16 states affected, yet no Canadian provinces, apparently. Good thing smoke can’t cross 5000 miles of open border…

You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.

I know a google engineer who was saying they’re having to update their code bases to handle > 16 exabytes of storage, if you can imagine. But yeah, that’s storage, not RAM.

I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.

I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?

Most recently? My wife was wfh and out of the kindness of my heart I brought her a coke. She was on a zoom call with her entire team. I was pantsless.

literally good for you

I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.

So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?

“Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,”

Seems like a lot of extra disk thrashing that would shorten the life expectancy of an SSD? Like it would be considerably more than your usual background chatter of daemons writing to log files and what not. Unless I’m misunderstanding this?

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.

What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.

I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.

Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.

I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.

Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)

Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?

Fair enough. I’m just looking for some independent confirmation as this is pretty big news.

Is this official though, or wishful thinking on the part of Cameron?

I had to sleep on this before coming up with a reply. As an individual who is not what you would call religiously devout, you can take it with a grain of salt. But whatever the case, here goes…

I grew up without religion for the most part but married a Catholic, and as musicians, we wound up playing at the local church.

As it stands, I would not say that I have bought into the whole religious faith thing at the deepest levels. That does not come easily for me. But I think it is fair to say that certain aspects of the religious experience have rubbed off?

In particular, I am more invested in the welfare of others ranging from my immediate family and friends (many of whom I met indirectly through church connections) to the community at large. As such, I am in no hurry to shuffle off at this point, as I feel there are people who depend on me and so I guess I still have unfinished business?

I don’t know what happens in any afterlife. Does anyone, really? Frankly, if we all just fade away into oblivion, I’d be satisfied to simply have a peaceful release from worldy concerns, but I don’t have any expectations beyond that.

Do you mean in the sense of say missing a concert because you got sick? Or is it something more contorted like feeling sympathy for someone and then regretting it?