I mean, if we’re making up a story about a kind of demon it probably shouldn’t be a healthy relationship.

A succubus sucks your soul out through your crotch, which feels great until it doesn’t. That’s why its supposed to be a scary monster.

The post says, “until you die of natural causes”, but for a counterpart to a succubus I think it would much more appropriate if it was able supernaturally influence you to reduce your worries and make you more and more dependent on it (just as a succubus can supernaturally charm its victims). Gradually you care about less and less as you lose all motivation, and at the end you don’t even bother to struggle as your soul is ripped from your body.

I remember the days when bugs in x86 CPUs were almost unheard of. The Pentium FDIV bug and the F00F bug were considered these unicorn things.

Distributed computing would eliminate the water usage, since the heat output wouldn’t be so highly concentrated, but it would probably somewhat increase power consumption.

In an ideal world I think data center waste heat would be captured for use in a district thermal grid / seasonal thermal energy store like the one in Vantaa.

Of course that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be thinking about whether we’re using software efficiently and for good reasons. Plenty of computations that take place in datacenters serve to make a company money but don’t actually make anyone’s lives better.

I used to think the same thing, but the thing is we don’t care about the energy that goes into the sunscreen, we care about the remaining percent that goes into the skin. If you go from a sunscreen that absorbs 98% of the sun’s energy to one that absorbs 99% you are halving the amount of energy your skin is exposed to.

If you’re still getting burned with 98% absorption, then increasing that number by 1% would actually make a huge difference. And that’s without even considering things like having a safety margin for improper application.

Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.

Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99E01tgOGw

France has nearly the same population density as Ohio, and it has the TGV, which covers more than 5 times the land area of Ohio. So where’s the Ohio high speed rail network?

This is the scale of Japan compared to the US east coast:

So why aren’t there high speed lines that cover that same distance in the US?

Americans complain about US politicians and US policy on a near constant basis, and yet when comparing the US to other nations its apparently impossible for anyone to have made a stupid or self-serving decision. The US apparently is always operating at the absolute limit of what’s physically possible, and if there’s any deficiency compared to its peers its never because something was done wrong. Its always because “the US is too big” or “we’re too diverse” (what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?).

To be clear there are actual answers to the questions I posed above, but its not either of those moronic excuses.

Wow, cool, you ride an airplane directly into an abandoned mineshaft?

Yeah, it doesn’t actually make much of a difference:

Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS’s job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.

Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they’re probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can’t violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.

The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:

1. Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.

2. If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn’t make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.

3. If you’re running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?

With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that’s long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.

In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.

Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they’re both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).

If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that’s small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.

I don’t daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my “favorite”.

1. Some sort of sex thing
2. This comes to mind, even though its specifically for dads:

Phones can figure out its location using gyroscopes and accelerometer

This is plainly false.

The error stack-up from the imprecision of a phone’s MEMS sensors would make positioning basically impossible after a couple of dozen feet, let alone after hours of walking around.

There are experimental inertial navigation systems that can do what you describe, but they use ultra sensitive magnetometers to detect tiny changes in the behavior of laser suspended ultra cold gas clouds that are only a few hundred atoms large. That is not inside your phone.

Just as we shape our experiences so to do our experiences shape us; the swarf is a part of you now.

What is the “everything” that Rust is being used in? From what I’ve heard its being used in the same place you’d use C or C++, not in any other niches.

How hard is it to just say “I don’t like that scent”?

The definition of jank is that it at least sorta works.

If it doesn’t its not jank its just broken.

The thing to understand about large organizations is that appearances matter a lot and the people working in them have to look busy. This is well known phenomenon among low level employees but it applies to managers and even executives too (who have to put on a show that they’re increasing shareholder value and that their company is special somehow).

So, why do advertisers care if someone says “fuck” but not about someone whose spewing pseudointellectual misogynistic bullshit? Because there’s someone whose job description is “brand value” and if they’re not upset about something then they don’t look busy. The amount of “fucks” per minute is a really simple metric that (now that speech recognition is as good as it is) is really easy to measure. In other words its an easy way to look busy.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the guy’s boss is probably a conservative anyway, and so doesn’t mind the misogyny so much, but looking busy is the main reason.

Play Fallen Aces if you want to experience a gooner shooter.

TBH, I think there’s something wrong with Americans.

Temple OS wasn’t Unix-like.

Also it gets way too much attention as is IMO. Its the only hobby OS project people know about, purely because 4chan turned its mentally ill creator into a meme.

I’m sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won’t do anyone any good.

Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn’t actually correspond to any useful economic activity.