The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.

Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.

Well, a plucked bird does look pretty different. Then again, fossilized feathers for dinosaurs have been found, so it’s not like we’re completely blind to that, either.

Every time I take an airplane, I feel tired and worn out. I don’t want to do anything for the rest of the day except take a nap.

Trains are no problem.

The main reasons might be relatively low oxygen at altitude (cabins are usually pressurized somewhere between 1/3rd to 1/2 atmosphere) and uncomfortable seats. But I think the whole dreary process of getting on and off the airplane is part of it, too. Train stations are so much more low key, even in large metropolitan areas.

Who could have guessed that ahead of time? The industry is famous for seeing a successful new strategy and then driving it into the ground with a list of copycats. The strategy has made so much money before; why would it ever have failed this time?

/s

(Let’s all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee)

Yeah, those are mostly showing off. They’re not really what I’m getting at, either. I more want to challenge people to make useful things simply.

And yes, there are ways that JavaScript can be used to give users a faster and more streamlined experience. The web as it stands is so far past that justification. I swear there’s lots of “full stack” devs that haven’t a clue how to make a site without React.

They’re destroying humanity both physically and mentally, so I certainly hope so.

I’m unimpressed by the people who use it.

I’d like full stack developers to try something. Next time you have an itch for a personal project, see if you can make it with no frontend JavaScript. Just some CSS and HTML forms. All templating handled on the backend. Just try it and see how far you get. Don’t worry if it looks like a GeoCities page.

Then try finding places where JavaScript would make it more responsive or better UX in some way. Does the back button still work? Is it actually faster? Does it provide any benefit at all?

Maybe it does, but just try.

AWS has a multitude of different offerings with confusing pricing structures. They have zero incentive to make them understandable.

That said, chances are your new company has people who understand this already and know how to manage it. Hopefully, they’ll put up some guardrails that prevent you and others from running up a big bill. I wouldn’t expect a junior programmer to know how to do this, but that’s ok as long as the company is managed right. Granted, that can be a big if sometimes.

unzip
strip
touch
finger
grep
mount
fsck
more
yes
fsck
fsck
fsck
umount
sleep

They made those requirements for a reason.

For raw computation, yes. Most programs aren’t raw computation. They run in and out of memory a lot, or are tapping their feet while waiting 2ms for the SSD to get back to them. When we do have raw computation, it tends to be passed off to a C library, anyway, or else something that runs on a GPU.

We’re not going to significantly reduce datacenter energy use just by rewriting everything in C.

That would be the natural assumption, but Sun didn’t do it. I think there is a logo for books, but not one by Sun/Oracle.

Branding fail so bad that everyone forgets that Java even has a mascot.

Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it’s easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they’re even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it’s good that they ask. There’s lots of places where they assume and things go badly.

The few survivors deal with it the only way they know how: another late night orgy on your face.

And then I accidentally found this article on ACPI debugging, which references the memo written by Bill Gates in 1999:

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.

What. The. Heck.

This is insane… Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying? I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally. If it really was his plan, then he succeeded.

Given that the the memo was submitted in court as evidence in a 2002 case, Comes v. Microsoft, it’s probably real. If anything, it didn’t succeed enough. It probably would have been possible to lock Linux out entirely, but by 1999, there were already too many Linux and *BSD x86 server deployments. Couldn’t ignore them. Had to make it just kinda shitty rather than battening it all up.

Server Linux has exactly the same ACPI problems and manages fine there.

That house is in the “so bad, it’s good” category. Vibe coders can only aspire to such things.

Legal weed ended up being the shortcut for me. My wife sometimes has to checkin after a good weed orgasm to make sure I’m alright.

Though I was actively working on being multiply orgasmic for several years before.