Oh yeah. Partying like its 1989 and I’ve booted up my Amiga. Let’s get some unicycling friends in here and do some hacking in 3D.

Dark Souls’ implementation is something special. Censors your name based on the language settings you have in place at the time, voice-over dialogue remains in English. So change your system language to either another language you know, or play it a few times so you know what things are, and then put the most offensive shit in as your character name you like.

PS3 most certainly had a separate GPU - was based on the GeForce 7800GTX. Console GPUs tend to be a little faster than their desktop equivalents, as they share the same memory. Rather than the CPU having to send eg. model updates across a bus to update what the GPU is going to draw in the next frame, it can change the values directly in the GPU memory. And of course, the CPU can read the GPU framebuffer and make tweaks to it - that’s incredibly slow on desktop PCs, but console games can do things like tone mapping whenever they like, and it’s been a big problem for the RPCS3 developers to make that kind of thing run quickly.

The cell cores are a bit more like the ‘tensor’ cores that you’d get on an AI CPU than a full-blown CPU core. They can’t speak to the RAM directly, just exchange data between themselves - the CPU needs to copy data in and out of them in order to get things in and out, and also to schedule any jobs that must run on them, they can’t do it themselves. They’re also a lot more limited in what they can do than a main CPU core, but they are very very fast at what they can do.

If you are doing the kind of calculations where you’ve a small amount of data that needs a lot of repetitive maths done on it, they’re ideal. Bitcoin mining or crypto breaking for instance - set them up, let them go, check in on them occasionally. The main CPU acts as an orchestrator, keeping all the cell cores filled up with work to do and processing the end results. But if that’s not what you’re trying to do, then they’re borderline useless, and that’s a problem for the PS3, because most of its processing power is tied up in those cores.

Some games have a somewhat predictable workload where offloading makes sense. Got some particle effects - some smoke where you need to do some complicated fluid-and-gravity simulations before copying the end result to the GPU? Maybe your main villain has a very dramatic cape that they like to twirl, and you need to run the simulation on that separately from everything else that you’re doing? Problem is, working out what you can and can’t offload is a massive pain in the ass; it requires a lot of developer time to optimise, when really you’d want the design team implementing that kind of thing; and slightly newer GPUs are a lot more programmable and can do the simpler versions of that kind of calculation both faster and much more in parallel.

The Cell processor turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. The resources needed to work on it (expensive developer time) just didn’t really make sense for a gaming machine. The things that it was better at, are things that it just wasn’t quite good enough at - modern GPUs are Bitcoin monsters, far exceeding what the cell can do, and if you’re really serious about crypto breaking then you probably have your own ASICs. Lots of identical, fast CPU cores are what developers want to work on - it’s much easier to reason about.

Oh, one of our customers’ users deleted the /var directory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was “taking up too much space on disk”. That’s where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.

Thought the text said that they were going to do Grimes. I’m up for some crimes, tho.

Nah, that there’s an armsadillo. You can tell, because he has two.

Any decent conductor is going to to vary the beat based on how long it takes for sound to fill the venue in question. Beethoven’s choices for the music halls in Vienna might have made sense then, but not so much today.

One of the things that’s always annoyed the conductors that I’ve worked with is that we always ignore the dynamics in his music. Beethoven’s markings are expressive, subtle. And we always play his stuff louder than indicated.

If having affairs outside of marriage counts as a ‘straight to hell’ offence, then sure. Also if pride still counts as a deadly sin, then off downstairs he goes. But he was an atheist in life.

Heaven looks boring anyway - I’d rather be where my friends are.

I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?

Deep frying a battery - likely to make your whole kitchen turn crispy.

It’s tolerable if you’re writing something quite prescribed; business reports, perhaps. It’s too limited and obsessed with tedious bullshit if you’re writing prose, say. It wouldn’t do to express yourself.

Friend of mine’s dad used to write some Mills and Boon ones, which is the UK equivalent I suppose. We all found it hilarious. Had to sign up for one the ‘8 pre-approved plots’ in advance, and then got paid about a penny a word. You need to be properly cranking out text to even reach minimum wage - it would be easier to work stocking the shelves at a supermarket, quite frankly. But yeah, not an environment that fosters innovation.

Hey! Perks that actually (a) trigger when intended, and aren’t bugged out (b) do something actually useful - are quite unusual in Fallout; there’s plenty of them that are just a trap for the unwary to waste their slots on.

I’d also nominate the ‘lady killer / cherchez la femme’ perk as being one of those traps; the vast majority of the enemies you have to kill are male, and certainly all the ones who are difficult. It gives a few interesting dialogue options, but there’s more effective perk choices.

Speaking as someone who has to use Google Cloud Platform most days; they also do some horrific stuff, and their documentation and support are miles behind the AWS and Azure equivalents. And having worse documentation than Azure is quite the achievement.

Remove the update manager? Remove the bootloader and all kernels if you want to - you might if you’re preparing a container image, it won’t stop you. Remove glibc and init? Fine, if that’s what you want - might have no need for those if you’re prepping it up for embedded.

The price of having a computer that does exactly what it’s told is that you have to know what to tell it. But that’s well worth while.

Yeah - pure functions and immutable data aren’t always the right answer, but appreciating that they’re damn good most of the time is a good first step. Writing obvious code that does exactly what it appears to do at first glance and not one thing more? Your colleagues will thank you when they have to work with your stuff.

I think it’s also very interesting from a ‘pure science’ background. Superconductivity isn’t ‘perfect conductivity’ - it isn’t that we’ve found ways of making normal resistance less and less until eventually we made it to zero. Instead, there’s certain materials that, as the temperature falls / pressure rises, that all of a sudden the resistance just disappears completely. The electrons pair up in a different way from usual, and we see different properties, like completely ejecting all magnetic fields.

They tend to have a ‘breakdown current’ above which they stop superconducting, so it’s not like they’re the instant answer to all of our power distribution woes. They could help in places, but they also tend to be amazingly expensive to manufacture, so they’re no magic bullet. Their magnetic properties might enable us to make things like rotating hard disks with truly absurd storage capacities - you wouldn’t need much superconducting material for each one.

We’ve had superconductors that operate at liquid-nitrogen temperatures for quite a while, which makes them easy enough to study in a laboratory. Having room-temperature ones makes it even easier, and might let us understand them even better. This one sounds a bit impractical for wide-scale use (it’s a powder) but might let us develop more useful ones.

I think having publicly-viewable ‘karma’ is a mistake - there’s no benefit to having karma-whore posts and bots if it doesn’t gain you anything, and that’s a cancer that eats away at other platforms. Similarly, the effect of brigading a single comment is much less - encourages conversation rather than groupthink. And we can all see each other’s posting history anyway - we can see whether any given account is a troll account and admins can ban them.