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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Most people don’t see how these things directly affect them because the effects are mostly indirect and the media doesn’t explain why they should care, and many have their social lives tied to using platforms where the other people they know are, so can’t switch to a less evil alternative without becoming a recluse unless a critical mass of their friends are already using it.



  • It’s explicitly stated in A New Hope that they were shooting to miss when the main characters were escaping the Death Star because a tracker had been planted on the Millennium Falcon and they planned to follow it and destroy whichever planet was hosting the rebel base. You can’t do that if you don’t let them escape. Every other time they’re in battle, stormtroopers are shown to be devastatingly effective except when a small garrison is overwhelmed by a vasty larger number of ewoks.



  • Aluminium antiperspirant stains are actually pretty easy to remove if you soak your shirts in something acidic - I use sulphamic acid (commonly sold as the main ingredient in coffee machine descaler, so pretty safe, and not as smelly as vinegar) and just leave things for a day, then any residue that’s left just comes out in the wash. The reason it stains is that long-acting antiperspirant seals the aluminium salts in tiny wax beads which break open over the course of the day to keep releasing more, and wax needs a lot of exposure to soapy water to dissolve, but it’s protected by the aluminium salts jellifying when wet, and they in turn are protected from rinsing away by the surrounding wax. Acids can attack both.








  • The exact quote is:

    And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

    I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

    I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

    But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

    This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus “round_up()” to a “round_down()”, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus

    That’s a long way short of finding the bug and pointing it out, and instead is just the tedious work of adding checks and then deciding where to add more checks when you have the result of the previous checks. I suspect if we’d spent a trillion dollars on a tool for that, we could have come up with something much more efficient than an LLM.







  • No, don’t use CLAMP, use CLAMP_TO_EDGE. CLAMP is a dumb mode for niche applications that all switched to using shaders around the turn of the millennium. No GPUs have direct hardware support for CLAMP and so they have to emulate it instead. You are throwing performance away for no reason.

    (also, technically, the image is using CLAMP_TO_EDGE as CLAMP is a 50% mix of the border colour and the edge pixel colour, so it would be greyer if the border colour is grey like the first image suggests.)