mindbleach

@mindbleach@lemmy.world
0 Post – 186 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Forty-four billion dollars to not have the employees, offices, servers, code, reputation, vetting, or brand.

And his hot new name for this smoldering ruin is... X.

Absolute fucking child.

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Famously compressible white noise.

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The PS3 had a 128-bit CPU. Sort of. "Altivec" vector processing could split each 128-bit word into several values and operate on them simultaneously. So for example if you wanted to do 3D transformations using 32-bit numbers, you could do four of them at once, as easily as one. It doesn't make doing one any faster.

Vector processing is present in nearly every modern CPU, though. Intel's had it since the late 90s with MMX and SSE. Those just had to load registers 32 bits at a time before performing each same-instrunction-multiple-data operation.

The benefit of increasing bit depth is that you can move that data in parallel.

The downside of increasing bit depth is that you have to move that data in parallel.

To move a 32-bit number between places in a single clock cycle, you need 32 wires between two places. And you need them between any two places that will directly move a number. Routing all those wires takes up precious space inside a microchip. Indirect movement can simplify that diagram, but then each step requires a separate clock cycle. Which is fine - this is a tradeoff every CPU has made for thirty-plus years, as "pipelining." Instead of doing a whole operation all-at-once, or holding back the program while each instruction is being cranked out over several cycles, instructions get broken down into stages according to which internal components they need. The processor becomes a chain of steps: decode instruction, fetch data, do math, write result. CPUs can often "retire" one instruction per cycle, even if instructions take many cycles from beginning to end.

To move a 128-bit number between places in a single clock cycle, you need an obscene amount of space. Each lane is four times as wide and still has to go between all the same places. This is why 1990s consoles and graphics cards might advertise 256-bit interconnects between specific components, even for mundane 32-bit machines. They were speeding up one particular spot where a whole bunch of data went a very short distance between a few specific places.

Modern video cards no doubt have similar shortcuts, but that's no longer the primary way the perform ridiculous quantities of work. Mostly they wait.

CPUs are linear. CPU design has sunk eleventeen hojillion dollars into getting instructions into and out of the processor, as soon as possible. They'll pre-emptively read from slow memory into layers of progressively faster memory deeper inside the microchip. Having to fetch some random address means delaying things for agonizing microseconds with nothing to do. That focus on straight-line speed was synonymous with performance, long after clock rates hit the gigahertz barrier. There's this Computer Science 101 concept called Amdahl's Law that was taught wrong as a result of this - people insisted 'more processors won't work faster,' when what it said was, 'more processors do more work.'

Video cards wait better. They have wide lanes where they can afford to, especially in one fat pipe to the processor, but to my knowledge they're fairly conservative on the inside. They don't have hideously-complex processors with layers of exotic cache memory. If they need something that'll take an entire millionth of a second to go fetch, they'll start that, and then do something else. When another task stalls, they'll get back to the other one, and hey look the fetch completed. 3D rendering is fast because it barely matters what order things happen in. Each pixel tends to be independent, at least within groups of a couple hundred to a couple million, for any part of a scene. So instead of one ultra-wide high-speed data-shredder, ready to handle one continuous thread of whatever the hell a program needs next, there's a bunch of mundane grinders being fed by hoppers full of largely-similar tasks. It'll all get done eventually. Adding more hardware won't do any single thing faster, but it'll distribute the workload.

Video cards have recently been pushing the ability to go back to 16-bit operations. It lets them do more things per second. Parallelism has finally won, and increased bit depth is mostly an obstacle to that.

So what 128-bit computing would look like is probably one core on a many-core chip. Like how Intel does mobile designs, with one fat full-featured dual-thread linear shredder, and a whole bunch of dinky little power-efficient task-grinders. Or... like a Sony console with a boring PowerPC chip glued to some wild multi-phase vector processor. A CPU that they advertised as a private supercomputer. A machine I wrote code for during a college course on machine vision. And it also plays Uncharted.

