Viewing profile — slongfield

This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.

Full disclosure: I work at Etched. Weights are not burnt into silicon per-model. They're in SRAM/HBM. There's some more info on the website (etched.com) and we'll be sharing more d…

As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.

It used to stand for "[R]adeon [O]pen [C]o[m]pute", but since it's not affiliated with the Open Compute Project, they dropped the meaning of it a little while ago, and now it doesn…

Looks like the shelves were custom-built for those machines. I wonder what the monitors were hooked up to, or if they were just spares. My first thought was that this was built som…

This isn't new. "The Productivity Paradox" is what they called it when people were skeptical that computer would end up finding a place in the office. There are articles from the 9…

My favorite example of this was the Pew Research study: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-op... They found that ~15% of US adults under 30 claim to have bee…

Procedural generation can use a fixed seed, it's not too uncommon. For instance, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall's map was procedurally generated, but is the same for every player.

Computer hardware isn't trying to be currency. Bitcoin was supposed to be, but hardly anyone who uses Bitcoin these days is using it to buy things--it's used as a store of value or…

The other thing about Bitcoin is that it's deflationary, which leads to people holding the currency rather than spending it, as predicted by Econ 101.

The satellite view shows this off much better than Wikipedia's ground-level picture. It Really is just a long band of holes dug into the side of a mountain. https://www.google.com/…

The big problem with MUMPS is that as the "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System", it does not work well for development in other states. There's been som…

Only going off when you want it to actually happens to also be requirements #1, #2, and #3 for grenades

I asked it to create the kind of storybook my toddler would have asked for ("create a storybook about a music truck and an ice cream truck and a mailman and a carwash", inspired by…

It has some ancient history as a morse code distress signal: https://regulatorylibrary.caa.co.uk/923-2012/Content/Regs/03... And it shows up in some old BSD code: https://www.snell…

I've recently started using Github code reviews for a lot of C++, and one thing that I wish it would do is show the header (.h) files before the implementation (.cc) files. Small P…

For better or worse, Google gets more bad press when their models get things wrong compared to smaller AI labs.

People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actua…

The parting of the waters in the USA is such an interesting landmark for just how uninteresting it actually is in person. Looks like any other split in a forest river, marked by a …

Yeah, YouTube's UI lets you set where the ads go. The creator tools let you set how many, and where midroll ads will play. However, most creators just click the "insert automatical…

Non-centralization is enough for me (I love archive.org, but always worry about them flying too close to the sun one day and getting shut down), but this does also have a different…

Personally, when I send an email, I feel less time pressure to respond, so I more carefully craft my responses. The metadata is similar enough, but the actual data in email/forums …

Too much iodine can lead to thyroid problems, and this has been a problem in some subgroups in Japan: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/107/6/e2634/6516999

The most annoying bots are the ones that mindlessly slam sites over and over, without doing any filtering. Having these kinds of tarpits out in the wild forcing people to be better…