Kale

I’m a mech E in the medical field. We’re consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we’re probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.

My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I’ll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It’s not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.

Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There’s a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that’s how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.

The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.

AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.

Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.

I don’t know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became TSMC GlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.

This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could date other people work on mobile projects, which helped them learn.

It’s a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It’s possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.

As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it’s not like they ignored mobile, but it didn’t benefit them as much as TSMC.

There are methodical ways of valuating a private (and public) company. Some are pessimistic and some are wildly optimistic. Your can legally use whichever one you want, only you must only use that valuation method for everything. It’s illegal to value the company low for taxes and high for loan collateral. And if you sell it, you can owe back taxes if your valuation was off (sale price is the new valuation).

This is overly-simplified US accounting rules (from finance class 10 years ago)

He took it private so, although there can be shares, they aren’t traded on the open market. So no positions to short.

Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don’t think I was looking at a Surface pro though.

If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.

I’m not following closely and haven’t gamed on PC in a while but:

Denovo is a technology that is supposed to prevent copying games (DRM). Not sure what it’s current state is or might be mixing it up with other DRM, but DRM is known for causing headaches for paying customers. Using excessive system resources, refusal to launch for legitimate paying customers, spyware/excessive data collected and sent to a corporation, etc. In some games, volunteers will patch bugs out of a game, and this will cause the game to think it’s cracked and refuse to launch.

Some DRM is “phone home” and can’t be played offline, so people in remote areas can’t play. And sometimes the company doesn’t want to keep servers online when the game has been out for 10 years, so people that purchased the game can no longer play.

In this case, the company let reviewers rate the game and got the initial scores and sales, then pushed the unpopular DRM update. It’s scummy. If you’re using it, then use it. Don’t bait and switch.

The more adjectives in a countries’ official name, the less likely those names are to be accurate.

Republic of… ok

The People’s Democratic Republic of… yeah ok buddy

Yeah, nothing seems to work properly online. It’s so complicated trying to manage deep data analytics without OracleSAP. My conflict free vaping startup switched to OracleSAP and now everything runs so well we created an office ultimate Frisbee league. It’s bae, fam. (This post has been guilded 2654 times!)

Goldschlager?

Positive spin take: will encourage higher quality content and comments. Will incentivise spending more time posting and commenting and greater care put into both.

Likely reality: Rush to lowest-common-denominator posts. Sensational titles to grab attention. Comments are less likely to write things the hive-mind doesn’t want to hear, so less variety in comments. White-knighting increases. More porn by professional posters.

Almost-certain to happen: change in content. It’s a gamble that the new content will be as popular as the old content. Reddit had a platform up until June this year. No matter what happens, they abandoned that platform to re-shape it into something else. Which seems like it would be a hard sell to investors. “You know our core product and user base that you’re interested in? Well, what if we told you that we were creating something to gather an unknown amount of new users! And all we have to do is alienate our current user base!”

Fundamentalism in Christianity means you interpret Scripture with two rules that are a lot like Occam’s Razor. The first is that text is interpreted literally unless it has obvious indications that it is not literal. The second is that the Tanakh (which Christians call the Old Testament) is followed unless the New Testament specifically comments on it.

Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe in evolution because there’s nothing in Genesis that hints at allegory, and it’s not mentioned in the new testament. Eating pork and shellfish is allowed because that is specifically addressed as being Ok. Something like the Talmud in Judaism or Papal Bull / Canon in Catholicism, where Scripture can be interpreted in a more complex light, is not used at all. That’s a hallmark of fundamentalism in Christianity.

There’s a joke told around me that explains this. Why do you always invite two Baptists fishing? Because if you invite one Baptist, they’ll drink all your beer.

A lot of that is selective breeding. Humans add a ton of extra stuff to breed, but groups of breeds are not as arbitrary. Pointers have been bred for bird hunting, shepherds for livestock, retrievers for waterfowl, terriers for small game hunting. Bulldogs were bred for 150+ years to attack bulls, bears, and other dogs (until animal welfare laws banned dog fighting). Further division of breeds (like rat terrier vs feist) is arbitrary and doesn’t represent anything meaningful genetically.

My opinion is that bulldog / terrier mixes (like the pit) represent a greater risk to humans than the average dog. I don’t think it’s anything unique to the pit, which has a lot of media hysteria. The data look so bad for pits because they are so popular. If Staffordshires were more popular in America, they’d show up in the stars more.

