> The x86 server CPUs, like AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, have a lower range within which the clock frequency may vary and their policies for changing the clock frequency are less aggressive than for desktop CPUs

Probably we need to compare Xeon/EPYC with something like AWS Graviton or Ampere Altra to get an accurate picture here. That said, I think "Windows Server works fast on Snapdragon" is both crazy and fascinating; I wasn't even sure if that was possible.

1. ARM64 is actually less "smart" than x64. While Intel's Core i9 tries to be clever by aggressive boosting and throttling, Snapdragon just delivers steady and consistent performance. This lack of variability makes it easier for the OS to schedule tasks.

2. It is possible that the ARM build is more efficient than the x64 build, because Windows has less historical clutter on ARM than x64.

So, has CPU throttling become too smart to the point it hurts?

There is actually a clear, concise and actionable answer to this question:

- Hide under the nearest table or desk (if you are at home or in the office).

- Grab the nearest pole or handrail (if you are on a train).

The basic idea is that the most common cause of death in an earthquake is being crushed by falling objects, so you should use every second to minimize the risk.

Here are a few common mistakes:

- Do not attempt to stop furniture from falling (you'll get crushed by it)

- Do not try to run outside (you'll get hurt by falling walls)

- Do not try to turn off the gas (most systems have automatic shutoffs)

- And for Catfish's sake, do not use your precious 45 seconds to open the social media.

This company purported to sell AI transcription service. Raised capital from notable local VCs. Did IPO in Oct 2023.

It turned out that more than 90% of its sales were fake. The CXOs were arrested and the company was liquidated last month.

Personally I never get the appeal of going public on fake sales. By design, the amount you need to fake grows bigger and bigger over time. So the collapse is inevitable.

They opted to do so because it's just more efficient. It takes a lot of efforts to physically move 129 tonnes of gold after all. And as a side effect of this relocation project, they ended up recording a capital gain. It's nothing-burger.

So here are some positive things that I think PE funds can contribute:

1) Private equity serves as an exit path for small business builders. Suppose that you have built a small, profitable trucking company. Now you are old and want to retire. You kids have no interest in the business, and have already built different careers elsewhere than managing a fleet of Super Greats. Oftentimes, PE funds are only realistic buyers of your business.

2) At a more subtle level, PE can supply better management. For example, a supermarket owner I know accepted capital from a PE fund specifically to acquire better talent (his remark: "very talented people are rarely excited to operate a rural food & beverage shop").

3) PE-backed companies are, arguably, structurally better than the public counterparts. The cliche is that many public firms are run like third-world fiefdoms (the board are focused on empire building; the executives are spending money lavishly on perks). Most of these concerns vanish once each director are given a shared, transparent objective set by the deal structure. (As Henry Kravis often remarks, PE is mostly about alignment of the interests)

- It's hard to buy a decent company at 5x EBITDA today. A typical EBITDA multiple nowadays is like 10x-15x. (e.g. EQT bought SUSE for $3B in 2023, and the adjusted EBITDA was $240M, which implies 12x EBITDA)

- Debts are tranched. Banks typically get a senior slice, often secured by real assets (a.k.a. collateral), so they can recoup the money even when the company goes straight into a ditch. The real risk lies in the junior loans ("mezzanine"), which demand very high yields to compensate for that risk.

- In a typical PE deal, most profits are earned at exit, not via dividends en route. So managers have incentive to make the target company (look) better for the next buyer, rather than neglecting it.

A more fundamental reason why the situation you describe rarely happens is that PE fund managers treat their operation as an "on-going" business. Lenders are gonna be really pissed if they lose their money. So fund managers try to avoid that scenario to keep the credit flowing for their next deal.

https://dav.lbl.gov/archive/NERSC/Software/xv/help/xvdocs.pd...

I think the "Miscellaneous Ramblings" on the final page really illustrates the color of his personality:

Section 13.3: Miscellaneous Ramblings

And, of course, thanks to everyone else. If you contributed to the developement of xv in some way, and I somehow forgot to put you in the big list, my humble apologies. Documentation and careful record- keeping are not my strong suits. “Heck,” why do you think it takes me a year and a half to come up with a minor new release? Because, while I love to add new features to the code, I dread documenting the dumb things. Besides, we all know that writing the documentation is the hardest part of any program. Particularly when the good folks at id Software insisted upon releasing DOOM II...

And finally, thanks to all the folks who’ve written in from hundreds of sites world-wide. You’re the ones who’ve made xv a real success. (Well, that’s not actually true. My love of nifty user-interfaces, all the wonderful code I’ve gotten from the folks listed above, and the fact that xv actually serves a useful purpose (albeit “displaying pictures of naked women”) are the things that have made xv a real success. You folks who’ve written in have given me a way to measure how successful xv is.) But I digress. Thanks!