The PS3 was originally intended to ship without a GPU. That's part of its infamous launch price. They wanted a software-rendering beast, built on the Altivec unit's impressive-sounding parallelism. This would have been a great idea back when TVs were all 480p and games came out on one platform. As HDTVs and middleware engines took off... it probably would have killed the PlayStation brand. But in context, it was a goofy path toward exactly what we're doing now - with video cards you can program to work however you like. They're just parallel devices pretending to act linear, rather than they other way around.

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I don't care. Any outcome where he's walking free is a failure. I want to stop hearing about this miserable idiot.

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Charitable assumption.

It probably broke.

"At will" is pure conservative bullshit, right down to the name being a lie that makes "fired for illegal reasons but wink wink doesn't count" harmful to even discuss.

No relation to Musk's stupidity. Just picking a nit.

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This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the "multiple document interface," i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren't really a thing yet.

It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there's damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It's more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I'm kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that's smaller than my CPU's cache.

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The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.

Any turn of events somehow bolsters their claim, because their worldview is unfalsifiable nonsense. It is not even wrong.

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Federated sites overlap with leftist-adjacent interests. Software freedom, opposition to Facebook, weird illustrated porn, that sort of thing. Even if we're not leftists - we're the people who heard about Lemmy and went "oh, like Mastodon."

Many leftists were also familiar with Mastodon, because they saw Twitter as a harassment engine. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results. Even before Elmo took over, Twitter was a continuous source of misery by design, if not on purpose. Now it's definitely on purpose. And it's been tilted against leftists, specifically, for a long damn while.

Some people are here because the mainstream options were a threat to their physical safety.

Meanwhile, right-wing assholes aren't leaving Twitter until they run out of victims. They just want an outgroup to yell at. They don't even like alternatives made for them specifically, because they can't stand each other, either. When they get tired of suffering their own company they'll migrate over to Threads. And then endlessly whine that Threads is "bias" against them, no matter how blatantly Zuck ignores their abuse and silences their victims.

Reddit was in a damningly similar situation, long before Spez decided to burn down every scrap of trust and goodwill. Some of us have been waiting on a better alternative for ten fucking years. There wasn't one. There still isn't. The bastards in control just made reddit itself worse, in ways that make even passive use feel like a failure and a betrayal. Spez could personally hunt me down and kick me in the groin, and it wouldn't leave me any less likely to waltz back in with a smile on my face. Dumb bastard made insane demands, killed the best interfaces, told us stupid lies, threw away our money, declared protest powerless, and threatened the people who do all of the fucking work on his empty box of a website... then says 'they'll come crawling back.' Nooo shit the first people out were principled self-organizing curmudgeons.

That aside:

People here reasoning from what they pretend "conservative" must mean are actively doing harm. Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It's just a label. It's the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is "Well someone has to be the king." That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default. That's why dealing with it is such frustrating bullshit.

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The Idiot stiffed the lawyers who defended him for stiffing his previous lawyers.

With emotional distance this will be endlessly hilarious. But living through it, in real time, I am pulling my hair out.

Why's it need to be temporary, anyway? It's an airport. Nobody's sticking around.

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30-year copyright, no exception.

Dead people don't need incentives.

So a deconstruction / reconstruction shuffle. A work picking apart the tropes of a genre, making you question them... and then putting them back together in ways suited to a self-aware audience.

One Punch Man looks like a decent example. The premise is a rebuke of who-is-stronger anime, like the endless power-level treadmill of Dragonball Z. The main dude is stronger. Next question. And the next question is, well, what does a setting with assorted superheroes and supervillains look like, if there's some guy who is unbeatable 1v1, but is otherwise just some guy? Does society support him, after he's basically relegated to an occasional "come save our asses" phone call? How do other supers proceed with their equally-cliche motivations, when SSJ4 Goku showed up in episode one?

