Microsoft basic could be saved in the original text format or a faster loading token format. The token format was not human readable but existed as a language of its own. Any computer language can be translated into another language including human readable language. I had a translator program that would convert token basic into human text readable. I also have a program that converts C programs to pascal.

Any computer language is just a language and can be translated to most any other language if you know what the tokens mean. Granted you loose the embedded comments that explain what the code is supposed to be doing but that isn't all that different than fixing some beginners code that doesn't do what it was supposed to do.

Star-taling news

In one Solaris environment there was a problem of searching through a list of ~ 100,000 names for each of ~ 1000 names. Perl let me do it in 3.5 minutes which beat the old method that took hours. Yes, the old method was bad for this operation but it' what they had.

One book I read on Perl showed three different ways to do the same thing. It then said they all compile the same so write however works for you. So most of my Perl looks like shell script or basic with lots of comments. It's easy to support that way. I'm dating myself when I say I also use Pascal mostly because it's easy to read my old code. With the Borland compilers it's really fast code. With it I could get deep into Microsoft's OS and do things that I read couldn't be done like change the ID on floppy disks or hard disks. I could even add multiple IDs to disks though only one would show. Fun times messing with the low level stuff.

I would like to see my metal roof barn painted with this stuff. The south side of the roof is 16 by 44. That would probably power a lot of my house, at least the coffee maker.

Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

But we've dropped really low if we even skip OP or can't remember it a couple PgDn's further, haven't we.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Now, would you like a slightly smaller burger with your slightly smaller portion of fries?

BTW, that'll be 5% more with the new pricing.

Raising a question is asking a question

Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.

Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

Important systems should have redundant backup/restore options.

Where I worked (now retired) as sysadmin, every system had two boot disks. If a system was patched and failed on reboot for any reason, the system was booted off the unpatched second disk. Now if the second disk failed because lightning struck the system we would boot to the unpatched hot spare system which also had duel boot disks. We also had multiple levels of remote backup to restore every system.

I don't know at what level Delta made their decisions on backups but I am sure they didn't treat their critical systems as important as my former employer did.

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.