🇨🇦 tunetardis

Yeah it’s weird. I was actually a little disappointed by the A&W in the US compared to Canada, but then later someone told me A&W Canada is a completely different company/operation? Even though they seem to share certain branding.

In-N-Out Burger became my go-to when visiting family in California. It’s a little weird though in that they seem to have choices not on the menu? Like my sister-and-law said I should ask for “animal style” and I looked at her dubiously but they knew what right away what that was.

As a fellow Canadian, I’m partial to the Harvey’s veggie burger. It’s often on sale in the app and generally hits the spot, though sometimes it’s a bit dry if they overcook it.

I’m not a strict vegetarian, but don’t go out of my way to get meat either and sort of default on veggie burgers. I’ve tried them at other places. A&W has the Beyond Burger, which has a bit of an aftertaste I don’t care for. I should go back though and try the masala burger. I’m curious about that one.

Burger King has the Impossible Burger. That’s quite good, but there are no BKs near me. McDonalds also has a veggie burger now. I tried it. It’s very soft and a tad boring. I don’t think the Big Mac-style mayo-based sauces work great with it? I wish they would let you opt for one of the nugget sauces instead. Like it might be good with BBQ?

Apple has been slow to get into the LLM game and it’s not that intrusive at this point, but that could change.

Defaults to zsh these days but bash is certainly still there.

That is mortifying. I hope he was able to rebuild his life afterwards, and that the stigma didn’t follow him around everywhere.

I once got accused of a hit-and-run because they presumably entered the wrong licence plate? I eventually got off when I was able to prove I was in another city at the time, but I was totally freaking out!

The creepy part was there was another car of the same make, model, and colour that often parked near us at the apartment complex and its plate only differed from ours by 1 letter. It was bad enough that my wife eventually attached a little foam ball to the head of the radio antenna so we could tell our car apart.

I’ve thought about that since, and concluded it’s not as statistically improbable as you might think? Licence plates are issued in blocks that just go up sequentially, so finding someone living nearby with an almost-identical number is probably pretty common. And if you both bought the car new, there’s a decent chance it will be the same model.

Is there an Origman? Can we go back to him for a bit?

When I first started taking high school Latin, I thought any language with such an arcane grammar deserved to die. Later, I joked with a linguist about how I was so relieved modern romance languages like French have abandoned all that, and he said “Well, we still have Romanian.” Now, I live in horror of visiting eastern Europe.

Ah, you’re a gamer then.

Well sonny, it’s because back then, media files would eat your entire drive in a hurry, so they had to be shouted out as a warning.

Burglar laughs. Then sees another roomba approaching the first with a blasting cap. “Oh, shit.”

I’m a slow learner, and I have come to compensate for this by gradually building out this tree of knowledge I can hang new little bits on. When I encounter a contradiction to something I had placed on the tree, I must redo the branches in the area. They need to be self-consistent or I am going to have a bad day.

So when I am challenged, I do probe a bit and ask the other party to prove or justify their stance. It’s not motivated by any sort of pride in my own opinions, but rather the work it would take to sort things out again in my head. I don’t want to do so unless I am clearly in the wrong.

But if I am proved wrong, I will certainly accept it. It can lead to new insights as I rework the tree.

It may even be that the slow-learning is actually due to this system I’ve developed? Like every piece of knowledge has to be processed into the context of my current understanding of things, and that takes time and effort.

I think this is perhaps the problem with AI? It makes all these little connections between things, but it doesn’t have a big picture, which makes it frequently contradict itself. I couldn’t live like that.

I would be a poor judge of this. I was one of the closed-off people earlier and life, but have opened up over the years as I’ve become a bit more self-assured and less concerned with how people see me. I still tend to prefer individual pursuits, though.

But there does seem to be a lot of loneliness going around, particularly with my kids’ generation and the elderly. Speaking to the former, it seems to stem from incessant online scrutiny following them around everywhere and causing them to withdraw into safer modes of limited social interaction. And I thought my high school experience was hell. It’s very sad.

For a brief moment, I had a picture in my head of some Hatsune Miku-style fashion models and it piqued my interest.

Agreed. I know that globally, mosquitos are worse, so it’s a little self-serving to put ticks above them. But the mosquitos in my area do not carry malaria, yellow fever, etc. I think West Nile is about as bad as it gets?

Meanwhile, 50% of the ticks here carry lyme disease. I was going to put down the lyme disease parasite, except then I remembered my vet tech offspring rattling off the list of diseases ticks carry that can fuck you up in all sorts of inventive ways.

Honestly, they have changed my life, making me stop hiking in the woods or rolling in the grass like I did as a kid when they had yet to move into my area in force.

At the beginning of my talk, I would have everyone turn off their phones and any other electronics. Then for the rest of the 15 minutes, I would have us all just sit around and veg out.

No talking, no distractions, no demands. Just day dream about whatever. You can take a nap if you like. You probably need one if you do.

And then my “talk” would end with “Let’s try this every day.”

Oh I never got that far. It was all static. I supposed if I had kept plugging away it, I might’ve reinvented a 64-bit OpenCL eventually, but you have to understand the uphill climb it all was. Like I was shocked to discover at one point that while you could compile a 64-bit executable, the malloc library function was still only 32-bit! I bitched about this to IBM tech support, and they said well you could write your own malloc using mmap. I mean yikes!

Oh yeah! I mean to be fair, it was a full-fledged PowerPC single core in its own right. I’m pretty sure that generation had AltiVec (simd instructions), so you could theoretically do some number-crunching on it as well, but it had plenty to do already with managing memory I/O. And actually also network I/O for us, since I worked a bit on trying to combine the resources of more than one blade. But man, it just devolved into a giant mess in the end! I think I still have some PTSD from it :P

Yeah, you know, that’s a good way of looking at it. It’s like each core could only access its own cache memory, and all the syncing to main RAM had to be done painstakingly in software. That would be a hardware function in any modern architecture. I can’t remember how big the caches were. I think they were bigger than a typical L1 at least, but not huge.

Anyway, it was not too horrible if you were just walking through an array sequentially applying some operation to it, but when you had to jump around memory, it became an absolute nightmare! Uuuugh…it’s all coming back to me now why we got nowhere with it.

Yeah, the prospecting industry includes mining and oil/gas. I’m in the former. In the past, if you went to a trade convention, the oil/gas side would take up at least 2/3 of the floor space, but that’s kind of flipping around now. The electrification of the economy is bringing metals to the fore.

I guess you could say the Cell was as an 8-core CPU (well, 9, if you include the PowerPC in the middle) at a time when such things were unheard of, at least in the consumer space. So the theoretical performance if you could max out all those cores was through the roof. I have no doubt that’s what drew Sony to them for their next gen console.

But whereas all the cores of a modern 8-core chip can access the same RAM, in the Cell, only the PowerPC could access the main memory and each core had its own dedicated internal RAM, meaning you had to load both code and data into all the cores laboriously yourself using asynchronous DMA requests before executing the code, and then sync the results back using more DMA. It was a bit like GPU programming, I suppose, though within the cores, it felt more like a CPU in terms of the instruction set and what not, so kind of a hybrid approach I guess?