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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you made memory access lines twice as wide, they’d take up more space. More space means (a) chips run slower, because it takes time for the electricity to get there (b) they’d be bigger and more expensive.

    The main problem with 32-bit, as others have noticed, is that that’s not really so much RAM. CPUs do addition and subtraction the way we were taught at school - ‘carry the one’, they’ve an overflow bit that’s set when your sum doesn’t fit in the columns. On 8-bit CPUs, we were always checking back when adding up large numbers. On 64-bit CPUs, we can deal with truly massive numbers anyway, it’s not such a hassle. And they’re so fast at doing sums anyway and usually waiting for memory, it’s barely a hassle.

    Moving to 128-bit would give us a truly minuscule, probably unmeasurable, benefit in exchange for significant downsides. We could make them, but it would be pointless.




  • We’ve a few rescue cats - we got them all when they were about three / four years old. We kept them inside initially for six weeks or so, made sure that they’d got used to living in a new house before we let them outside.

    The one which had been abandoned and had been living outside for a few weeks (a boy) stopped using his litter tray completely, as soon as he was allowed outside again.

    The other two, both girls but a ‘smooth’ changeover, took a bit more time to get used to being outside. One transitioned off of her litter tray after a couple of months by herself; the other took more like four months, and she was a bit of a fair-weather pooper for a while as well.

    My take-home message would be that cats generally prefer to do their business as far away from where they live as possible. Only possible bit of advice would be to wait until the weather’s getting better in case your cats dislike the wind and the rain. I believe forest cats love the frosty weather anyway, though?







  • There’s also the financial risk to be considered. A mainstream film release from 1970 might have been produced by fifty people, cast and crew combined. The crew for Barbie as per the image above was close to a thousand people. That’s expensive. Have to put in twenty times the ante to be in the game, and all the payoff is in established properties that you already know have an audience? It would be foolish to do otherwise.

    Like you say, if people actual did what they said they wanted, and go and take a punt on the new stuff rather than going to watch the same-old, then it would be different. But you can’t complain about it when that’s what you spend your money on.



  • Cat food is enriched with the amino acid taurine, which they can’t produce themselves. Dog food is not. Feeding cats exclusively on dog food will kill them eventually, via blindness and heart disease.

    Not a disaster if they steal it from the dog once or twice, but it cannot be their long-term diet.



  • Seems fair both ways to me. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount of pay for a day’s work, as even if the ‘final product’ is only a minute, it will still have stopped him from doing much other work that day. Contrariwise, if he’d been asking for any more, the client would have been able to find someone else to do it just as well at the original price, since the requirement is basically ‘clearly spoken’. Wouldn’t make sense to get Ian McKellen in to interpret this bit of acting work.