According to gamedevs, 1-player pong (that is, vs computer) involves AI. It’s a description of role within the game world, not implementation, or indeed degree of intelligence, or amount of power. Could be a rabbit doing little more than running away scared, a general strategising, or a right-out god toying with the world, a story-telling AI. Key aspect though is reacting to and influence on the game itself or at least some sense of internal goals, agency, that set it apart from mere physics, it can’t just follow a blind script. The computer paddle in pong fits the bill: It reacts dynamically to the ball position, it wants to score points against the player, thus, AI. The ball is also simulated, possibly even using more complex maths than the paddle, but it doesn’t have that role of independent agent.

EU offers Trump removal of all industrial tariffs

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Last time around the Yanks wanted the EU to accept chlorinated chickens I don’t think anything has changed in that regard. They’re just playing the headlines.

That’s three devices. There’s two connections between them, and they go “RAM<->CPU<->SSD”. The first <-> is the DRAM Phy, the second <-> is 1-4 PCIe lanes. Neither of them are a bus. There is no third connection.

It was you who was talking about “bus paths” and “traversing CPU>RAM>SSD”. There’s neither buses connected up to any of those things nor does the data ever flow like that, it always flows via the CPU.

So… what’s wrong about my characterisation of computer hardware? Do you have any issue with the claim that RAM doesn’t talk directly to the SSD, but via the CPU? If yes, please show me the traces on the motherboard which enable that. About the importance of latency to CPU-type computations?

Or do you want to tell me how it’s absolutely unsuspicious to bang out a press release in tech and talk about “speed”, not distinguishing between bandwidth and latency? Where’s the fucking numbers. There’s no judging the tech without numbers and them not being forward with those numbers means they’re talking to investors, not techies.

PCIe 5.0 x16 can match DDR5’s bandwidth, that’s not the issue, the question is latency. The only reason OSs cache disk contents in memory is because SSD latency is something like at least 30x slower, the data ends up in the CPU either way RAM can’t talk directly to the SSD, modern mainboards are very centralised and it’s all point-to-point connection, the only bus you’ll find will be talking i2c. Temperature sensors and stuff.

And I think it’s rather suspicious that none of those articles are talking about latency. Without that being at least in the ballpark of DDR5 all this is is an alternative to NAND which is of course also a nice thing but not a game changer.

Any complex data stuff they could need should be done on some database server, the rest of what they’re doing can be done by anything that can deal with minesweeper.

Honestly, I have no idea.

A full PC, no, but a set top box definitely yes. And a set top box is plenty of computing power for a thin client, think workstations for accountants.

The one thing to criticise about steam (and that they’re slowly, but surely, losing a EU court case over) is inability for customers to sell their games.

Their marketshare is organic, based on being the choice of store both from the customer and developer POV. As a customer you get the usual painless returns, great interface, community features and whatnot, as a developer you get plenty of store features which make life and customer acquisition and gamedev a lot easier (things like playtesting, next fests) and most of all you get customers because steam has lots of customers and a real, I mean real good, recommendation algorithm. Sure, Epic wants a smaller cut but you’re also not going to sell much, there, which is why they had to lure devs in with advances, guaranteed sales, etc. Larger publisher might not like steam so much because they have gigantic marketing budgets in the first place so all the discoverability/recommendation stuff is not as relevant but, well, fuck EA, Ubi, etc IDGAF, I don’t want to hear it, cry silently.

As to the “can’t sell games for lower prices elsewhere” myth: That applies to when you’re selling steam keys in places that are not steam. Which is fair, if you’re selling steam keys then that’s incurring costs for them (if nothing else, bandwidth) and they don’t even get their usual cut when you sell a steam key off-steam, least you can do is not undercut them.

Oracle is not a tech company it’s a racket run by an army of lawyers. Obligatory link to Bryan Cantrill’s talk.

I’m not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it’s going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a “programmers are hard to find” situation, not “these systems absolutely must be replaced” one. It’s well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they’re running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there’s one thing that IBM mainframes are then it’s excessively backwards-compatible.

As far as the language is concerned: It’s not hard, it’s just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things “divisions” would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I’m not in that space isn’t because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it’s all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.

Also I’m not sure what “modernising” actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won’t batch up the day’s transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they’re doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.

When I’m forced into a qwerty situation it’s not just 30 seconds, I simply can’t touch-type qwerty and my current qwerty skills are way slower than 25 years ago where I had reached peak seven-and-a-half-fingers hunt-and-peck performance. In principle I should know where all the keys are, still, I can’t find them without looking. Somewhat similarly, I don’t really know where keys are with dvorak when my fingers aren’t on the home row but I am faster finding them on a touch display than finding qwerty keys. Also dvorak is nice on the smartphone your thumbs alternate more often.

I mean yes but no. Back at some old job all the devs had the local admin password so we could do things like install drivers for bluetooth dongles on our own (I said “old job”, didn’t I) and usually everything was fine but at some point my machine just barfed, it would neither install nor uninstall drivers. I called an admin because I have no idea about windows internals. They were ecstatic, finally, an actual problem, and not walking someone in marketing through how to write an email. Some arcane regedit magic later the problem was solved, and yes I had layout switching ready on the taskbar.

COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don’t want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language’s current standard dates to 2023.

It’s at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you’ll be a career bureaucrat but that’s up sufficiently many people’s alley, no “move fast and break things”, it’s “move slowly and keep things running”.

Blitzkrieg is not a Nazi strategy Germany had already been fighting WWI like that, or at least tried its hardest to do that, they used the term Bewegungskrieg (manoeuvre warfare) to contrast Stellungskrieg (trench warfare), that’s all there is to it. The German preference for decisive battles over wars of attrition dates back to at least Moltke the Elder, whence also Auftragstaktik (mission command) and “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”.

Then, the Nazis were way more deliberate and careful when taking over state institutions. And yes they did care about popular opinion that’s why they e.g. switched over to nabbing Jews in quiet instead of publicly making a show out of it didn’t play well with the population. Trump with Nazi strategy would be saying “We’ll re-take Cuba, get rid of socialism, and turn it into a beach resort and every American will be able to go to state-sponsored holidays there”. Like this, but bigger.

It’s kinda weird to say this as a German but when I look at other countries’ fascists they’re a clownshow. Nazis of course are also self-destructive, fascism inherently is, but there’s a fierce edge of competency in their madness.

That Signal leak? Under the Nazis, heads would be rolling, they would have no qualms bending actual incompetence into high treason to make an example to enforce discipline.

You can do deep hierarchies in Rust, the thing Rust doesn’t have is implementation inheritance. Or more precisely said implementation inheritance that relies on anything but the interface (traits can have default methods but they’re part of the trait definition, not any implementation).

It’s not actually much different in Germany, there’s zero bins just randomly lining the streets. Areas with shops will have some, parks and playgrounds usually have one or two, but that’s it. “Park” here is to be understood quite broadly, it might be a footpath with nice view and some benches. Bus stops also tend to have bins.

Paper + pencil are still a programmer’s best friend. YMMV when it comes to graphics tablets, but no fancy software doing anything but precisely emulating paper + pencil gives you that raw braindump interface, when you have to think about how to squeeze things into syntax you have a bottleneck that chokes everything.

People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging.

Missed opportunity, right there, because even the operators still think in terms of “gas station”. Get a plot of land with a nice view, build a cafe, build a couple of charging stations. Make it a destination people want to go to regardless whether they need a fill-up or not.

Heck, whatever happened to car cinemas.