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Comment Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score 1) 105

Well I know that you can't argue over personal tastes, and many people like modal editors, but I don't think it is about "educating yourself". Perhaps the opposite is true, as this interview with vi's creator, Bill Joy, explains:

REVIEW: What would you do differently?
JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think the interesting thing is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

Comment The Surface Studio had a good screen, at least (Score 1) 16

I never had a Surface Studio. But I always wanted one for its 4500x3000 display. Microsoft did a good job in pushing 3:2 aspect ratio and driving the PC market away from the horrible letterboxing that dominated laptops and monitors for a decade. It's a pity that panel was never sold in a standalone monitor (Huawei talked about it but the product never reached the market).

Comment Re:Fundamentally Similar to Fake Quotes (Score 1) 85

Did you try asking one chatbot to check the quotations given by the other chatbot? If you ask the AI to find something then it will do its best to please you. But if you ask it "is this quotation real" or "is there any evidence for X" then at least some of the time it can perform the useful service of saying "no, can't find it".

Comment Might free up some hardware (Score 1) 91

I upgraded my video card recently. I need four DisplayPort outputs so I picked a Nvidia RTX A2000 (old generation, not Ada). The prices on ebay.co.uk looked good value. Then I looked at the seller, and he had about a dozen of these cards for sale. I guess Bitcoin or crypto mining costs have reached some threshold where these cards no longer make money.

(The A2000 is a power-limited card drawing only 70 watts, intended for workstations, but I guess that might also make it suitable for mining.)

Comment Surely AI can check its own hallucinations? (Score 1) 74

Couldn't you take the legal brief generated by an AI, and feed it into ChatGPT asking "please look up all of the cases cited in this brief and give a URI for each"? Personally I feel that getting AI to check for errors in work is much more useful than getting it to write the work itself.

Comment Re:Premium Pro surely means half-decent screen (Score 1) 77

Hmm, I've been using hi-dpi (220 pixels per inch or more) for about twenty years (starting with the IBM T221) and using them with Windows has usually been fine. Even ancient versions let you set a text size of 200%. They mucked it up starting with Vista, doing a blurred scaling in the GPU for some applications, but you can turn that off.

Comment Please don't omit the alternative names, thx (Score 3, Funny) 73

Fixed that for you

Last week, or seven days ago, Vsevolod Kokorin, also known online as Slonser, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he found the email-spoofing (also known as forgery) bug (or vulnerability) and reported or disclosed it to Microsoft, formerly known as Micro-Soft.

Comment Re:Apple Exec says fuck you (Score 1) 73

What I meant was that the hardware you bought stays working -- you don't have to junk it because the software is full of unpatched, known security holes (or has just stopped working because somebody switched off a server somewhere). You're right that newer, better hardware becomes available, but that doesn't mean the old one is obsolete, if it does what you need. (One exception might be older wireless standards, for example if the 3G network is switched off in your country.) The biggest failing of older hardware is that the battery gets old and tired, as you noted.

Comment Re:Apple Exec says fuck you (Score 3, Informative) 73

Maybe a little unfair. No phone is particularly great, but iPhones since launch have generally suffered less from obsolescence (planned or otherwise) than Android or other competitors. Apple keeps producing security updates for several years and makes sure you can always install them. That can't always be said for Android devices.

Comment Re:You can't compile for these CPUs any more (Score 1) 18

Thanks. I misunderstood what the hardware does. I saw it as "a bucket of Pentium chips on a PCIe card" but really those are just an interface to the vector units, which is what you really paid for. And I guess even if Intel crammed 80 Pentium cores onto the card, it would still be outperformed by a pair of 40-core processors designed thirty years later.

Comment Re:You can't compile for these CPUs any more (Score 1) 18

But you could, in principle, parallelize your kernel build across the numerous x86 processors in a Xeon Phi. You can't use the GPU to speed up gcc. It seems like there ought to be some application of the technology for integer code that needs to go fast and is parallelizable, but not vectorizable. Intel never found it though.

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