News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

stikypad

Re:Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI on Thursday August 14, 2025 @06:44PM (#44906589)
I think you meant vodka.
Re:Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI on Thursday August 14, 2025 @06:43PM (#44906576)
On the plus side, you can decompose your matrices for free using termites.
Re:Let's properly analyze an AI article for once on Thursday August 14, 2025 @02:08AM (#44897224)
Turns out it was the last.
TFA says the same surveys indicate that alcohol is not being replaced by marijuana use.
For tech jobs, the answer to 2 is a resounding no.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream...

Re:Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @02:48AM (#37318513)
220 VAC allows higher gauge (thinner) wires for the same wattage consumption and more watts per circuit for the same amperage (more powerful appliances and/or more concurrent appliances without tripping a breaker). And the UK in particular has far safer plugs than the US, with a fuse in every plug, partially insulated plug leads, and blocking shutters on the sockets.

So basically we could use less copper, have safer homes, and simplify power supply design since we (and a handful of other holdouts) are basically the only countries using 100-120 VAC rather than 210-230 VAC, which would lower costs and reduce waste.

Re:Call of Duty Adds Kernel Level Driver for Anti-Cheat on Thursday October 14, 2021 @07:53AM (#28863070)
There are definitely cheaters in (nearly) every match of every game.

I should know, because I decided years ago to take the path of "if you can't beat 'em..."

Once I did, it became painfully obvious how many people cheat. With x-ray, "wallhacks," or 3D "radar," with bounding boxes around all players, it became readily apparent who's aiming at and/or chasing players who shouldn't be visible, always choosing the route the opposing team is taking, without fail. And who on the other team always takes the route you take, chasing you through any maze with no problem, even turning around when (and only when) you try to flank them. Also anyone who out-scores you while cheating (particularly if you're "rampaging") is definitely cheating as well, because you're already doing better than is humanly possible. And believe me, you'll get out-scored plenty.

I would be glad to have functional anti-cheats, but it's just not possible in my experience. Cheats are available on day one of any game launch, or day 2 at worst. It's big business (clearly). Even kernel drivers like this have patched kernels to get around them.

For now, cheating makes games fun to play again. Aimbots aren't perfect anyway, and even if they were, nobody can look or shoot everywhere at once. You still have to manage ammo, you still have to reload, and you can still get the drop on people (cheaters) when their attention is focused elsewhere, and you still get killed while cheating. Sure, it sucks for the people who don't have cheats, but I'm not going to be one of those people as long as a large percent of other people are cheating too. Unless and until anti-cheating actually works, it's just evening the playing field as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @08:27AM (#22365215)
I get where the author is coming from, and I'm often dismayed by how much of programming is just shuffling data from one platform/format/structure/persistence layer to another. It's tedious AF.

Still, there appears to be a lot of conflation of concepts here, and I don't see anything approaching crystallization of a coherent solution.

What do I gain by telling the OS that I want a JPG rather than a sequence of bytes that I know is a JPG? I'm probably already using a library to deserialize this for me, unless I'm a masochist, so the heavy lifting has already been done. And that object/struct/whatever is going to be represented somewhat differently in memory for Java than for C++ than for Python. There is no way to reconcile those differences without creating even more problems. So a programming language would need to either be written or adopted to standardize on.

Most application-specific data is already stored in a database of some sort anyway, which is itself (potentially) platform agnostic. To assert that applications should instead rely on the OS and filesystem to provide this persistence layer is to assert that there is a universally appropriate choice of database -- a bold claim.

Moreover, if structure can (must?) be defined by the application which is interfacing with the OS, then nothing is gained but overhead. Every object would need a description of itself, so we either end up with redundant structural information for every file, or else we have some centralized table of "object types" that the OS has to look at every time we request something.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the appeal here. I understand the desire to reduce overhead, but as far as I can see, this just creates more.

Re:Elevator.js on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @01:58PM (#9422223)
Percent of volume says nothing about the line level, which is hardware specific. Since audio jacks were invented before we had industry standards bodies, there is no specification that hardware manufacturers have to meet. Many provide around 1Vpp, or -10dbV, at max volume, but it's going to vary from device to device. The impedance of the headphones are going to affect the SPL as well, and none of it is likely calibrated to any high degree of certainty unless you're buying professional equipment.