By the way, when I last counted (in October 1992), xv was in use at 180 different Universities, and dozens of businesses, goverment agencies, and the like, in 27 countries on 6 of the 7 continents. Since then, I’ve received messages from hundreds of new sites. And xv has been spotted in Antartica, bringing the total to 7 of 7 continents, and allowing me to claim that xv is, in fact, truly global software. That’s probably a good thing. Does anybody know if there’s a Unix workstation in the Space Shuttle?... :-)

- The owner originally had two dogs. Both disappeared from her backyard one day. One dog returned home. The other vanished without a trace.

- Eleven years later, a random girl found the missing dog outside. She befriended the dog and brought him home. She talked with her parents and contacted ACCT Philly, who in turn found the original owner through a microchip.

Does this make sense? To me, this story managed to be a rare mix of heartwarming, insightful and frustrating.

https://github.com/lemire/counters/blob/main/include/counter...

It fetches the number of mispredicted instructions from Linux's perf subsystem, which in turn gathers the metrics from CPU's PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) interface.

No there certainly is. This is documented in the official API documentation:

    UTF-8 representation is created on demand and cached in the Unicode object.

    https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/unicode.html#unicode-objects

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Objects/unicodeo...

Is it clear enough?

IMO, while this may not be optimal, it's far better than the more arcane choice made by other systems. For example, due to reasons only Microsoft can understand, Windows is stuck with UTF-16.

[1] Actually it's more intelligent. For example, Python automatically uses uint8 instead of uint32 for ASCII strings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiikawa

It's a portmanteau of "Chiisai" (small) and "Kawaii" (cute).

I'm not being sarcastic. This is absolutely incredible.

https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=17236880&Fi...

It appears that all the engineers -- system designer, material engineer and structural analyst -- thought that OceanGate CEO was going to kill himself:

    If you ever find , he’s not going
    to have a whole lot of nice to say. He was very frustrated
    with the company. (...) And I understand why. He thought
    Stockton was going to kill himself.

    Now, the question is, why wouldn’t the engineer get inside
    his own vehicle? It was because of what I felt -- and I have a
    background in Navy diving in EOD operations. I knew firsthand
    that the operations group was not the right group for that role,
    and I told him as much, that I don’t trust operations and who he
    has there.

Evidently the camera data was recorded to an external SSD card in the mission computer when the accident occurred.

The investigation team actually managed to salvage the PC as well:

https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19169363&Fi...

Sadly it turned into a compressed ball of metal...

I think this graph sheds some light on your question:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...

What happened in the last decade was that solar panels ("Module" in this graph) got very very cheap. They used to cost $3 per watt in 2010, but now only cost $0.3 per watt.

This extreme price drop happened thanks to technical innovations (such as commoditization of PERC cells), and the large-scale production in PRC.

Metal components ("Hardware - BOS" in this graph) did get cheaper in the same time frame ($0.6 per watt to $0.5 per watt), but their cost cannot be reduced as much exactly because they are just a piece of metal i.e. there is no low-hanging fruit in Metallurgy.

You actually don't need any image editing skill. Here is a browser-only solution:

1. Take two screenshots.

2. Open these screenshots in two separate tabs on your browser.

3. Switch between tabs very, very quickly (use CTRL-Tab)

Source: tested on Firefox

https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/monochrome-2-my-cu...

His trick is to use a number of heat pipes (that transfer the heat through vaporization), and a really really big heat sink (a 5kg copper plate).

    print(f"{n:.2g}")

    g - General format. For a given precision p >= 1, this rounds the number to p significant digits and then formats the result in either fixed-point format or in scientific notation, depending on its magnitude. A precision of 0 is treated as equivalent to a precision of 1.

    The precise rules are as follows: suppose that the result formatted with presentation type 'e' and precision p-1 would have exponent exp. Then, if m <= exp < p, where m is -4 for floats and -6 for Decimals, the number is formatted with presentation type 'f' and precision p-1-exp. Otherwise, the number is formatted with presentation type 'e' and precision p-1. In both cases insignificant trailing zeros are removed from the significand, and the decimal point is also removed if there are no remaining digits following it, unless the '#' option is used.

    With no precision given, uses a precision of 6 significant digits for float. For Decimal, the coefficient of the result is formed from the coefficient digits of the value; scientific notation is used for values smaller than 1e-6 in absolute value and values where the place value of the least significant digit is larger than 1, and fixed-point notation is used otherwise.

    Positive and negative infinity, positive and negative zero, and nans, are formatted as inf, -inf, 0, -0 and nan respectively, regardless of the precision.