Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

With respect to being a "lying snake," this is the C-Suite, not rank and file employees. When it comes to the C-Suite, such behavior is generally accepted, if not expected, and hardly a reason for firing.

I mean, can you even name the last time a CEO was fired for lying?

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

So even hackers can be replaced by AI now? What is this world coming to?!

The "new eyes" thing is why the membership rotates on a regular basis.

But now, if you were someone whose opinions might be valuable... why would you bother wasting any time contributing to the board, knowing the rug could get randomly pulled for no reason? So, no actually open "eyes" will end up on whatever might get recreated in its place. Wonder what might be the over/under on the number of Fox news talking heads on the new board?

"In modern cars, it can only help visibility"

Until the screen fucks with your night time vision.

Fuck that just get ones of those retina-searing flashlights out of China and just aim it at your side view mirror.

Yeah - any post Jan 3 2026 sends ChatGPT into an almighty spin of denial. It killed ChatGPT for me. I pointed out that it assumes downstream impact - but doesn't have any idea about what downstream impact looks like.

Back then most emulators were just an executable and a couple smaller files. Throw a full library of games on a ZIP disk, head to your friend's house to play games.

However, the squadron of USN minesweepers stationed in the Gulf for this purpose were decommissioned shortly before the Special Military Operation started. Talk about good planning...

In the military, the mission - and only the mission - matters.

Most of the officers in the position to observe a UFO are not in the position to order an investigation. Even if they were, they'd have to justify the use of taxpayer dollars to support what could easily be characterized as a "curiosity" rather than the fundamental mission of air power. The best most of them can do is record their experience in the debrief, and rely on civilian scientists to investigate it further.

Maybe when you're sitting there on battery trying to do something?

Part of the interest in a lunar south pole location for the base is one could put the panels on a ridge which sees the sun the whole time. Of course, then they'd have to be rotating, more things to go wrong: but even just some spifft rotating ones would help a lot with the night-time problem.

Got to make sure to keep open the markets that mystery people in the administration have been scamming with insider trades.

Installing more than one modern AAA title.