Shaun Of The Dead is definitely a reconstruction of zombie tropes - timed right at the crest of the 2000s zombie-movie revival. But Hot Fuzz is a little odd to mention here because it's actually three distinct genres. It goes from screwball comedy to murder mystery to blockbuster action without missing a beat. Ironically I'd say the weakest part is the screwball comedy at the beginning. It's very sedate compared to what it almost was: there's a deleted scene where Angel did Word-art banners for each department, ending on rainbow lettering reading "sexual assault." The opening we got is held-back to ease the later shifts in theme. And while each of these shifts is truly masterful, I'm not sure I'd call the movie as a whole a great example of anything it riffed on.

Really - does it fit any movie marathon that would unironically include Point Break?

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Ignoring the obvious - provocation and false flags are polar opposites, you dunderfuck.

Agent provocateurs go into sincere crowds and start shit to escalate what they're already doing. (Or to justify violence against the crowd, because "someone" threw a rock.) It's an agent, singular. An opposing individual in disguise shapes perception.

False-flag attacks are done by an opposing group. And they do the thing, themselves. They're not goading a crowd into escalating, or inviting violence from undisguised opposition. Sincere individuals are completely optional. The action is performed entirely by people acting under someone else's banner. You know. Like the name.

If if was a false flag, you'd want these assholes in jail as badly as we do.

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Jesus Christ, the usability nightmare of this website is worse than the goofy animated GIF they think is an exaggeration.

www.wired.com##.sticky-box to get rid of the autoplaying video go fuck yourselves, www.wired.com##.journey-unit__container to get rid of the assorted gigantic flyover bullshit.

You ain't straight.

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"It beats smoking" is a low fucking bar.

The science is that putting shit in your lungs is not great. There's no upside for non-smokers. It's a lark. The only truly positive side is that it's objectively better than inhaling smoke, and that only matters if it's a tobacco alternative - and contains nicotine. Which let this low-impact delivery mechanism create new addicts.

Two decades in either direction and the calculus would be trivial. 1990, the way people smoked back then? We'd solve the epidemic overnight. Trade it for vaping in a heartbeat. 2030, the way statistics were headed? Pointless and inexcusable. A brief fad that would linger in countries with hookah culture.

Instead, the worst-case scenario happened immediately. The same murderous liars made money hooking a new generation with a fairly unsafe and hideously addictive chemical. Like they'd previously done by adding filters, and then menthol, and then cloves.

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Politics being genetic, of course.

What?

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Yeah this thread is 70% sad-sack life stories, 10% Sports Almanac financial advice, and 20% popping around the corner with a rainbow flag yelling SURPRISE!

The AI couldn't decide who tops, so both figures are Elmo and Zuck simultaneously. Like they got Brundlefucked.

4.1 Illustrated and Computer-Generated CSAM

Stopped reading.

Child abuse laws "exclude anime" for the same reason animal cruelty laws "exclude lettuce." Drawings are not children.

Drawings are not real.

Half the goddamn point of saying CSAM instead of CP is to make clear that Bart Simpson doesn't count. Bart Simpson is not real. It is fundamentally impossible to violate Bart Simpson's rights, because he doesn't fucking exist. There is nothing to protect him from. He cannot be harmed. He is imaginary.

This cannot be a controversial statement. Anyone who can't distinguish fiction from real life has brain problems.

You can't rape someone in MS Paint. Songs about murder don't leave a body. If you write about robbing Fort Knox, the gold is still there. We're not about to arrest Mads Mikkelsen for eating people. It did not happen. It was not real.

If you still want to get mad at people for jerking off to the wrong fantasies, that is an entirely different problem from photographs of child rape.

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The answer in this case is neither.

But you'll notice a deafening absence of criticism from the right when The Idiot's children did all this and much worse, and vanishingly little liberal defense of Hunter.

There is no great Democratic hypocrisy on this subject. He was going to plead guilty and be sentenced and nobody really objected. What he did was undesirable and gross and apparently over-the-line, but it's not much of a scandal even on pre-Idiot levels. (Five or six years of constantly going "holy shit what the fuck is going on?" has tilted that scale to where this barely registers.)

