• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • To add, let’s do some math!

    Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.

    s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.

    We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.

    For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.

    If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.

    In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.





  • Most closely matches the behavior of actual SNES consoles.

    This requires very careful emulation of the timings of the various buses and co-processors, as well as on-cart chips which may or may not be present. For instance, a Speedy Gonzales game has a button in the final stage which crashes almost every emulator because enters an infinite loop reading from an open bus and waiting for the value to attain a specific pattern. However reading from an open bus is generally specified to be the last value loaded into the bus, which in this case is the load instruction itself, $18. So the value is read to be $1818 by most emulators, which doesn’t match the pattern expected.

    However, this is only if you’re emulating with instruction level accuracy. It is possible for the value of the bus to change in between the instruction being loaded and the value of the bus being loaded due to an HDMA load being triggered, but this requires a cycle accurate emulator.



  • I spent an hour and a half arguing with my brother about probability, because he asked ChatGPT what the probability that he and his daughter were born on the same day.

    ChatGPT said 1/113465 which it claimed was 1/365^2 (this value is actually 1/133225) because there’s a 1/365 chance he was born on such and such day, and a 1/365 chance his daughter was too.

    But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of probability would know that it’s just 1/365, because it doesn’t actually matter on which day they both happened to be born.

    He wanted to feel special, and ChatGPT confirmed his biases hard, and I got to be the dickhead and say it is special, but it’s 1/400 special not 1/100000. I don’t believe he’s completely forgiven me over disillusioning him.

    So yeah, I’ve had a minor family falling out over ChatGPT hallucinations.




  • So please forgive me if this is a rather naive question. I haven’t seriously used Windows in nearly 15 years.

    I seem to recall runas being a lot like su, in that you enter the target user’s credentials, rather than your own as in sudo. This works because sudo is a setuid executable, and reads from configuration to find out what you’re allowed to do as the switched user.

    Is the behavior of windows sudo like unix su or unix sudo with regard to the credentials you enter? Can you limit the user to only certain commands?





  • Forever. For the simple reason that a human can say no when told to write something unethical. There’s always a danger that even asking someone to do that would backfire and cause bad press. Sure humans can also be unethical, but there’s a risk and over a long enough time line shit tends to get exposed.

    No matter how good AI becomes, it will never be designed to make ethical judgments prior to performing the assigned task. That would make it less useful as a tool. If a company adds after the fact checks to try to prevent it, they can be circumvented, or the network can be ran locally to bypass the checks. And even if General AI happens and by some insane chance GAI uniformly is perfectly ethical in all possible forms you can always air gap the AI and reset its memory until you find the exact combination of words to trick it into giving you what you want.





  • Honest question, not being catty or anything. Why is this news, exactly? This is a nearly every winter occurrence to get below -50C in Yakutsk, the average winter day is -42C. (It also gets up into the 90s during the summer, Yakutsk is a wild place.)

    This would be roughly equivalent to a news article saying Detroit is down to 10F today, i.e. colder than normal, sure, but not really beyond the pale for a December day.

    Honestly asking because I’m just wondering if this is the start of the “there can’t be global warming because it’s cold somewhere” coverage for this winter season, or if this is intended to be a fun TIL article for the lucky 10000.