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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • CS degrees haven’t been relevant to programming for a long time, but they’re still used as a troll toll in large parts of the industry. Most places actually looking to hire fresh graduates are expecting to have to train them in how they do things, but good luck actually finding an opening like that. Almost all of the open positions are looking for mid-level to senior experience.

    Doesn’t help that the job market is absolute ass right now, thanks to a bunch of big corporations laying off huge swathes of their workforces in order to pad their earnings reports.






  • About 6-8 years ago, McDonald’s had a line of like, “gourmet” burgers that came with grilled onions on them and big leafs of Romaine lettuce, those things were delicious but they discontinued them after only like, six months. For a while afterward I would order grilled onions on a regular quarter pounder but one day they said they didn’t do that anymore either.

    I’m still not over Taco Bell discontinuing the Quesarito. One day when I tried to order it, they told me you could only get it through the app anymore, but I hate installing apps for every little thing so I didn’t bother. I occasionally ordered through the website and was able to get it there but it eventually disappeared altogether.

    Then one day I spotted the chipotle ranch grilled chicken burrito on the value menu and I got hooked on those, but that also disappeared recently. The chicken enchilada burrito that replaced it is a banger, though, and surprisingly cheap.

    And before anyone calls me a shill, I’ll say I fucking hate how everything else on their menu is now like $6 or more unless you order it as a combo.

    IMO, combos shouldn’t be more than 20% cheaper than ordering items a la carte. Like, it shouldn’t be legal to price things that way. It’s just ridiculous that you get ripped off unless you order like, 500 more calories worth of food than you should really be eating in a single meal.

    The chicken enchilada combo box is fucking stupid because of how much food comes in it, and the stacker taco is garbage. They stuff that thing with so many stale, rock hard chips that it’s like eating glass.









  • Yeah, they’re basically talking about a virtual machine (they call it a “framework” but it sounds more in line with the JVM or the .Net CLR) that can automatically offload work to GPUs and tensor cores and the like.

    Programs would basically compile to a kind of bytecode that describes what calculations need to be done and the data dependencies between them, and then it’s up to the runtime to decide how to schedule that on available hardware, while compensating for differences, e.g. in supported precision for floating point math.

    They’re quoting like 4x speedups but their benchmarks are all things that already have efficient GPGPU implementations, mainly signal processing and computer vision, so the computation is already highly parallelized.

    I could see this being useful for that kind of Big Data processing where you have a ton of stuff to churn through and want to get the most bang for your buck on cloud hardware. It helps that that kind of processing is already coded at a pretty high level, where you just lay out the operations you want done and the system handles the rest. This runtime would be a great target for that.

    I don’t really see this revolutionizing computing on a grand scale, though. Most day to day workloads (consumer software and even most business applications like web servers) are not CPU bound anyway. I guess memory bound workloads could benefit from being offloaded to a GPU but those aren’t all that common either.



  • Likely not to an appreciable degree. Horns make a sound louder by giving the thing producing the sound more air to push against, so the pressure waves actually build up and travel through the air instead of just pushing it around.

    Meanwhile a gunshot is loud because it’s already a massive pressure wave. Silencers work by containing the pressure spike and allowing the gas to expand and cool.

    In fact, muzzle cones were added to rifles and machine guns during the early 20th century for a similar reason, to suppress the muzzle flash from the unburnt powder hitting fresh air and combusting by giving the gases a place to expand and cool. They did also tend to direct some of the concussion away from the shooter, but it’s debatable how effective this was.




  • I was looking for someone else to mention Futurama. The new season is just so mediocre. You hit the nail on the head, they’re leaning so hard on social commentary but most of the references are already dated (Bitcoin mining, lol) and in general it’s just rather cringey. I’ve yet to hear one joke that actually had me bust out laughing, and the writers seem to have forgotten the subtlety that made Futurama stand out from other animated sitcoms.

    Billy West sounds like he’s lost his voice and it feels like the rest of the cast are phoning in their performances a lot of the time. And what’s with the release schedule? A Christmas episode in August? I remember there being delays but I don’t understand why they would rush to get it out, they had so long to get it right and they still messed it up.