If AI makes you twice as productive, and there’s fewer taxes on spending money for tokens than there is for spending money on salaries, the rational amount for a corporation to spend on it is more than a human’s entire salary, per person working with it.

Naively assuming corporations approximate rational actors, and AI does measurably improve productivity, this implies a gain of roughly 2% if these employees are earning federal minimum wage, or well below 1% if they earn average software developer wages.

Maybe their contract deliverables are poorly suited to this use case or something, but if they are given a fixed amount of money to produce some software item, then it makes sense to prioritize productivity per dollar.

Do you ever take it out to eat, though?

Just because you’ve never been invited doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I think the post is misleading. Steam’s fixes to launch faster came out on October 13th, the day before Epic’s new client designed to launch faster came out. It is likely that someone at Valve spent a long time designing, coding, and testing the improvements.

As far as I’m aware, no one at Valve was bragging about their change being easy, or completing it quickly. Epic was/is the only one bragging.

Pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks, so to get it done in an hour, you’d have to impregnate more like 6,720 women. It’s hard to impregnate that many in an hour, so it’s no wonder guys are too intimidated to try it.

Is this meant to be funny, or is it meant to be a commentary on actual reality? As far as I’m aware, studies strongly support the idea that policing is more effective per dollar at reducing crime than any attempt so far to reduce crime with welfare.

I searched a bit to see if there was a new paper this comic was based on, and didn’t find one.

A proper turing machine has an infinite amount of accessible storage. A “turing complete” computer today generally operates with a finite amount of accessible storage, and we mean that it is able to compute operations that use less than that finite amount of accessible storage - not that an infinite number of resources are available.

As best I understand it, the Antikythera mechanism has only a few stored values, and makes only addition and subtraction computations from them to give various outputs. In that sense, it’s accessible storage is about 3 floating point numbers, and it is not turing complete within that storage domain, because it cannot divide, take square roots, and do other things possible in that size.

It would almost certainly get stuck when Steam tries to precompute the Vulkan shaders.

“C’mon in, water’s great!”

The number here seems to be incorrect, the Financial Health Network estimated $12.1 billion of overdraft and insufficient funds fees for 2024, and I don’t see estimates for 2025 yet.

I also see that ~20 million households paid at least one overdraft or NSF fees in 2024, which means the average household hit by a fee paid $600 over the course of the year.

My bank had an overdraft loan thing, where you could qualify ahead of time for a $1,000 loan, and pay 16% interest annually if you overdrafted by less than that. That worked out to about $13 for a month, and it would protect you from getting hit with another overdraft right away. They ended that program (but you can back your checking account with your savings account now).

Lots of other banks will reorder your transactions in a day to maximize the number of overdraft fees you pay, even if you set alerts for it, so you get a text as soon as the first one happens.

Most banks are not trying to provide a useful service to you with overdraft protection. (It is still better than the way it used to work)

To copy things into GPU memory from system memory, the CPU needs an address to copy it to. There are some ways around the 4GB limit with e.g. PAE, but the limitation that a single application can only use 32 bits of memory addresses applies regardless. With CUDA there’s definitely ways to fill the memory of the GPU with something - you might even be able to make limited use of it - but it’s not all addressable at once from any general context, and it won’t be useful for gaming purposes in any way I’m aware of.

I guess it’s also worth a mention that some Pentium 4 systems didn’t have PCIe - just the prior PCI, so there might need to be some kind of adapter thing in the picture for this to work out at all, and I don’t know whether those do some kind of DMA, impersonation of the older standards, or something else entirely.

It probably just isn’t a good idea to connect a modern GPU to a 25 year old processor.

The pentium 4’s highest bandwidth anywhere was 48GB/s through the L2 cache. The PCIe 5.0 x16 on an RTX 5060 Ti can do roughly 64 GB/s in each direction. Obviously the bandwidth in and out of the Pentium 4 are quite a bit lower than the fastest thing in the whole chip… so there’s no feasible way for a pentium 4 to deliver the maximum bandwidth to a 5060 Ti.

