Greece in a nutshell: 3€ to send a letter, but the postal service doesn't actually deliver mail, not even registered mail. You can pay extra for a PO Box, but it's illegal to use it for official business. They don't do email, of course. Oh, and there's no auto-pay of anything, so you need to go in person to the various offices to ask whether you have a bill due, since they don't deliver mail.
@thomholwerda Yeah, Greece is weird for that, accepting credit cards is so mandatory that I'm legally required to have a credit card setup at home in order to be allowed to work as a software engineer. But at the same time non-Greeks are blocked from going through the setup process.
On one side, the nVidia 555 drivers ABSOLUTELY F*CKING SMASH and they actually work nice. Explicit sync is SUCH a boon and it fixes so many things with Wayland.
On the other?
Steam streaming on Wayland is uberf*cked now. It was trying to work before, now it doesn't even try to show the "let me work on it for a bit".
@never_released I feel that even GPL variants have been tiptoeing around this kind of issue, never yet going as far as requiring that the tools be Free Software themselves.
What is the best explanation you’ve heard for 1 not being a prime number? For me it’s “because it breaks everything in my programs since the loops won’t terminate” but that’s obtuse. “Because the God of math decrees it so!” is compelling, but shallow.
“it can only be divided by 1 distinct number” is contrived.
1 “feels” prime— it has the fewest factors. (Primeness being about NOT having factors) ruling it out for having too few? eh.
“it’s the zero of multiplication” is better… thoughts?
@winter@glitzersachen@futurebird Yeah, the definition of "only divisible by 1 and itself" is only valid for natural numbers, but gets weird in larger sets. E.g. if you include negative numbers, 2 is still a prime, but it is divisible by 2, -2, 1 and -1.
(and, weirdly, 2 is not a prime in gaussian integers, since it is (1+i)*(1-i))
Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.
I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17
@gabrielesvelto@cr1901 maybe that's why it sometimes felt like those old machines were rock-solid in spite of their limitations: hardware has become less reliable faster than software became more reliable.
I didn't anticipate there would be so much interest in how memory in consumer devices goes bad, but since there is I'll try to write a short thread later on the topic.
I personally encountered lots of computers with bad memory while helping friends and family, but what really gave me a measure of the problem is when I figured out a heuristic to detect how many Firefox users encounter crashes because of it.
@gabrielesvelto I don't have statistics (we never spent the time gathering them), but, when I was at Yahoo, we had evidence of single-bit errors in our analytics packets: Flurry event names are strings, and it was easy to spot events whose name was off by one bit.
Hmmm. Write Z80 first, then port to 6502? Write 6502 first, then port to Z80? Write 68000 first, then port to both Z80 and 6502? Write a bytecode interpreter on both 6502 and Z80 and then code to that bytecode?
I guess I'm looking for an excuse to think about writing code instead of, you know, actually writing code.
@mariani1 my challenge now is not to fall for that seduction and to finish my current project instead. If I keep changing focus 2 months into 6-month projects, I'll never get anything out.
I can relate to the learning process of going from a high-level language down to the metal, and then bring horrified at the cost of the abstractions built on top of that.
@bscloutier oh, that's interesting stuff. I haven't worked much with asymmetric multiprocessing, and the little that I did ran the processors in parallel (Megadrive, NeoGeo, Falcon030) so I never had to worry about the cost of switching.
@bscloutier Yeah, those older CPUs don't like to share with other bus masters. The Z80 is somewhat more amenable to it (e.g. the Amstrad CPC graphics component steals cycles from the Z80), the 6502 likes that a good deal less (e.g. the 6502 derivative in the NES does weird things during audio DMA cycles).
@rbreich Beyond market manipulation, stock buybacks are also tax evasion: they allow shareholders to recognize long-term capital gains and to control the timing of such gains (e.g. to match them with tax loss harvesting).