addie

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it's a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There's some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn't take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it's obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn't how things are done in Windows any more.

AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn't really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.

Something needs to change, but I'm not convinced that would be enough...

Which is strange, because Azure's documentation is complete dogshit.

We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure's own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don't exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

Just as long as they keep their hands off our beans.

Takes the 'shell model', which is exceedingly dodgy theoretically but gives good results, and reinterprets it in terms of quantum mechanics, which are pretty solid theoretically. So just need to validate it against what we already know - sounds like they did most of their work against a single isotope of tin.

(We don't have a theory of quantum gravity, so even though quantum mechanics and general relativity are both well-studied and tested theories with enormous predictive power, they can't quite be right. If this new result gives us a better understanding of the strong nuclear force, which it might, then it might also give us a better understanding of all forces. Getting some 'island of stability' larger isotopes might help with packing a lot of power into a small space; elerium-115 style, too.)

Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they've a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it's a cross section.)

The female ones don't smell too bad - 'rodenty' but not too pungent.

The males are extremely whiffy. Very musky, akin to BO, gets into everything.

My grandad used to keep them as working ferrets, for flushing rabbits out of their warrens, and fed them on leftover rabbit carcasses. You could smell that from quite a distance.

The babies are incredibly cute - size of your thumb, very soft. The adults are also cute, but have sharp claws and a nasty bite when they're annoyed. They're faster than you might expect, too - can really cover the distance when they get their bounce on.

Well, in which case, I'm super-gay. Don't need to organise a three-some when I can just have three one-somes.

Not wearing his ring, just in case he meets a girl who wants to party later, the dog.

Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn't be "upgraded" from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.