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williamDafoe

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Ask us about the 27 phone calls and TEN DAY DELAY AS WE REACHED OUT TO FIVE CLINICS to get a mohs surgery scheduled for my son, 23, in the bay area, with diagnosed and biopsied melanoma.

The USA medical system is really fucked up. Finally a Canadian in Vancouver hooked me up with a plastic surgeon while on vacation who agreed to end his vacation early and do the surgery in Campbell, CA ( South San Jose )!

So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!

IBM system/360 OS had more than 50,000 bugs which could not be fixed because fixing any single bug would introduce two new bugs. I fear that a lot of AI software systems will reach the same crapware state as IBM system/360 very very soon!

I know from personal experience that once you fix a bug introduced by Claude, Claude tries to recreate the bug every time he edits that code again!!

What a foolish mistake!

On Our maiden voyage aboard spirit, they dumped us halfway home, in las vegas. No compensation, no meal voucher, no overnight accomodation - they just DUMPED US (along with 30 other connecting passengers).

Spirit seems incapable of holding a flight even 5 mins for connecting passengers delayed via spirit's incompetence!

We saw them slam the door 50FT away to our connecting plane as we got off our plane. We watched in horror - our faces against the airport glass - as our next-leg pilot looked up at us and sat on the tarmac 30ft away doing NOTHING for 20 minutes as Spirit told us "nothing could be done" and "you missed your connecting flight" and "see the agent to get DUMPED AND NOTHING, later".

These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.

I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.

But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.

Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.

My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...

I'm had 15 months of daily usage (8+ hours per day) of an Asus S16 and it's been pretty great. I haven't been lugging it around very much - mostly just using the 10 cores at my desk to run minikube and WSL and Windows and also gaming on it and I upgraded the SSD to 2GB. I was a longtime thinkpad bigot (T41, T42, T60, T430, T460s) but their near-complete shunning of AMD CPUs has been a FAIL. This laptop had some MediaTek WiFi issues and STILL doesn't always come out of sleep, but the 16" oled is fantastic, it's thinner and lighter and FASTER than a macbook air, I love the build quality and ceraluminum ceramic coating, and it plays just about any 3D game you can think about ... The 31 watt power limit clips all the performance off the hx370 / 890m GPU (32GB RAM) so I went with the hx365 / 880m GPU (24GB RAM). The low amount of RAM is my only complaint.

I have an original line printer printout of 1970s "Adventure" (translated from Fortran into C for UIUC's CAC PDP-11/70 running UNIX v7.) Adventure is the father of Zork. Zork is a clone of Adventure.

I have a feeling the author compressed 8 million copies of Moby Dick with LZW compression using a huge token cache, then printed the binary results in a 1000-page book. Each successive copy would become smaller and smaller.

If you only understood how White Hot and Stone Cold a research field can be! Five years ago crypto was white hot and today it's almost Stone Cold! People get intoxicated with the money beams that get blasted at people in the white hot subfields but realize that only 5-10% of phds are majoring in the white hot subfields and they simply got lucky 5 years ago to pick that subfield and all that attention hopefully lasts for 10 years which is enough time for them to get tenure or succeed with a startup! if the field isn't white hot for 10 consecutive years they will get fired at tenure time!

When last I looked there were three physics faculty in the United States for every two PhD students. That's because there just aren't any industry jobs for physics PhDs. Assuming a 40-year career, that means one job every 13 years for those two PhDs (one graduating every 3 years) to compete for - so a 1 in 4 chance of getting any physics job! Which is completely insane it's a lucky thing there are trillions of computer science jobs for these unemployed physicists to take - and take them they sure do!

The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...

This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!

Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...

I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...

I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).

Just FYI Google runs their data centers at 85 degrees F (about 30 degrees C). I think Google probably knows more about how to run Intel CPUs for longest life and lowest cost per CPU cycle. After all they are the #5 computer maker on earth. What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power. This is a sign of a failed corporation.

"Stronghold" is a joke phrase, is it not? Intel had ZERO progress in integrated graphics from 2013-2020. ZERO. That's the reason why "it works so well" - because they NEVER improved the performance or architecture! Sure, they diddled with the number of CU's, but as far as graphics architecture, they never changed it, and it was POOR to begin with (couldn't do 1080p esports very well ...)

The 7000 series of CPUs is NOT known for running cool, unlike the AMD 5000 series (which are basically server CPUs repurposed for desktop usage). In the 7000 series, AMD decided to just increase the power of each CPU and that's where most of the performance gains are coming from - but power consumption is 40-50% higher than with similar 5000-series CPUs.

Multics : everything is a memory segment, just get out your soldering iron and wirecutters to begin porting Multics to your hardware today!

IBM: everything is a record type, we have 320 different modules to help you deal with all 320 system-standard record types, and we can even convert some of them to others. And we have 50,000 unfixable bugs because other pieces of code depend upon the bug working the way it does ...

UNIX: everything is an ASCII byte. Done

I started writing code in the 1970s on TOPS-10, TWENEX, PLATO, and my undergrad thesis advisor helped to invent Multics. The benefits of UNIX are real, folks, the snake oil is the hardware vendors who HATE how it levels the playing field ...