU give it sound samples one or two bytes at a time (fetched from the very same memory buffer(s)).

More sophisticated cards could also do mixing of several sounds in "hardware" (usually by having their own little CPU do the work) instead of having the main CPU doing the mixing. Some of them could even play the constituent sounds at different speeds (Gravis Ultra Sound and Midi cards but the Midi cards usually had fixed sound samples). This mattered for more sophisticated game audio for a few years until x86 performance improvements made it irrelevant. DMA is still crucial.

Re:your C is not standard C on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:47AM (#50103667)
> a very "dumb" compiler that does little magic

which is precisely why they can get away with a library seemingly without having to specify or coordinate anything with the compiler.

Re:your C is not standard C on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:03AM (#50101500)
But the VAX really, really wants to make it signed.
Re:Xi's 'death watch' will become a global spectacle on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @09:08AM (#50087184)
She would need the backing of both the European Council and the European Parliament to get a third term. That is extremely unlikely to happen. Moreover, the European Parliament can kick her out at any point if it really wants to.

There are also hard limits on what she can do as president. Brussels doesn't rule over the member states like Beijing rules over the provinces (Chinese + "acquired" ones). Most things need the backing of the Council (= the member states) + the member states can drag things out at home if they want to. The EU doesn't have anything like the US National Guard that can be used in member states to force them to comply (possibly against state laws and state constitutions).

The European Union is the consensus making cooperation machine many European countries have chosen to use and die Uschi is only in charge of one component of that machine.

Doesn't seem very rulery to me.

Re:Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:54AM (#50084975)
She was the real deal, just massively overhyped for being a woman.

Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

Re:Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:50AM (#50084945)
Isn't the problem here the Anita Borg foundation and not Grace Hopper?
Re:Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:48AM (#50084930)
Harvard lost due to obvious "anti" racist discrimination. It still seems to discriminate against whites and asians and in favour of blacks, but not as heavily as it used to.

Edit: forgot to to write "and asians".

Re:Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @02:06PM (#50076000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night

I mean, how dare Estonia not be ecstatic about the Soviet soldiers who kept them thoroughly liberated until 1991.

Re:Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @01:53PM (#50075810)
1959 was a long time ago.

Should we (the EU?) have sent weapons to the Venezuelan opposition in 1999? When exactly did Chávez become a dictator? He was clearly not a democrat (coup attempt in 1992) but I think it would have been premature and unlikely to have had good outcomes if we had done it in 1999 or 2000 (he was democratically elected both times). He was obviously a dictator when he died in 2013 but a large part of the Venezuelan population still hadn't cottoned on to it or they thought it was great.

Iran was similar. The crazies were quite popular in 1979.

> Punishment is out.

Punishment is cheap and actually quite likely to work.

No, the money spent per pupil has a tiny effect (at best!) on outcomes.

There are also massive transfers involved (and the US has had them for at least twenty years) so the property taxes (in the US) have little to do with how much money schools have per pupil.

You can probably do it on a tenth of the budget.

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