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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • To copy things into GPU memory from system memory, the CPU needs an address to copy it to. There are some ways around the 4GB limit with e.g. PAE, but the limitation that a single application can only use 32 bits of memory addresses applies regardless. With CUDA there’s definitely ways to fill the memory of the GPU with something - you might even be able to make limited use of it - but it’s not all addressable at once from any general context, and it won’t be useful for gaming purposes in any way I’m aware of.

    I guess it’s also worth a mention that some Pentium 4 systems didn’t have PCIe - just the prior PCI, so there might need to be some kind of adapter thing in the picture for this to work out at all, and I don’t know whether those do some kind of DMA, impersonation of the older standards, or something else entirely.

    It probably just isn’t a good idea to connect a modern GPU to a 25 year old processor.


  • The pentium 4’s highest bandwidth anywhere was 48GB/s through the L2 cache. The PCIe 5.0 x16 on an RTX 5060 Ti can do roughly 64 GB/s in each direction. Obviously the bandwidth in and out of the Pentium 4 are quite a bit lower than the fastest thing in the whole chip… so there’s no feasible way for a pentium 4 to deliver the maximum bandwidth to a 5060 Ti.

    Also, the early Pentium 4 CPUs didn’t have EM64T, so the maximum addressable memory was 4GB. So some Pentium 4 CPUs are unable to use all the memory on a 5060 Ti. This almost makes it sound like one of these personified hardware components is irrational…




  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldLMAO
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    10 days ago

    I was trying to add a column of numbers in LibreOffice Calc the other day, and I ran out of fingers. Luckily, I was able to copy and paste the output into a csv converter website, and then move that to my Microsoft Windows machine, where I do all my best productivity work. Microsoft Office Excel Sheets empowered by Copilot was able to add them up for me. (17 was the total, in case you wondered)


  • My dorm building in college had exit doors that were undersized for the fire codes. They fixed this by moving the exit/entrance door to one side of the hallway, and adding an emergency exit door on the other side. The emergency exit door had a single red sticker on the push bar that said “Emergency exit - Alarm will sound”, and it really would. It happened at least 75 times in the first month after everyone moving in.

    They fixed this by sending everyone 75 angry emails about it. The same thing happened the next year, and also every year since then. I heard (but could never confirm) that putting double doors for the entry/exit doors would have cost a total of $3,000 more, for the multiple exits.



  • Oh boy… So, they took off from a test facility adjacent to Plattsburgh International Airport. I don’t see it stated, but I give it 98% they landed where they took off. Plattsburgh has some of the lowest residential and commercial electricity costs in the country, so that $5 nets them about 110kWh of juice.

    They also reached a maximum altitude of 1,100 feet with a plane that weighs in excess of 25,000 pounds. Lifting 25,000 pounds up to 1,100 feet takes 37 million joules of added potential energy, or a bit above 10 kWh.

    The entire remaining 100kWh of energy budget is the equivalent of accelerating the 25,000 pound aircraft up to 252 meters/second at perfect efficiency in a vacuum. This flight was not going very high, and it was not going very fast.

    If the economics of their hybrid idea work out, it’ll be fantastic, but the attempt at marketing over transparency here doesn’t fill me with optimism.


  • A coworker of mine made the worst code base in the world. Beginning as soon as it was allowed, he used generative AI to work faster, add more documentation, review his MRs, write tests, and make changes to embrace industry norms.

    It went great until this code was actually deployed. It turns out that he more than doubled the size of the code base, and made the worst code ever written by humans even worse. It has become superhuman levels of bad. The code AI wrote for him is going to produce the singularity of stupid, out of which hyper-anti-intelligence will emerge, and grow to consume every compute resource for the remainder of time.

    In related news, yes, I could end my use of AI.


  • I searched a bit, the main thing I can find is that 7 days ago, Mamdani appeared on stage at an event in Staten Island, where he only got 23% of the vote. Multiple (at least 4) people booed him, and he left the podium/stage after roughly a minute during which he thanked various people.

    So… He went to a borough where he wasn’t very popular, and he still isn’t very popular there, I guess? This is just like the ending of my own relationship’s honeymoon phase, when my sister in law that has never liked me, still didn’t like me after I got married.


  • If Apple made a phone that could move around and take pictures of things, and the user asked it to take a picture of the trees outside, and it went to the trees outside and took peeping Tom photos of their neighbor, does the fact that the user asked it to take a picture of some kind make them responsible for whatever irrational and vaguely related thing it does based on the way Apple made the phone?

    Should Toyota be held responsible if they make a car where turning the wheel left makes the car turn left 99.99% of the time, and the remaining 0.01% it locks the accelerator, and steers towards the nearest orphan? They put a sticker on the dashboard to warn that sometimes it does that, and you need to be alert to turn off the engine, just in case. They also sell a version with no windows and no driver’s seat.

    If a gun explodes in someone’s hands, and injures them, is the manufacturer responsible?







  • This relates to the thing I am most confused by in today’s business climate. Companies face brutal competition, and tremendous pressure to “innovate” (screw the customer more), and yet every ounce of research on the question suggests that rather than pushing people to work longer and longer hours, they can get the most out of their workforce by mandating proper sleep, time walking/in nature/exercise, non-continuous working periods, and comfort items like faster computers, better chairs, higher quality food, etc.

    Why isn’t any company ruthlessly pursuing efficiency by giving bonuses for sleeping well? It would be super creepy and authoritarian to mandate sleep monitoring, but I don’t see why that stops them, when it doesn’t appear to in any other direction. Or even simpler, requiring shorter working hours, but expecting the same/more output?

    Is it this exact attitude, that somehow happy workers with free time will get up to no good, or become depressed, or feel less committed or something?


  • No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.

    Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the “more hours worked means more things got done” thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.



  • It depends. It looks like the orange portal is being moved by a hydraulic cylinder (aka laminar flow), which means the relative positions and velocities of things moving through the orange portal are conserved, and A is correct.

    If instead that’s (yuck) an air fired cylinder… Then it’s going to be B.

    If the movement is handled by a threaded rod, then the box will emerge from the blue portal spinning, and (perhaps contrary to expectations) if the orange portal is moving because of gravity, then the bouyant force of the box progressing through the portal will stop it from falling further, and the box will end up just less than halfway (because of the angle) through the blue portal.