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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Back in the 00s, a story about CPUs getting so hot they’d start on fire went viral. In it was a video of someone removing the cooler while it was running and then a few seconds later a flame appears.

    On the one hand, obviously you shouldn’t remove your CPU cooler while it was running.

    But on the other hand, fans and mounts can fail, so this was still a risk even for people who were smarter than removing the cooler entirely.

    It prompted CPU makers to add thermal protections that started out as “if CPU hits threshold, cut power”, but over time more sophisticated heat management was integrated with more sophisticated performance and power management.

    So these days, if you aren’t sufficiently cooling your CPU, it won’t die much quicker, instead it will throttle performance to keep heat at safe levels. OP would have gotten better performance out of it after removing that plastic. Assuming it was CPU bottlenecked in the first place. Things like RAM choice and settings can make it a moot point because the RAM can’t keep up with the CPU at 100% power anyways.




  • On yeah, the little mouse puzzles. I always figured it wouldn’t be that hard to give cursor movement a more natural curve, just give it an interpolation that clamps the first 3 derivatives of position and adds jitter and a little overshoot and correction or clamps the derivatives even harder at the end to mimic slowing down for precision.


  • I’d say countdown to programs that pretend to be webcams and display an AI video of the requested action has started but I bet at least someone has already done it. And then the arms race between actions to be requested and what AI can do will start until eventually passing the test will be a fail because the actions requested are either too difficult for humans to understand or too difficult for humans to perform, at which point AIs will be trained on knowing the physical limitations of humans.

    This will come in handy for when they get tired of our shit.


  • Or just do what I did where I have one of those wall mounted plastic channels with some of the cables hidden in it but two other cables just go to the TV without being hidden because the channel got full and I decided that I was done managing my cables for now.

    The lady that owned this place before me had one of those in wall cable runs on a wall I didn’t want to put my TV on. Not even sure how you get the cable out the other side, so I’ve left it there with the broken HDMI cable she left there, in case I want to run a different cable (so I can just attach it to the current one and pull it through). I probably should just patch the wall up though lol.


  • Isn’t masking tape the one that looks kinda like sticky yellow/beige paper? I think you’re right about tape being used, but it’s one of the clear ones.

    I also counted at least three of the plastic ones that get nailed to the wall. One near your first picture, (can’t see it while I write this comment (really need to get a better client than Voyager) so I forget if it’s visible in the pic or if you need to check the big pic), on the cable from the PS4 to the TV, just after the bend to a diagonal, it’s one of the ones you clip the cable into after mounting. And two on the xbox psu cable, they are both the type that you nail over the wire and a curved bit of plastic holds the wire against the wall.

    But those were the only ones I could see, plus even those ones don’t explain how it keeps the hard angles instead of the cable settling into a rounded shape. Guessing they intended to use the plastic ones but quickly realized it wouldn’t hold the shape they wanted without needing to put a ton of holes in the wall and switched to tape after that to solve both problems.

    Edit: looking at it again, I don’t think the first one I mentioned is one of those clips anymore, so just the two on the xbox psu cable (should be obvious once you see them).






  • Yeah, Java’s enforcement of everything must be a class put me off of the language right from the start. I was already used to C++ at that point and hated that I couldn’t just write a quick little test function to check something, it needed a bunch of boilerplate to even get started.

    I still think C++ has a great balance between object oriented and sequential programming. Not sure if it’s the best, but I can’t think of ways to improve on it, other than built in concurrency object stuff (like monitor classes that have built in locks that prevent more than one thread from accessing any of its functions at the same time, basically guaranteeing any code in it has mutual exclusion).


  • Sometimes tech presentations make me feel really bad for the person giving it. They are up there trying their best but clearly don’t have the skills to do more than just communicate information but still try to make their presentation cool and fun and it just falls flat.

    Anyone can be cool, but not everyone can be cool on demand or on stage.

    Though on the other hand, just because a presenter can pull off the cool factor, it doesn’t mean what they are presenting is actually cool. The coolness of a presentation has no correlation with the coolness of what is being presented, unless that coolness is just information about the product (though even then, they are probably skipping over the flaws and enshitification).


  • Business logic would be transformations to the data. Like for a spreadsheet, the data layer would handle the reading/writing of files as well as the storage of each cell’s content. The business logic layer would handle evaluating each of the formulas in the cells, and the presentation layer draws it on the screen.

    I think the part where it gets confusing is that each of these layers are pretty tightly coupled. The end destination of the presentation layer might change, one might show it on a GUI, another might print it, and another might convert it to pdf or html, but each of those presentation layers needs to understand the data that it is presenting, so it’s tightly coupled to the data layer. Same with the businesses logic layer, though it’s tightly coupled on both the input and output sides. The design of the data layer constrains the possibilities of the other two, so it’s hard to draw a clear boundary between the layers because they all need to know how to walk the same data.

    My mental flow chart for this is more of a data layer in the middle instead of business logic, where business logic is to the side with arrows going both ways between it and data layer, then the presentation layer also accessing the data layer directly, which I suppose is a different permutation of what you described.

    Though another way to look at it does make sense. For a website, think of the database as the data layer, the server scripts as the business logic layer, and the client side scripts/html/css as the presentation layer. That one also follows the layered approach where the presentation layer is talking with the business logic layer.


  • Yeah, well-designed abstraction can help enable more concurrency. That said, concurrency isn’t easy at any point once there’s shared data that needs to be written to during the process. Maybe it’s not so bad if your language has good concurrency support (like monitor classes and such that handle most of the locking behind the scenes), but even then, there’s subtle pitfalls that can add rare bugs or crashes to your program.


  • I think the windows connection help wizard might have actually fixed a connection issue I had once. Out of more chances than I probably should have given it, considering how often it did dick all, despite my phone’s connection being fine.

    I think there’s a rare race condition or something in the windows network stack because I’ve had four different machines suddenly lose the ability to connect to working networks, where sometimes toggling airplane mode would fix it, sometimes even that wouldn’t do anything and it needed a restart. It happened more often with wireless connections, but I’ve seen it affect wired ones, too.