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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Meh, not nearly as configurable as linux, some things you can’t change.

    NFS beats SMB into a cocked hat.

    You start spending more time in a terminal on linux, because you’re not dealing with your machine, you’re always connecting to other machines with their resources to do things. Yeah a terminal on windows makes a difference, and I ran cygwin for a while, it’s still not clean.

    Installing software sucks, either having to download or the few stuff that goes through a store. Not that building from source is much better, but most stuff comes from distro repos now.

    Once I got lxc containers though, actually once I tried freebsd I lost my windows tolerance. Being able to construct a new effective “OS” with a few keystrokes is incredible, install progarms there, even graphical ones, no trace on your main system. There’s just no answer.

    Also plasma is an awesome DE.


  • It wasn’t artillery, it was shells.

    We had access to bat guano from islands in the pacific for nitrogen, well, eventually.

    The Germans had to develop whole new chemical processes to keep up, and they were expensive.

    Until the US entered, Germany had an advantage in number of guns, and actually shells too at the very beginning (England was not ready for a non-colonial war).

    Chatgpt, because I’m too lazy to cite real research:

    Yes, Germany had more artillery guns and shells in the early stages of World War I, particularly before the United States entered the war in 1917. Germany had invested heavily in artillery prior to the war, and its military strategy, especially in the Western Front, relied on heavy artillery barrages. This gave Germany a significant edge in terms of both the quantity and quality of its artillery.

    At the start of the war, Germany’s emphasis on artillery allowed them to fire large amounts of shells in major battles, including during the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. However, as the war dragged on and the Allies ramped up their production and coordination (with significant help from the United States after 1917), Germany’s advantage in artillery was gradually eroded. By 1918, the combined forces of the Allies, with U.S. involvement, had caught up in terms of artillery and shell production, significantly diminishing Germany’s earlier advantage.

    The U.S. entry into the war tipped the balance in favor of the Allies in terms of both manpower and industrial capacity, contributing to the eventual defeat of Germany.







  • Single-thread is really hard, we’ve basically saturated our l1 working set size, adding more doesn’t help much. Trying to extend the vector length just makes physical design harder and that reduces clock speed. The predictors are pretty good, and Apple finally kicked everyone up the ass to increase OOO like they should have.

    Also, software still kind of sucks. It’s better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.

    Flash was the epochal change, maybe we have some new form of hybrid storage but that doesn’t seem likely right now, Apple might do it to cut costs while preserving performance, actually yeah I see them trying to have their cake and eat it too.

    Otherwise I don’t know, we need a better way to deal with GPUs, there’s nothing else that can move the needle, except true heterogenous core clusters, but I haven’t been able to sell that to anyone so far, they all think it’s a great idea, that someone else should do.