There was someone that parked like this all the time when I lived in an apartment complex. I called the management office to complain, and they explained that their towing enforcement contract was only Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. You know, when everyone is at work, and therefore not parked.

The truck owner went on vacation, so her truck was parked like this on a Monday, and I called. The office worker decided they had to give a written warning first. So nothing ever happened with it.

A proper turing machine has an infinite amount of accessible storage. A “turing complete” computer today generally operates with a finite amount of accessible storage, and we mean that it is able to compute operations that use less than that finite amount of accessible storage - not that an infinite number of resources are available.

As best I understand it, the Antikythera mechanism has only a few stored values, and makes only addition and subtraction computations from them to give various outputs. In that sense, it’s accessible storage is about 3 floating point numbers, and it is not turing complete within that storage domain, because it cannot divide, take square roots, and do other things possible in that size.

It would almost certainly get stuck when Steam tries to precompute the Vulkan shaders.

I mean… “Sit in this room with a pen and a piece of paper until your thoughts are on that paper. If we see you pull out your cell phone, we’re taking it away.” is pretty effective.

“C’mon in, water’s great!”

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…

I remember the great lakes with HOMES.

I guess it’s not too hard to switch to SHAME

You mean I can’t have my new plastic in a particular shape for a WHOLE WEEK? I knew the commies were up to no good when they said technology could make the world a better place.

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.

I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll sleep better knowing I have $19, but probably wouldn’t sleep at all knowing $7 billion is showing up tomorrow. I don’t think I’m cut out for the billionaire life, but I’m prepared to try.

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?

In the 1812 German version (and German versions since then), the queen asks who is “schönste” in the land. That’s definitely pretty, beautiful, or attractive, rather than pale, white, or brilliant.

We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren’t paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics… They’re practically engaging in a boycott.

Processing all the text as tokens is too much work, so the AI will just read the headline and the first 3 paragraphs, then hallucinate the rest of the details.

That’s known as PEBCAK: Problem Exists Between Cart And Kiosk

I think she’s Ariana Minuta now.