AlotOfReading
@AlotOfReading@lemmy.world
- Comment on YSK that United has significantly escalated their war against basic economy passengers 2 months ago:
Can’t be air canada and repressed trauma prevents me from acknowledging WestJet’s existence, so I’m going to guess the good one is Harbour Air. They run the cute little seaplanes you see around Vancouver and Victoria. I hear that boarding one when the system clock is set to 3am unlocks a special area where you can catch spirit bears.
- Comment on New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer 2 months ago:
Any cryptography you’re likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren’t relevant for practical cryptography, they’re just fun.
- Comment on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning 3 months ago:
The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.
Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.
- Comment on “Should art be regulated by the SEC?” NFT artists file lawsuit 4 months ago:
No, the “non-fungibility” simply means that anyone who creates an NFT with the same link will be distinct from your link to the image, even if the actual URL is the same. Both NFTs can also be traced back to when they were created/minted because they’re on a blockchain, a property called provenance. If the authentic tokens came from a well known minting, you can establish that your token is “authentic” and the copy token is a recreation, even if the actual link (or other content) is completely identical.
Nothing about having the “authentic” token would give you actual legal rights though.
- Comment on Regarding this picture, where do you think quantum computers lie and why? 4 months ago:
That’s perfectly solveable with math. Each grid square can take 10 colors, so there are 10^100 possibilities. That’s about 330 bits of entropy, or equivalent to a 51 character password. That’s gross overkill if the underlying cryptosystem isn’t broken, but insufficient if it is (depending on the details).
Cryptography routinely deals with much, much larger numbers than what you’re suggesting (e.g. any RSA key), and even those get broken occasionally.
- Comment on Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity 4 months ago:
No. Nvidia will be licensing the designs to mediatek, who will build out the ASIC/silicon in their scaler boards. That solves a few different issues. For one, no FPGAs involved = big cost savings. For another, mediatek can do much higher volume than Nvidia, which brings costs down. The licensing fee is also going to be significantly lower than the combined BOM cost + licensing fee they currently charge. I assume Nvidia will continue charging for certification, but that may lead to a situation where many displays are gsync compatible and simply don’t advertise it on the box except on high end SKUs.
- Comment on Please help me stop my baby from crying because kodi keeps buffering 4 months ago:
Flat cables can be conformant and they still have twisted pairs. Cables just have to meet the physical properties set by the standard.
- Comment on Oregonian driving 4 months ago:
Have you ever taken the coast starlight or the Cascade trains? Last time I took the former it arrived 14 hours late.
- Comment on Ive bought two 5 months ago:
Have you tried plugging it in first? Machine kneading is usually faster than hand kneading.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 6 months ago:
You’re misunderstanding how their wealth is distributed. By and large, they’re not directly owning the land and paying taxes. They just own significant stakes in the actual companies holding property. I’m sure they own a house or three, but it’s not significant compared to their other assets.
I’m not taking a position on whether property taxes are good. I think they are. I’m just pointing out the discrepancy.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 6 months ago:
I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.
Billionaires generally (are there even any counterexamples?) do not have the majority of their net worth stored in assets that are taxed the same way. It’s a meaningful difference.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 6 months ago:
Normal people regularly owe taxes on unrealized gains. That’s what property tax increases are.
- Comment on Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds 7 months ago:
Just for context, a large chunk of “top tech talent” at the companies in the study are going to be making 200-400k. While there’s still going to be issues with pay, it’s a pretty different situation than fast food workers or similar.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 7 months ago:
I’m not assuming it’s going to fail, I’m just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we’re not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.
As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I’m not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I’m aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 7 months ago:
ML is not an ENIAC situation. Computers got more efficient not by doing fewer operations, but by making what they were already doing much more efficient.
The basic operations underlying ML (e.g. matrix multiplication) are already some of the most heavily optimized things around. ML is inefficient because it needs to do a lot of that. The problem is very different.
- Comment on Can we create a new Internet ? 1 year ago:
TCP has been amended in backwards incompatible ways multiple times since 1993. See e.g. RFCs 5681, 2675, and 7323 as examples.
Plus, speaking TCP/IP isn’t enough to let you to use the web, which is what most people think of when you say “Internet”. That 1993 device is going to have trouble speaking HTTP/1.1 (or 1.0 if you’re brave) to load even the most basic websites and no, writing the requests by hand doesn’t count.
- Comment on Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users - gHacks Tech News 1 year ago:
eGPUs aren’t supported on Apple silicon.