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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I’ve only known people on the production side of porn. One was a 3D artist that was taking raw 3D scans of pornstar penises and cleaning/refining them for dildo production. I think he enjoyed the work, because he kept doing it.

    Another was a sound engineer struggling to find stable work, who really did not approve of pornography. I’m pretty sure his wife made him apply and take the job. He was also the strangest conspiracy theorist I’ve ever met - noteably he believed the US air force had technology for greatly enhanced surround sound recordings to capture some kind of sounds. Instead of 5.1 or 7.3, he believed they had 28.7. This got even more confusing when he worked with mixers that could handle 128 feeds in and out, and he set up microphones for large bands with e.g. 60+ recordings going… so all he’d need to outdo top secret military technology is 60+ speakers.



  • 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 have been rather fortunate, and well paid (~$120K after taxes and savings). Even 3 years ago, I didn’t have to think about money day to day. I was brought up with a very modest lifestyle, so the things that feel extravagent to me were affordable in that context.

    Today my wife and I eat out less, shop for groceries differently, and plan things that used to be a small purchase more carefully. It’s not a struggle in the important senses, but I have a clear feeling of “it’s going to get worse”, and I want to make lifestyle adjustments ahead of that rather than falling behind it.




  • In my market it was 5 super stuffed pastries in 5 sleeves vs. 8 regular pastries in 4 sleeves. In the alternative view, the super stuffed box contains 1150 calories, and the regular box contains 1480 calories.

    1.5*5 is 7.5, so using nominal figures you get slightly less filling, much less crust, much less frosting, and more plastic with the super stuffed box.




  • 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 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)