eric__cartman

It would be a nice collectable trinket, but OpenAI is quite down on the list of companies I'd gift money to

To be fair I care way more about the long term sustainability of my body than all the software I write regardless of how business critical or interesting it is. Or hardware for that matter, the "temporarily" zip tied CPU cooler fan says hi lol

It's more niche but also underestimating the impact of using SIMD in places where it makes sense. Especially in higher level, interpreted programming languages where the overhead for each iteration is much larger than the few assembly instructions it would take to perform that iteration without vectorization in a low level language.

How would destroying the GPUs prevent the model weights from leaking? By the time you get your hands on them the memory is powered off for a long enough time that a cold-boot style attack is impossible.

If I transported you to the 1960s and gave you a wizard that could punch cards for you with a chance of making a mistake, would you still bother to learn how to operate a punch card?

What would you do if the wizard gets stuck? Coarse the wizard into making the black box work through somebody else's direct perspective on the problem?

Those operating systems already exist. You can run NetBSD on pretty much anything (it currently supports machines with a Motorola 68k CPU for example). Granted many of those machines still have an MMU iirc but everything is still simple enough to be comprehend by a single person with some knowledge in systems programming.

How many of those legacy applications where the source is not available actually need to run natively on a modern kernel?

The only thing I can think of is games, and the Windows binary most likely works better under Wine anyways.

There are many embedded systems like CNC controllers, advertisement displays, etc... that run those old applications, but I seriously doubt anyone would be willing to update the software in those things.

You can't seriously expect a new GPU manufacturer to create a perfectly useable ecosystem on day one.

The drivers will surely get better over time and support for integrating the compute stack that they use will come if the incentive is good enough.

I really hope this doesn't turn out like HIP in AMD Radeon cards. That is absolute dog shit and has been dog shit for ages. It's really sad that an AMD card from 2017 is useless for compute while an equivalent Nvidia card from the same era is just now getting dropped by the latest CUDA versions.

My phone is a piece of junk from 8 years ago and I haven't noticed any degradation in browsing experience. A website takes like two extra seconds to load, not a big deal.

Android studio became great after I upgraded from 16 to 48 gigabytes of ram. Thanks for that, Gradle!

Honestly I don't see much of a problem if this is applied to imports of single items by an end user. I used to be that I had trouble importing some device partly because the power supply was not certified by the local regulatory entities. Most of what people import in single quantities are electronics with switch mode power supplies that work from 100-240v and at 50/60hz. I doubt many people are importing a hairdryer or a toaster. Personally if a power supply is approved by the FCC or some other important entity I consider it good enough for my personal use, even if it has a foreign plug.

It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.

Performance varied between a 4.3 percent slowdown to a 2.3 percent speedup depending on the way it was bent.

I have practically zero knowledge on the physics behind semiconductors to try to think why this could occur but I find it fascinating nonetheless.

An iPhone 8 still has a lot of processing power for headless home server tasks. I use a much weaker ARM dev board as an ssh gateway and Wireguard VPN into my home network and it works just fine. The only thing I'd worry about is leaving the battery on the phone and having it puff up after being trickle charged for months on end.

But if you remove the battery and mod the phone to power it directly from an external power supply you're all set!

I had to slightly rewrite the title to get it to fit within the 90 character limit.

I've always had a feeling that mixing caffeine and alcohol was a really bad thing, even when binge drinking as a teenager. Not that limiting myself to only alcohol was a healthy alternative or anything...

I wonder how much damage (if any) that caused considering I didn't do it very frequently. And how much damage could it do to someone that does it every weekend during their late teenage years?

If you're unlucky enough to experience memory errors in one of the intermediate buffers files go through while being copied from one computer to another an incorrect copy of the file might get written to disk.

When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that these errors are common it's highly likely that the operating system will crash very frequently and the user will know something is seriously wrong.

If you want to make sure that files have been copied correctly you can flush all kernel buffers and run diff -r between the source and destination directory to make sure that everything is the same.

It's probably way more likely to experience data loss due to human error or external factors such as a power surge than bad ram. I personally thoroughly test the memory before a computer gets put into service and assume it's okay until something fails or it gets replaced. The only machine I've ever seen that would corrupt random data on a disk was heavily and carelessly overclocked (teenage me cared about getting moar fps in games, and not having a reliable workstation lol)

I still use an HP 48GX for all my university courses that require a calculator (not many nowadays, the best math courses are the ones without numbers in them). I bought it used in 2020 and it's been one of my favorite sub $25 purchases I've ever made!

