Gh0stRAT

Agreed, how could we not have datacenter capacity for the GPUs when Meta has shown that you can go from a bare field to an operational datacenter in about 3 months by using tents instead of buildings?

It's been quite a while since I first heard about it, but IIRC they were seeding cryptographic PRNGs with entropy from multiple sources, one of which was allegedly this art installation.

Seeding PRNGs with sufficiently unpredictable data was a real security concern for a while. New cloud instances have a small entropy pool space for attackers to enumerate due to lack of a real source of randomness. (See the Debian/OpenSSL issue for what can happen when your entropy pool is too small/predictable)

One fun fact about XOR is that anything XOR'd with a uniform random distribution results in a uniform random distribution, so there isn't any harm in mixing additional non-attacker-controlled entropy sources in as long as at least one of them is sufficiently unpredictable. The lava lamps provide a potentially hard-to-predict source of entropy for this, but if it's not available then it certainly doesn't "take down the internet". They'll still use packet arrival timing, interrupt timing, etc to seed their CSPRNGs.

Ian Banks' Culture series is the only one that comes to mind.

You missed Adelaide's O-Bahn, which is another way to mitigate the "buses get stuck in traffic" problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway

That's not countering the argument that steering is what is preventing the bike from falling over rather than the gyroscopic effect of the wheels. You'd have to tie off the handlebars with a static line before rolling it in order to prove that it was the gyroscopic effect keeping the bike upright.

IIRC if your brokerage reports everything to the IRS properly, you only need to fill out net short- and long-term capital gains on your schedule D rather than specifying every single transaction on a bunch of Form 8949 copies.

Not sure if Double's underlying brokerage is reporting everything necessary for this to be the case though, as I believe some brokerages don't.

This is exactly how Toyota's AWD works in the Sienna these days.

It gets 35mpg city and highway, 1mpg less than the front wheel drive Sienna (which, to be fair, is also a hybrid)

If your threat model includes someone with a quantum computer intercepting all of your traffic and storing it to decrypt later, you probably don't want to share your keys over a non-PQC channel unless you can guarantee that they haven't started eavesdropping on your traffic yet.

They fought the FBI over unlocking iPhones when they could have just quietly complied with the request. I'd say they have a decent track record.

IIRC backpropagation was a very significant breakthrough on how to update weights when training neural nets.

I want my guests to be able to cast to my TV, add songs to the Spotify queue, etc. As far as I can tell, these sorts of features work via broadcast frames and thus require the relevant devices to be on the same subnet.

Things like my printer and wifi-connected grill live on a much more restrictive VLAN. (with some firewall rules to allow devices on the trusted network to still print to my printer's hard-coded IP address)

Amazon Fresh also used it in a handful of locations. (and still does) IIRC there are 2 Whole Foods locations that use it as well.

Yeah, I'm going to be honest: I'm a cryptocurrency doomer so I've not followed things super closely, but a quick Google search turned up this article[0] from 2022:

While it is true that Nvidia cards are generally preferred by miners due to better price-to-performance, AMD GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6600 XT could still be mined on profitably until recently. […] So yes, carefully consider the condition of all used graphics cards—Nvidia or AMD.

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/395149/should-you-buy-a-used...

IIRC people were already converting their data into texture maps and writing their SIMD instructions as shaders operating on those textures before Nvidia released CUDA.

There's a quote that I love:

I'm a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.

Nvidia has been working hard(er than their competition) on the software side for almost 2 decades to be in the position they find themselves today. 16 years ago, they released CUDA for general-purpose computing on GPUs, and then 9 years ago they followed that up with cuDNN. They have a consistent pattern of making a intentional, long-term bets to diversify their market exposure and unlock new product areas while building a software ecosystem moat.

Yes, they obviously got super lucky with the cryptocurrency frenzy, but there's a reason all the miners were mostly buying Nvidia cards instead of AMD cards.

Is the term you're looking for "cupping", ie the formation of "sun cups"?

Haha yeah, I was being charitable to avoid starting a flamewar ;)

I think that Javascript's massive success with the terrible syntax it used to have goes a long way toward confirming your hypothesis.

So that they can seamlessly upsell you on upgrading to a new phone that you'll pay off in installments over the next couple years.

Also, many postpaid plans (like my home ISP) require SSN because they are providing you service on credit. Postpaid cell paone plans have been the "default" in the US for a long time, though prepaid seems to be gaining market share.

If you practice bringing a new datacenter online without any connectivity on the existing deployment, and you practice then joining two disjoint "clouds", then you've pretty much covered your bases.

Are you making a rate limiting/ddos argument about "turning them all on at the same time"?

Azure has procedures in place to prevent circular dependencies, and regularly exercises them when bringing new regions online.

IIRC some of the information about their approach is considered sensitive so I won't elaborate further.

Unfortunately yes. That being said, the hottest loops that would benefit the most from added parallelism tend to have fewer side effects already in my experience so things aren't quite so bleak.

foreach will not be replaced behind the scenes into multithreaded version since it changes behaviour.

It only (meaningfully) changes behavior if you're both iterating over an odered datastructure and the body of your loop has direct or indirect side-effects. (like printing, writing to a file, making network requests, etc)

One difference from most other classes of bugs is that threading issues can be quite nondeterministic, which makes it harder to automatically disambiguate between flaky tests and real bugs being caught.

Also, the code introducing a race condition may get lucky when your CI system runs the tests and still make it into your main branch.

I agree that tooling (like static analysis, Rust's borrow-checker, etc) can play a big role here though.

Humans are bad at reasoning about multiple threads simultaneously, so I suspect the more practical shift is the trend we've already been seeing toward more declarative syntax.

eg `for` loops are being replaced by `foreach` loops,`map` and `filter` operations, etc. These tell the compiler/interpreter that you want to do some operation to all the items in your datastructure, leaving it up to the compiler/runtime whether and how to parallelize the work for you.

The part I don't understand is why the prices still go up at the same time for my ammo despite it not running low.

Because many gun owners own multiple guns. (especially the ones who consume the most ammo) If they're short on ammo to shoot their AR-15 at the range this weekend, they're not going to just sit at home. They'll go to the range and shoot 30-06, .357, 9mm, etc.

Retailers know the score and can preemptively raise prices on their non-NATO rounds before they run out because they know their customers are going to be less price sensitive due to the shortage in NATO alternatives.

(in economic parlance, the different rounds are still "substitute goods" despite not working in the same firearms, so it would actually be pretty surprising if their prices WEREN'T correlated)

The real way to look at it is via the marginal revenue minus the marginal cost.

Generally speaking, it makes sense to keep hiring more workers if you're getting a net benefit from hiring each one. That being said, at a certain scale the organizational challenges may eat into your net marginal profit. (eg unclear ownership and diffusion-of-responsibility, more layers in the org chart making it harder for decision-makers to hear from the people actually doing the work, longer deprecation cycles, etc)

Hiring is hard and slow, so it's definitely possible that the other companies you used as examples were theoretically understaffed. (if you ignore the costs of hiring, anyway)

I'm sure you'll be able to use voice commands to take pictures/videos hands-free with these. jperras just said that THEIR ideal workflow would rely on a button.

Well in this hypothetical scenario, you are stationary (sitting across from each other) so there would be no tracking to notice.

They could be pointing it mostly at the table (<45° angle) and you'd still be in frame without realizing.