The name “pit bull terrier” did originate from bull terriers used in professional dog fighting. Dogs would fight in a pit. Until animal cruelty laws became a thing.

Just being upfront: I wouldn’t own a pit due to the number of instances of friends having a pit that is the “nicest dog ever” and it randomly attacked them one day. I also extend this to Persian cats, btw. But we can’t ban particular breeds. Punish bad owners, continue selectively breeding dogs to reduce aggression.

Extreme example: Adults who were abused as children are more likely to be child abusers themselves. Should we ban people who were beaten by their parents from being teachers? They are statistically more likely to abuse children.

Barking is a performative aggression. It’s meant to intimidate. Predatory attacks frequently don’t have warning barks. It’s quiet staring then a lunge.

The behavior you described sounds dangerous, but it’s a known thing (that doesn’t make it less dangerous, but does give opportunity to blame the owner that they should have known they had an aggressive dog). Terrible owners don’t correct this behavior and have dogs that are dangerous to people. But there are many dogs that show zero aggression before attacking. There’s a bunch of biased sources but I think there is some truth to it, nearly half of dogs that kill have not shown aggression towards humans before.

Side note: Rottweilers are the #2 killer dog breed in America. They average about 10% of all fatal attacks. Pits are the #1 killer dog breed. The past couple of years they’ve been 65%+ of fatal attacks.

It’s becoming more common to see police departments ban Malligators. Less predictable than GSD.

Any dog can be aggressive, yes. Most pits have great personalities, sure. But I’ve known a few pits that weren’t aggressive towards people. Until they were.

The owner problem is a real factor (owners who are likely to raise aggressive dogs are more likely to get pits), but there’s an extra layer to pits. They are raised to be muscular with very strong jaws. If a Yorkie turns on it’s owner, someone’s getting bloody ankles. A pit (and chow, and Rottweiler) can really hurt people.

On top of this, there’s two types of aggression in dogs: performative aggression with barking and short charges, and prey drive which is quiet staring and sudden lunges towards the throat of another dog or animal. I was under the impression for a long time that dangerous dogs had terrible tempers and were “grouchy”. No, dangerous dogs are social creatures like most dogs and many show affection to other pets and humans, until something triggers their prey instinct. The website I cite below has a statement that pits are less likely to act aggressive before an attack.

There were a string of dog deaths in my city last year. All pits. Two were family pets that both attacked their toddler playing in the family’s yard. The mom ran to help and the dogs attacked her and their infant. Both children died and the mom was hospitalized. And a friend of mine had to mace a dog doing his job last year for the first time, it was a pit. Anecdotal, I know, but it’s changed my mind on pits.

This group says 69% of dogs involved in fatal attacks in 2019 were pits: https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2019.php

One 2019 fatality was from 8 different breeds. This means that if you flip that statistic around to “percentage of fatal attacks involving pits”, that number is even higher.

Pits are estimated to be 6.5% of American dogs.

I haven’t posted once since RIF was disabled. I think my account is up to 16 years now. I’ve been on a subreddit if Google brought me there, but I don’t browse anymore.

Jerboa is pretty similar to RIF so it’s been great.

Melting tundra releases methane, accelerating the increase in temperature. Rising temperature reduces polar ice, making oceans absorb more heat, accelerating heating. Climate pattern changes cause more frequent and larger wildfires, accelerating heating.

There are probably processes that work to reduce heating as it increases that I’m not aware of, but there are a lot of positive feedback processes which is concerning.

I believe the IPCC 1.5C was criticized because it included effects of a carbon sequestering process that hasn’t been invented yet. That’s pretty optimistic.

I really hate how insanely profitable the film industry is yet almost all the wealth goes to a few obscenely wealthy people, while the regular workers who make films struggle. My knee-jerk reaction was that it’s great that there’s a slowdown of releases to put pressure on people, but I forgot how little movie theaters usually make on movies (I think they barely make any money on the movie and make most of their income on concessions).

It’s great to see there’s a way to keep theaters earning money while the writers continue their strike.

My company blocks lemmy.zip on WiFi, but lets lemmy.world through. So I tried to be on something other than lemmy.world, but still use it about half the time.

I jiggle my wrist to open my camera app. And chopping motion turns on the flashlight