The Top500 is not relevant to desktop or laptop performance.

I love using linux for all my HPC stuff but on a desktop or worse a laptop it can be a major pain in the ass. Linux is really tuned for a server and not as a desktop. Even with an SSD and all fully supported hardware on a laptop linux just doesn't run as well. It can use things like optimus to switch between integrated gpu and dedicated gpu but it is clunky and buggy compared to windows. The interface does not run as smoothly and the fonts don't render as well.

Only part of the problem is that consumer hardware is designed for windows, the other part of the problem is that linux still does not take the desktop seriously after all of these years. The entire experience is still pretty glitchy and I have used linux as a desktop for over 15 years now. Windows has improved enormously and it is harder and harder justifying using linux as an end user machine.

This could also end up backfiring spectacularly.

Self driving cars are getting much better very quickly. A few too many of these protests is going to be remembered when it is time to deploy self driving cars.

The worst one is all the train strikes in Germany and other places in europe. Their jobs can be completely automated right now. The technology to do it has existed for more than a decade. If they keep striking the way they have been people are going to get fed up and instead of giving in they will replace the entire lot of them with self driving trains.

If you are enough of a nuisance the public will react to make the problem go away. It just may not react in the best interest of those causing the nuisance.

With the type of work I have been doing additional storage is not a problem however resizing is expensive. I create all my vectors at their required size in advance in almost all cases. I think I only have a few cases where I have to dynamically expand a vector since there was no way to know the size ahead of time.

I agree though that you could screw up pretty badly if you just create it at size 0 and then keep building it up to millions of elements. That would be horribly slow compared to the rest of the code.

The great thing is that vectors are guaranteed to be contiguous in memory and that means you can hand them to BLAS routines.

CUDA and opencl are great for certain types of problems. If you don't have a problem that works well on GPUs then they are pretty horrible.

For the kinds of HPC work I have been doing I get a nearly linear speedup up to 128 cpus with appropriate use of openmp.

OpenMP is a standard and supported by all modern compilers. It works extremely well and gets rid of all the boilerplate code you would normally need with threads and gives extremely good scaling on high performance systems.

I may hate seeing it written that way also but that is also the current most common way to write it and that is what HR systems and their computer screening systems except. You are writing a resume for an HR person usually and if you want it t be seen by someone more important it has to get past them first. That means doing stuff that HR people understand.

There are many fights to take on in this world and others that are just not worth the effort to fight since the costs are so high compared to the benefits and this is one of those fights.

There are many things you can use to improve your c++ code like std::vector. With that you store data contiguously in memory but you also don't have any manual memory management. No new, no delete, no malloc, no free.

For my high performance work I tend to use std::vector, BLAS and LAPACK and my programs usually have no manual memory management of any kind in them. Valgrind shows no memory leaks and the programs are very easy to read and work with.

If you want to do high performance c++ then learn OpenMP and MPI. If you want to do threading just use OpenMP since that makes it VASTLY easier to get threading correct. Add tasks with OpenMP along with their dependencies and you end up with a nice cross platform and very high performance code base if you have done your job correctly. If you need to scale to multiple nodes then use MPI between nodes.

Earth is a horrible place. It is infested by humans!

Have you seen how stupid humans are?
World wide people prefer the lies they tell themselves and the lies of their culture to actually looking at scientific evidence. Humans are also very poor at dealing with any threat that it nos immediate to them and so all kinds of things we deal with poorly.

Face it humans are really not very nice to be around and earth is not exactly a good place.

Of course I also agree completely that many that don't want to be traced are drawn to crypto currencies. It was an inevitable given the nature of the currency and even if the currency itself is neutral and there are many good uses for it also the negative uses will always overwhelm the neutral and good uses of crypt currency.

Journals should be highly interested in posting failures. We can all learn about an approach that did not work. Failure tends to be replicated a lot and it is wasting a lot of time and money.

Knowing that an approach does not work would save a lot of time. It would also help to know if a certain experimental setup did not work and that a different setup should be tried.

I think the problem with this is our society.

For some reason we tend to only think that positive results matter. Negative results are just as valuable. If you do a really well done 10 year study and find no connection then we learn a lot.

In many aspects of our society winning is all that matters and that has spilled over into our science funding.