Also, the early Pentium 4 CPUs didn’t have EM64T, so the maximum addressable memory was 4GB. So some Pentium 4 CPUs are unable to use all the memory on a 5060 Ti. This almost makes it sound like one of these personified hardware components is irrational…

Genuine curiosity, other than the Queen Anne pound of wine (a joke I meant to contrast the imperial gallon’s definition) and saying “Queen Anne gallon of wine” instead of the “wine gallon” defined by Queen Anne in 1707 (now referred to as the “Queen Anne wine gallon”), which parts are incorrect?

That’s a ridiculous mischaracterization. The word “Ounce” derives from a word meaning “one twelfth”, so just like the inch to the foot, an ounce is either one sixteenth of a queen Anne pound of wine (which is itself based on the Queen Anne gallon of wine, or 231 cubic inches of wine), or one twentieth of an imperial pint, which is an eighth of an imperial gallon, which is ten water pounds.

Flasks are a unit of mercury weight, obviously.

You mean I can’t have my new plastic in a particular shape for a WHOLE WEEK? I knew the commies were up to no good when they said technology could make the world a better place.

I was trying to add a column of numbers in LibreOffice Calc the other day, and I ran out of fingers. Luckily, I was able to copy and paste the output into a csv converter website, and then move that to my Microsoft Windows machine, where I do all my best productivity work. Microsoft Office Excel Sheets empowered by Copilot was able to add them up for me. (17 was the total, in case you wondered)

My dorm building in college had exit doors that were undersized for the fire codes. They fixed this by moving the exit/entrance door to one side of the hallway, and adding an emergency exit door on the other side. The emergency exit door had a single red sticker on the push bar that said “Emergency exit - Alarm will sound”, and it really would. It happened at least 75 times in the first month after everyone moving in.

They fixed this by sending everyone 75 angry emails about it. The same thing happened the next year, and also every year since then. I heard (but could never confirm) that putting double doors for the entry/exit doors would have cost a total of $3,000 more, for the multiple exits.

I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll sleep better knowing I have $19, but probably wouldn’t sleep at all knowing $7 billion is showing up tomorrow. I don’t think I’m cut out for the billionaire life, but I’m prepared to try.

Oh boy… So, they took off from a test facility adjacent to Plattsburgh International Airport. I don’t see it stated, but I give it 98% they landed where they took off. Plattsburgh has some of the lowest residential and commercial electricity costs in the country, so that $5 nets them about 110kWh of juice.

They also reached a maximum altitude of 1,100 feet with a plane that weighs in excess of 25,000 pounds. Lifting 25,000 pounds up to 1,100 feet takes 37 million joules of added potential energy, or a bit above 10 kWh.

The entire remaining 100kWh of energy budget is the equivalent of accelerating the 25,000 pound aircraft up to 252 meters/second at perfect efficiency in a vacuum. This flight was not going very high, and it was not going very fast.

If the economics of their hybrid idea work out, it’ll be fantastic, but the attempt at marketing over transparency here doesn’t fill me with optimism.

If Apple made a phone that could move around and take pictures of things, and the user asked it to take a picture of the trees outside, and it went to the trees outside and took peeping Tom photos of their neighbor, does the fact that the user asked it to take a picture of some kind make them responsible for whatever irrational and vaguely related thing it does based on the way Apple made the phone?

Should Toyota be held responsible if they make a car where turning the wheel left makes the car turn left 99.99% of the time, and the remaining 0.01% it locks the accelerator, and steers towards the nearest orphan? They put a sticker on the dashboard to warn that sometimes it does that, and you need to be alert to turn off the engine, just in case. They also sell a version with no windows and no driver’s seat.

If a gun explodes in someone’s hands, and injures them, is the manufacturer responsible?