I wish I had this all those times I had to guess what buffer exploded just by looking at the Valgrind output signaling invalid reads/writes.

Yeah the camera is the only feature that would really make me want to switch phones. In my case it's more about being a broke CS student without a job lol.

But the low-end device thing still stands. At least here in Argentina where I live most people can't buy a $1000+ phone without going into debt or saving money for a stupid amount of time to get it. Some people that really can't afford to do so still buy them though. Maybe it is reasonable for some but I never saw any appeal in spending so much money (comparatively to a monthly salary) on a non necessity. I happily spent that kind of money on a PC to use for work/study, but a phone? Nah.

I have noticed with two 7 year old Snapdragon 835 devices that RAM and running a recent Android version makes a huge difference.

I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain.

Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's no tomorrow.

I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can make a difference but there is a night and day difference between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated software is hampering this device?

Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-wide audience.

That's a very low tech solution. What we need is an internet connected mug that senses with a camera if it's about to be set on top of a piece of paper and starts beeping uncontrollably.

With a firmware update and an additional charge to the customer a model for detecting polished wooden furniture could also be used.

That wiki was invaluable to me when I took computer organization courses. My recommendation would be to learn x86 assembly and C (also familiarize yourself with gdb!) by writing programs that run on a Linux system and only after target bare metal programming by using something like QEMU + gdb or Bochs for emulating bare metal hardware that's also debuggable.

(I used x86 assembly as an example assuming you wanted to boot your OS on a PC. An alternative could be to target a well documented SBC like the BeagleBone Black)

They used the hardened PowerPC for the rover, similar to previous mars rovers and the Snapdragon chip for the helicopter.

I doubt that'll happen. Android has had the possibility to create alternative app stores since the very beginning and even though there are other stores like F-Droid or whatever Samsung calls their bloatware nowadays almost no one uses them. Apple will not bloat their devices with that crap (talking about the Samsung stuff F-Droid is great and I'd love to see an equivalent for iPhones) from the factory and the vast majority of users will still use the default because it's what they are accustomed to and what's recommended by the manufacturer.

All mainstream apps will remain in the Apple store and everything will be pretty much the same with the ability to side-load whatever you please to the device you bought.

I don't know why, but throwing away computers has always felt wrong to me. I have this small device, built on countless years of research and development that would have been unthinkable not too long ago and it's going straight into a garbage bag. Goodbye to all those semiconductors built on extraordinarily precise manufacturing processes and full of rare earth metals I guess. Now I got a new device with more memory and computing power that'll perform just as bad in a few years for the same tasks because a lot of software sucks ass.

I wonder if Microsoft will continue to patch Windows 10 even after it's official EOL date like what they did with Windows XP. That thing ended up receiving like 12 years of support.

I'd rather be a unicellular microorganism. Only having one cell to worry about sounds pretty chill.

Maybe some people won't. But those that were able to navigate pirate sites in the early 2000s will be easily able to catch up on what somewhat trustworthy sites are used today. I'd wager that it's even a nicer experience now that say in 2010 were internet connections are fast enough to download a movie in a few minutes and all versions of Windows now come with a good built in antivirus program.

The ones that are clueless when it comes to technology will either have to learn about the stuff, or ask a friend to do it. The same thing happened 10 years ago, maybe not with smartphones but copying a movie into a flash drive to watch in one of those fangled new TVs that could play media from an USB mass storage device was certainly a thing.

I at least hope they sell/give away those machines to keep them in circulation. I'd be a real shame to have modern and environmentally expensive hardware like that be torn apart for scrap metal in a recycling facility. Many tech companies love the "eco-friendly" trade in programs that essentially serve to take working, used devices out of circulation.

Security shouldn't be much of an issue with most modern CPUs. The microcode can be updated at boot time by the kernel, even if the one loaded by the BIOS is out of date. So microcode level patches are taken care of.

That leaves attacks on secure boot, which could be feasible with a bad implementation, but I doubt most home users would have to worry about an evil maid attack.