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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I use interactive rebases to clean up the history of messy branches so they can be reviewed commit by commit, with each commit representing one logical unit or type of change.

    Mind you, getting those wrong is a quick way to making commits disappear into nothingness. Still useful if you’re careful. (Or you can just create a second temporary branch you can fall back onto of you need up your first once.)



  • CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU (“general purpose GPU” aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.

    Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn’t competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.

    Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don’t want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.

    That’s anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it’s anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.


  • Compared to other languages it’s still very barebones – but admittedly some of the bloat is also because the JS world is kinda set in its ways. I still see people use jQuery for basic selector queries and SASS for basic CSS variables.

    Another factor is that developers these days assume that users have fast unmetered connections. Loading 800 kB of minified gzipped JS from ten different domains is seen as no big deal. When the cost of adding piles of dependencies is considered nil there’s no impetus to avoid them.









  • Last winter, in order to protect the dwindling completely full strategic gas reserves, the government issued an order for all govenment-owned office buildings to limit the central heating to no more than 19° C because that seemed to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic solution at the time.

    This included buildings that don’t even use gas for heating. Remote heat? Geothermal heat? Free waste heat that you have to actively vent to the atmosphere in order to lower the room temperature? Yep, all required to not exceed 19° C. The building I worked in at the time (for a company that rented some excess floor space) actually wasted energy adhering to this well thought-out rule.

     

    So yeah, I’d say that in order to change a lightbulb you need at least 1000 Germans. You need both chambers of parliament to create and pass a new ordinance that applies specifically to this lightbulb (and several other contexts it has no business applying to but does because it’s too vaguely worded). Then you need at least three different expert panels to advise the government, regulatory agencies to make sure the ordinance is adhered to, licensed trainers to make sure the people executing the job are formally certified to do so… Actually, we might have to get the European Parliament involved; the new ordinance might benefit from being propoted to a European standard.

    I’ll get back to you about this in about three to five years; we need to get this figured out.