If we started to truly value negative results we would progress much faster scientifically and we would also have much better science quality. The current system favors making very safe bets that are basically impossible to be wrong on and then have others make another tiny step from that one.

Even the USA would split apart without these kinds of transfer payments. Most of the states in the south receive more in federal money than they pay in taxes. Actually for most of the USA you can separate red vs blue states based on if they are net positive or net negative on tax paid vs federal dollars coming back. There are states upset about this but it does stabilize the country.

I would love to see a party that was fiscally conservative, basically stayed out of all these wars and peacekeeping missions, did more negotiations for foreign policy and basically left people choose their own social lives. I am sick and tired of all the anti-woman and anti-gay stuff I see coming out of politicians.

Gay people should be allowed to get married just because of equal protection under the law, end the discussion and move on.

Women should be allowed to have abortions because I don't have the right to impose my morality on other people. It doesn't matter if I think abortion is right or wrong it is not my place to make that decision and I wish we had politicians that would take that viewpoint. Just make it a non-issue and focus on economic issues.

I want a real focus on infrastructure, fixing roads, bridges, power etc since bad infrastructure costs our economy a pretty vast amount of money. I want a real focus on modern education for degrees our economy needs.

I also want actual immigration reform. If we really do need migrant workers to pick food then make a special visa for that. Saying it is illegal and then bringing them in anyways is not helpful.

Mostly I want skilled immigration reform. I want the H1B visa program ended since it ends up being more like indentured servitude and has far too many loopholes. Instead I want to see skilled labor able to easily get into the country on a regular visa like any other first world country. There are people I know with PhDs in VERY rare fields and they can't get into the USA. They would help our economy a lot and would not be taking a job from a qualified US citizen. Heck there are some fields where a skillset is so rare we have hundreds of job openings and tens of candidates on earth. Let them all in!

My view on guns is lets worry about more important issues and once we fix infrastructure, education, the economy etc lets see if guns still matter.

As for the stupid censorship that some politicians push and all the stuff they want to control to protect the children ... screw them.

Religious views do not give you the right to put millions of others at risk. Viruses mutate and that is inevitable. A vaccine is also not 100% effective in many people it just gives them a kind of limited immunity. We don't have treatments for many of the things we have vaccines for. If measles mutates it will kill millions of people and there is no guarantee how long it would take us to make a new vaccine.

In the end I don't care what your religion is I care if you are putting others at risk. Refusing to vaccinate is putting others at risk. You may not want to accept the biology on that or believe that your deity will never let that happen but most of the rest of the human race has accepted this and if you want to live with them you have to accept it also. If you don't want to live under our understanding of biology and vaccines then you can have religious freedom by yourself away from all other human contact.

Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.

The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.

Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have people that have religious views on human sacrifice and we don't allow that either.

There are limits to religious freedom and this has to be one of those limits. A legitimate medical reason should be the ONLY way to get exempted from a vaccine unless you want to go live as a hermit and never encounter humans again.

It doesn't matter if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea since as a society we have no choice but to accept it and figure out how to best integrate it into our society. 3D printers exist now and they will continue to get better. They can print things like weapons just as they can engines, food or any number of other things. What can be printed is going to continue to advance fairly rapidly. In the end how to 3D print something is just a file and there is no way to control files.

The music industry has tried to stop music sharing and the movie industry has tried to stop moving sharing and we all now how effective that way.

We can choose to bury our heads in the sand and not see that our technology has advanced to the point where it has destabilized certain aspects of our society or we can try to figure out a new stability point.

As I said I think the pricing was massively off. Steam should have had the standard 30%, 10% for Bethesda for tool development, documentation etc and 60% for the mod author.

However the basic idea is a good one. Donation just means free. So many say this stuff should all just be donation but people don't donate EVER pretty much. No matter how good something is they don't donate.

It would have been nice to see what mod developers would have done if they where being paid enough to do full time mod development and gained several years of experience.

It just seems that ideas today must work on day 1 perfectly and must not upset a few people because otherwise they cry like babies on social media until whatever upset them is taken down. It is highly destructive behavior and it currently carries no consequences of any kind. You can help ruin someones life, cause large economic damage and there is zero responsibility and it is considered completely okay until it happens to you. Heck we have people that still consider SWATing a joke.