You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

• load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
• manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.

Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

Beautiful creatures with excellent names.

As an aside, the Mars rovers are much larger than this - we don’t see them side-by-side with people for comparison very often. Curiosity is the size of a car - three metres on a side, two metres tall, and weighs the best part of a tonne.

If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

It’s easy to tell the difference between stoats and weasels. One is weasily recognised and the other is stoatally different.

Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses

Now that sounds interesting!

Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.

So; for $2k upfront, $19 a month in saas fees, you get a bed that you can adjust the temperature of online? And also, opens up your whole house to being remotely hacked? And our guy in the article has chucked his electronics and replaced it with a tropical aquarium heater pump for $180, which suggests that it’s just the bog standard kind of waterbed that you could have bought for about $300, with unnecessary tech attached?

There’s plenty of “silicon valley tech” that seems to have a ridiculously poor value proposition - this isn’t the Juicero, but might challenge for second place. Have to wonder exactly what they’re thinking, though. And what the devs were thinking, putting it into production with a live AWS key in the firmware.

Your classic VGA setup will probably be connected to a CRT monitor, which among other things has zero lag, and therefore running your sound separately to your audio setup, which also has zero lag, will be fine. Audio and video are in sync.

HDMI cables will almost certainly be connected to a flatscreen of some kind. Monitors tend to have fairly low lag, but flatscreen TVs can be crazy. Some of them have “game” mode (or similar) but as for the rest, they might have half-a-second or more of image processing before actually displaying anything. Running sound separately will have a noticeable disconnect between audio and video; drives me crazy although some people don’t notice it. You would connect your audio setup to the TV rather than directly to source to correct this.

Now, the fact that a lot of cheap TVs only have a 3.5mm headphone jack to “send on the sound” is annoying to me, too. A lot of people just don’t care about how things sound and therefore it’s not a commercial priority. Optical digital audio output would be ideal, in that cheap audio circuitry inside the television won’t degrade the sound being passed over HDMI and you can use your own choice of DAC, but they can be both expensive and add a bit of lag as well.

Dunno why you’re being downvoted. If you’re wanting a somewhat right-wing, pro-establishment, slightly superficial take on the news, mixed in with lots of “celebrity” frippery, then the BBC have got you covered. Their chairmen have historically been a list of old Tories, but that has never stopped the Tory party of accusing their news of being “left leaning” when it’s blatantly not.

Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn’t protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn’t protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn’t protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn’t protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.

“Infrastructure”, to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I’m thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/hardware/allen-bradley/programmable-controllers.html.

Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven’t been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it’s up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.

PLCs tend to be coded up in “ladder logic” and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn’t a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there’s a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and “supported by manufacturer” is critical for these industries.

True. I’d mentally envisioned it as a whole series of “bread powered water wheels” down the side of the building, with a furnace at the bottom. Nothing actually going fast enough for friction to matter. A machine that only tried to convert all the kinetic energy at the bottom would be wasteful, as you say.

Plainly, we’re going to have to put some engineering design time into the concept of this.

A kilogram of bread is about 2000 calories, about 9 kJ. Your body “burns” food too - probably more efficiently than you could make a steam engine for the same, but it’s about that much.

Energy from gravity is equal to mass * gravity acceleration * height. 1 kg of bread in a 9.81 m/s/s field has the same gravitational potential at “about a kilometer”.

If you’re throwing magic stake baguettes off the top of the Burj Khalifa, the energy would be about equal.

AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.

I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.

“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.

Bless her. If someone that really ‘loves and appreciates wine’ but ‘hates eggs’ finds that a complete nightmare, then I (who am the opposite) should leave it alone.

She’d absolutely cooked the shit out of those eggs, though. I’d probably hate them too if I only got ‘yellow cooked until it’s a powdery dust’ as my options.

At least they’re fucking up their own series! So much worse when some big publishers buy out a beloved series and fucks it up properly, often never to be seen again. Could be Eidos fucking up Thief, Bethesda fucking up Fallout; EA fucking up Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Dead Space, SimCity, Need for Speed, Star Wars: Battlefront, Command & Conquer, Ultima and The Settlers. In fact, just fuck EA.

Control back in the right place… where you can press it with your left pinkie without taking your fingers off the home keys? Rather than where useless caps lock is just wasting space?