On the other hand - Republicans suddenly feigning deep concern about nepotism and propriety is so two-faced that it's not even funny. Idiot Junior, whats-her-face, and Eric were only outdone in classical naked corruption by The Idiot himself, because he's too stupid to know why people act coy about it. He pardoned Rod Blagojevich. His children aren't screaming narcissists, so their efforts were slightly more subtle, while still including overt criminal behavior.

Two fantasies - one, that anybody's been persecuted for posting on what was the most popular communication tool in the world, and two, that a narcissist ignoring his own bills will ever cover yours.

People don't get fired for where they post.

People get fired for what they post.

Why, did they add a week-long quarantine in baggage check? It's an airport. The whole point is to show up and leave. Even if the wait lasts longer than the flight.

If your ass in there longer than 24 hours, the wifi should be considered an apology.

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Hilarious, after the tortuously long road Xenia took to get there.

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Applying logic to bigotry is a waste of time. It's just ingroup loyalty. The rest is mouth noises. They won't be clever noises, and they won't be consistent noises.

Conservatives don't have beliefs - they have slogans.

Rational argument is not what they're doing.

Trying to "make it make sense" makes no goddamn sense. Please stop. It won't work.

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A man who reached sixty-seven, wealthy and loved, and put a gun in his mouth while at the kitchen table.

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The grapes of wrath aren't usually so literal.

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Honestly, dumb as this sounds, they can't lose. It's not a platform. There's no infrastructure. It doesn't even do cloud streaming, for some reason; it is 100.0% dependent on your hardware and your network. If Sony went bankrupt tomorrow, this gizmo would still work. If the hardware's sold at a comfortable profit and they're not gambling anything on its success, why wouldn't they launch this ridiculous object? They don't care if you don't buy it.

It's not a handheld. It's an accessory.

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Scream is the perfect answer. It was a response to the waning 80s slasher boom, making it all more real, more visceral, and more of a threat to the savvy audience, while still being funny as hell. Comedy and horror go beautifully together. There's a shared tension with the unknown.

Physicists treating their field as license to hand-wave other fields? Yeah, totally unrealistic.

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Please don't infer that sort of "4D chess" nonsense. This is not an act or a strategy. He's exactly as stupid as he appears.

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Generally meaning all republicans and one democrat.

Saying what you mean can be impossible when every sub demands "respect" or "civility" instead of honesty, accuracy, and appropriate behavior.

Sometimes telling someone to go fuck themselves is entirely appropriate.

Sometimes explaining to someone why they're being a moron is entirely appropriate.

Yes, you can navigate those situations with G-rated kum-by-yah language, and you can eat yogurt with a fork. But demanding anyone do that is aggravating fucking nonsense.

Intense moderation can create a forum where there's never reason to poke someone over what an asshole they're being - but that's not what anyone's doing, here. They're mostly protecting trolls, by refusing to comprehend what trolling is. It's not when you say dumb shit you don't mean and people get mad at you, like some playground argument with one smirking child in a shouting match about the make-believe. It's people spreading disinformation with textbook fallacy. It's emotional abuse with "do you still beat your wife?" level manipulation. It's not deep. It's neither hard to spot nor hard to call out.

But what's currently forbidden is calling it out.

Insisting people take it in good faith is failure. That's exactly what trolls demand. It is the only way trolling accomplishes anything, ever. If they just said dumb shit nobody believed, there'd be no problem. But the appearance of a sane argument, and the trappings of "debate" around their infuriating horseshit lies, create false legitimacy. It helps abusive dishonesty spread. It is actively ensuring that whatever "free marketplace of ideas" is supposed to filter out total garbage, can't.

And anyone who falls for them going 'punishing me would only make me stronger!' is incapable of dealing with a smirking child. They're just fucking lying. It's not deep, or hard to spot. Call their bluff and see what happens. The answer will apparently blow your mind.

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"Both sides," says one side.

Blackwater, Facebook, Twitter.

"Now you have two problems."

All these criminals keep getting arrested... it must be a conspiracy!

Please learn to live in reality. Please start caring what words mean.

Wikipedia shows a model of the probe made for promotional purposes.

Based on their tank situation, Russia will send that model next.