GeertB

The article made it seem that the tags way on the order of half a gram, but that would be about the butterfly's weight. Even at 60 mg it's a significant additional burden for the butterfly, I'd expect. Even if you only take the heaviest Monarch butterflies that weigh in about 600 mg, it is 10% of their body weight. Like an 6 kg backpack for a human weighing 60 kg.

I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.

Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).

Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.

Signed integer addition is only associative when overflow is defined to wrap around like unsigned arithmetic. This condition is matched here, because only debug builds panic on overflow. However, it's a bit of a gray area that the article completely ignores.

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

The program terminated just a few moves into the game when there were plenty of legal moves left. Also, it is surprisingly hard to play chess as a human when there is no checkered board.

I don't quite understand how multiply doesn't require addition as well to combine the various partial products.

The article makes it sound like the Tesla Semi is physically infeasible. Yet, it is in active use on a sufficient number of long-haul routes that ignoring this proof of existence undercuts some of the central points the post tries to make.

The combination of higher efficiency, regenerative breaking, and some regulatory wiggle-room such as slightly higher allowable gross-weight (2000 lbs in the US, and 2000 kgs in the EU), together with reduced maintenance cost and time significantly affect the economics of trucking.

As regulatory frameworks price in more externalities of internal combustion engines, such as the climate and health effects of their emissions, burning diesel will no longer make economical sense. All road transport will end up being battery-electric. The declining cost of owning and operating electric vehicles compared to internal combustion ones will reach this point even without regulatory changes, just at a slower pace.

monochrome

Can't help myself: whenever I see Windows 3.11, I have to compute the difference between it and Windows 3.1. So, I fire up the calculator from the Accessories folder, and compute 3.11 - 3.1. The result: 0.00. Try it! :-)

How did you handle games where Stockfish would castle or promote?

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!

To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!

I wonder if this will improve latency and signal strength

The title here says 100M, but the actual presentation says 1M?

That one has a special place for me. I was a consultant then and invited to join the chorus even though I wasn't at the more professional level the other cast members were. We did a performance in London and one in St Louis. Still, it was a lot of fun, and how I got to meet my spouse 25-ish years ago.