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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can’t imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they’re trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.

    I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.


  • Adding more light rail wherever it makes sense is definitely a good plan (and should happen), but improving bus networks gives a lot more bang for the buck than focusing only on light rail. Features like off-board fare collection (paying at the bus stop, not on the vehicle), bus signal priority (extending greens and shortening reds as buses approach traffic lights), and dedicated bus lanes all improve the overall speed of buses and therefore the overall rider experience. Expanding the prevalence of these features should be a priority everywhere, particularly on higher-ridership routes.




  • I wouldn’t say that the Expanse books are “significantly better” than the show - they’re both fantastic, and both have bits where they’re better than the others (for example, the books have more characters and storylines, plus the arc of the last three books, while the show is amazingly well adapted and in many ways is a second revision of the overall story).

    I’m still holding out hope for seasons 7-9 happening at some point in ~5 years. Assuming it’s adapted at the same level as the prior seasons, seeing the final trilogy on screen will be epic!






  • For consumer software, yes, most is still being built with a baseline target instruction set from the early/mid-2000s. In 2019 there were reports of Apex Legends requiring SSE4.1, an instruction set from circa 2007. It will be be probably close to a couple decades before consumer software would start commonly requiring these instructions.

    However, for more specialized environments, such as scientific and high-performance computing applications, it’s much more common that you will be using custom software designed for a specific task, and that it’s normal to recompile the software when you get a new set of hardware. In those applications, these instructions can make a huge impact, as you know exactly which capabilities are supported by the hardware and can use everything available.

    I believe there are also some (possibly limited) situations where a program can check what instructions a processor supports and use either the newer (higher-performance) version or the slower, more widely-supported version depending on that check. There may be limits on how often that can be done however.