You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.

I know a google engineer who was saying they’re having to update their code bases to handle > 16 exabytes of storage, if you can imagine. But yeah, that’s storage, not RAM.

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.

What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.

So you’re saying the comments themselves get cached on the local instance where the user is registered before being synced with the remote community-hosting instance?

I honestly don’t know how these things work internally, but had assumed the comments needed to go straight to the remote instance given the way you can’t comment once said instance goes down? You can still read the cached content though.

When I first heard the term “fediverse”, it immediately made me think of some sort of vast interplanetary network. And let’s face it: a fediverse-like model is really what you would need if you had settlements scattered throughout the solar system. A monolithic, centralized service would be awful, given the reality of communication lag and likely limited bandwidth.

So let’s say lemmy (or more generally activitypub) were to go interplanetary. How would that work out? You set up your first instance on Mars. Any content that’s posted there will be immediately available to your fellow Martians. Earthlings who subscribe may also be able to view it as their instances cache the content, albeit after some delay.

But the trouble starts when Earthlings want to start contributing to the discussion. If they have to wait the better part of an hour to get a single comment lodged, it’s going to get old fast.

So you would need to allow the Earth side to branch off to some extent from what’s happening on Mars. Then eventually, something like a git merge would try to bring it all back together? I wonder if that would work?

The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)

Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?

I don’t live in Scotland, but I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to have that close referendum followed by Brexit only a couple of years later.

What I’m wondering about right now though is Irish unification? That seems to be building up some serious momentum from everything I’ve been reading.

Gotta hand it to them. They’ve perfectly managed to capture that feeling of driving on a highway with endless billboards.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

Oh yeah, I remember CompuServe. I believe it was its own separate network from the Internet, though they had an email gateway at least. Maybe towards the end they became an ISP like AOL did? My memory is fuzzy on that.

I do remember they invented gif files which then of course spread to the Internet. But it was a mess because the compression they use was patent-protected. CompuServe had paid royalties on it, but the Internet was, well, the Internet…

Can’t remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?

I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?

I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.

But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.

I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.

This is a big deal. The UN doesn’t throw the term genocide around lightly. And I thank the OP for linking directly to their site to give as unadulterated a reporting as possible.

For me it often goes one step further. I remember a song or maybe hear it somewhere and think what a great tune! Haven’t heard that in forever.

And then what happens is it triggers a flood of other memories from that same time period when it was popular. Then, just as I’m starting to get all wistful, I suddenly recall how I used to hate that song! Like wtf?!?

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you’re looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it’s much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

I’m just going to leave this picture of a wampa from the planet Hoth here for no particular reason.

So many sci-fi authors exploring interstellar civilizations toss in some sort of faster-than-light travel or wormholes to facilitate the narrative. What I liked about Vinge was he considered how things might play out if you actually stuck to the laws of physics as we know them today.

He imagined a nomadic society which moves from star system to star system mostly trading knowledge. While they travel at sub-light speeds, they broadcast a galactic Internet’s worth of data at the speed of light. The catch is that much of it is encrypted and only they have the keys, so they have tremendous power wherever they go.

This is not to say he never considered FTL, but when he did, he went deep into its implications. It was not just a means of hopping quickly around the galaxy. He realized that it would enable outrageously powerful AI, as the speed of thought would be increased by orders of magnitude.

Personally, I would get an external SSD and try it on there first. At least it’s new enough to have USB3 ports. If you’re comfortable enough with it under the circumstances, you can put it on your main drive. But you may find you need to upgrade the RAM or that it’s just too much of a resource hog in the end? But even if you back away from 14, it’s always nice to have an external SSD kicking around. :)