exmadscientist

Scroll bars have always been both control (press here to move around) and indicator (how much of this document is there, and how far through it am I?).

Always-on-screen scrollbars are only useless if you think that indication is useless. Many people find it quite valuable.

I mean, I think that's exactly the parent poster's point. It's not an absolute "can this person communicate efficiently on CommunicationBench 3.0-beta7". It's "would I, personally, do well sitting next to this person every day and communicating constantly with them, or would I struggle with that?" There's a very personal piece to this that is both a little arbitrary, but completely practical.

(Caveat: I've always been interviewing for members of a small team who I might very literally be sitting next to every day and communicating constantly with. BigCo interviewing is different.)

Not quite luck, there was a bit more to it than that. Temazepam has a bit different risk profile than some of the others. And the stop signal was developing tolerance; increasing dose would have been the exact thing to do if I wanted to get addicted. So I didn't ask for that!

They really are extremely effective drugs when used correctly. That's why the calls to ban them (as seen elsewhere in this thread) are not terribly compelling. There's no replacement for what they do.

That said: do not abuse benzos. They will fuck you up.

I was prescribed temazepam for insomnia. It was the only sleep medication that worked, and it was the best sleep I've had in my life. It stopped being effective after around 30 days (or maybe 60, I forget). That was the end of that. I could have argued for a higher dose or a refill or whatever, but... you don't fuck with benzos.

I think "exactly like their parents" and "exactly opposite their parents" are indeed the two most likely outcomes.

(And congratulations on breaking the cycle. It's not easy.)

My personal opinion is that, under reasonable circumstances, if you type the words yourself (that is, if your fingers make the keyboard clack), you own them. That definition explicitly excludes copy-and-paste.

The simple act of forcing a roundtrip through your brain and muscles might seem like a small barrier, but I think it's actually a big step in terms of forcing you to interact with the text and take ownership. It's also not practical to do for large blocks of text, and likely will find you putting your stamp on and slightly rewriting even medium-length passages. Both of which are features of the definition.

The issue is really the extreme difficulty of programming them, especially for anything sequential (rather than combinatorial). Yes, you can just put down a CPU core, but that's really slow compared to a real CPU and a headache in a lot of ways. (But still is a totally valid and used technique.)

To give a concrete example, suppose you are doing some image processing and you need to write out something like a BMP image file from the pixel data in memory. Suppose, also, that it's dynamic-ish and you can't really precompute the header and just copy it around. This is a horrifying nightmare to do in an FPGA, generally involving writing a custom state machine and populating different bits of the structure on each clock and so on and so on. (This is not an arbitrary example, sadly; I've had to do almost exactly this.) You can do it but it's just plain hard.

On a CPU you're done in five minutes, for a BMP file.

Now imagine you want to write out a JPEG or PNG. On a CPU this is hard enough that you'll probably grab a library... and then still be done in about five minutes. Maybe thirty if something's unusual or you're being extra careful. Maybe a day or two if you decide to write it yourself (don't do this).

On an FPGA? Holy hell you're in pain. You're either going to spend $$$ licensing something or you're going to be there for weeks.

That is why there are jobs that FPGAs don't do. They're not technically impossible, they're infeasibly impossible.

If it is your core business, yes, great, do them. But you'd never decide to stop making wasteful unoptimized BMP files on an FPGA "just because". It's a major chunk of work. But on a CPU, five minutes.

Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.

Sorry, I spoke pretty sloppily there.

The point I was trying to make is that the CPU is a general-purpose creature and doesn't really care what you want it to do. If you had a CPU that could handle 1.2Tbps of Ethernet packets at 1Gpps, it could do a whole lot of other things involving 1.2Tbps of data flow too, very easily, if someone wrote the software. And more. (But you're probably not getting 2.4Tbps out of it, no matter what you do.)

An FPGA can not. There's plenty of things that those XCVU13Ps just can't do, or would do worse than a $1 microcontroller. (Setting aside for a moment implementing a CPU inside the FPGA... which does actually happen in just about every large-enough FPGA design, which is its own discussion....)

You don't really get an FPGA for capability. CPUs are much more capable, and they're general-purpose so they can do absolutely anything with about the same efficiency and just a little more code.

You get an FPGA for timing. They're less capable, but (in many common design architectures), they output their results once per clock, every clock, on time, every time. If you can hit a fabric clock of say 100MHz, clocking all the weird logic you can stuff in there, it gives 100 million outputs per second, never skipping a single one for any reason (short of total failure). The penalty is that making a small change to your desired "program" can be very expensive, and many things won't be realistically possible at all. Or at least won't fit into a part that you can buy. But things like audio, video, and high-frequency trading love being able to guarantee timing.

(Of course there are other ways to write your FPGA HDL, but that's one of the more common ones. And you do see DDR-style clocking, and similar, every now and then.)

Well holy shit. I didn't expect to wake up this morning and see the "outside" guy from my thesis committee (aka, the only one who wasn't a rubber stamp) winning the Nobel Prize.

Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.

It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.

Congratulations.

It doesn't even have to be transparent! (I think.) Big red "FIRE" letters and either a visible handle to open or very obvious instructions would probably be acceptable.

Impressive!

I wonder how stable this thing is, or if it can even be all that reliably purified out (if anyone wanted to). I've heard from reliable-ish sources that when tritium is introduced to the body it diffuses throughout quite rapidly, so I'm guessing it might be impossible to get rid of this with any reasonable level of effort.

This works for deuterium to hydrogen, but only barely (0.06%!). And that's a 2:1 mass ratio. Uranium separation is 238:235, roughly, or 1.013:1. Not so easy!

The flip side to this is that when you do come across a forged PDF (and I have!), they can be really, really effective. Nobody expects them. There are usually tells in the metadata, but... there don't have to be.