Posts by bob, mon! 205 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2007
"If the user base of an LLM - the buyers of the stolen goods - know that the output can't be relied on, then in theory they'll stop using it. "
Really? And how will the buyers know that they shouldn't rely on it? Most people accept computer output as authoritative --- "Garbage In, Gospel Out" was true 40 years ago. Being able to get a response from a "natural language" prompt only adds a veneer of credibility.
I am a long-time KDE user, and i almost always have at least one konsole window running with multiple tabs. This layout can persist from one login to another when KDE is running on X. However, when I tried to switch to Wayland I found that something about it didn't support this feature. Konsole is actually a major part of my workflow so this inability made Wayland a non-starter for me at the time. If that's still true, and MX Linux will now only support KDE on Wayland, then my interest in it goes way down.
Can MX be installed with X (and maybe Xfce), and then add KDE/Plasma afterwards? That should work but it's a shame to have to find a work-around for a choice the developers have made.
(If I'm worng or out of date about konsole and Wayland I'd love to know that.)
"22L" would be a runway oriented at 220 degrees (where North is 0 degrees), and it's the left-hand one of a pair pointed that way. Similarly, "10L" would be the left-hand runway oriented to 100 degrees, and "7R" the right-hand one oriented at 70 degrees.
I *think* I recall a publicized event involving runway 22L at Boston's Logan International Airport, back in the 1970's. (Or maybe that's must my brain continuing to degrade.)
I've been urging my Python students to get and install Anaconda as an easy way to get the language, a nice editor (spyder), and many modules in one convenient package. It sounds like we're still okay for now, but I can't help wondering how long that will last.
These are newbies and non-programmers, so I'm not interested in making them download things piecemeal --- for some, this is the first time they've ever installed non-Microsoft things (or maybe anything) on their laptops.
<rant>
Microsoft, Redhat/IBM, Oracle, now Anaconda... they're all trying to push us back to the heady days of the 1960's when computer installations were all closed shops. My school is already a minor supplicant of Microsoft. Was Crowdstrike a wake-up call? HAH!
</rant>
Inevitable, but very saddening. I met Bram once at some Linux expo or other; he was just a nice, quiet, unassuming man. He will be missed.
(I've been a dedicated vi user since I switched from ed. I love vim (gvim), it's the first thing I upgrade on new OS installs. Three gvim windows open on this machine at the moment.)
...considering that Moore's original observation referred to lowering the cost of transistors. Here's a quote from his 1965 paper (see e.g. https://montcs.bloomu.edu/~bobmon/PDFs/Gordon%20Moore.Law.pdf)
The complexity for minimum component costs has in-
creased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see
graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate
can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the
longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, al-
though there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly
constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the num-
ber of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost
will be 65,000.
I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single
wafer.
"Orion carries a trusty bit of equipment leftover from NASA's Space Shuttle era, its main engine, capable of providing 6,000 pounds (over 2,721 kilograms) of thrust "
Other sources suggest that the Space Shuttle's main engine provided as much as 470,000 pounds of thrust. One document does mention the "Orbital Maneuvering System Engines" producing 6,000 pounds of thrust.
Way back when I was in college, I was told that an engineering equation was "good enough" if it was accurate to 3 decimal places; a physics equation was good enough if it was within an order of magnitude; and an astrophysics equation was good enough if the units came out correctly.
That was in the days when slide rules ruled....
I can only hope that this data slurpage applies to the free version. My school system (consisting of 14 state universities) has chosen zoom as its official standard teleconferencing software. I have zero options to change to any other platform. And even if I could, getting people to use zoom was and is an exercise in on-the-fly training, and anything else would have that problem and no official support.
Well, maybe the corporate legal team actually did due diligence and checked out the Ts &Cs. Who knows?
Quoting from the abstract:
"Remarkably, the new structure appears to be undulating and its three-dimensional structure is well described by a damped sinusoidal wave on the plane of the Milky Way, with an average period of about 2 kiloparsecs and a maximum amplitude of about 160 parsecs."
Rural Pennsylvania. Rural (western) New York, rural Vermont, New Hampshire. Rural Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.
I'm 2 hours from New York City (at 70 mph), and 4 hours from Pittsburgh. Lots of small towns in between, but lots of farms, forests, state hunting lands and the like as well. My nearest neighbor is across the road, but the next nearest is 1/8 mile away. No cable out here, never mind fibre. Some days "IP over avian carrier" seems like a viable option.
"Can you do 3Mb up with a low bandwidth modem on a long phone line?"
AHHHAHAHAHA*kaffkaff* No.
I get less than 100 KB/s (so 800Kb/s) up on a good day... and Verizon DSL doesn't give me good days. I just now got a 44.1KB/s upload of a 300MB file. Yawnnn....
Of course, a true "low bandwidth modem" would be the 300-Baud unit I started out with, back in the previous millennium.
"let z;" - z is a... let? letter? letcher? lett?
It's lettuce. Green, leafy, and silly in a program.
I use C when Assembly isn't good enough...
Seriously: do-while versus while? (Versus for???). Look at the machine code. A decent compiler generates the same code for any version, and it's the most efficient implementation the architecture can provide. Those higher level constructs are so YOU, the programmer, can remember what you meant 6 months from now.
That's all you can say about the paper? I met it in grad school in the 1980's, and still have my copy. It's delightful! Here's an excerpt:
"Encouraged by this success, as minor as it is, the Blefuscuians tried to pull another fast one. This time it was on the VAX, the sacred machine which all the Little-Endians worship."
Look for IEN 137 if you want to understand where big.LITTLE came from. Or here's an online copy: https://montcs.bloomu.edu/Readings/ien137.txt
True GigE will be a boon for beowulf clusters running MPI or whatever over Ethernet, as the node interconnect is a bottleneck.
I just built up a 4-node RPi 3B+ cluster for class use, now i need to justify getting 4 new RPi 4's. Also glad to hear that the boards can run on 2.5A, since the cluster doesn't have any peripherals and the current generation of multiport USB P.S.'s max out at 2.5A per port.
Next step - find out whether 64-bit Devuan will run on the new board.
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