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There used to be stock exchanges running happily on DOS. Maybe there still are.

Worked at an exchange in 2007/2008 and... we had systems still running from the 80s. Mostly tape audit stuff.

Most use Linux now, and specifically RHEL. I did see some IBM z, but that was specifically for one old DB that handled oil pipeline stuff.

I would guess a modern BIOS chip is as powerful as an NES, right?

You can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)

What do you mean by "BIOS chip"? Like, the flash memory that stores the motherboard's firmware? I don't think that contains any processing elements.

BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.

VESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs.

UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.


Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think choosing which companies to support during this period of pre-alignment is one way to vote which direction this all goes. I'm happy to accept a slightly worse coding agent if it means I don't get exterminated someday.

Like Stack Overflow?

you still have to search stack overflow and sift, but I'm surprised someone doesn't just make a TLDR style or shortcuts-expanding product out of it that you can just pop in code for this use case or that. vs. the current product spending a few datacenter's worth of energy to give you the answer that's only correct x% of the time

I was delighted to see that a sequel is coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTBoQhWaC0

The maze level on the original game has to be an all-time best level design.


> I was delighted to see that a sequel is coming

the sequel trailer got me into the first game, actually :)) and I'm already sold on these recursive pigeons. is it multiplicative resonance?

> all-time best level design

well, the only worthy contenders are DEATHLOOP and Dishonored 2 :>

but yeah, Remedy does deserve every award they got with Control


also fun little project i discovered randomly

https://control-records.netlify.app

source: https://github.com/louh/control-records/

> the sequel trailer got me into the first game, actually

similarly the first game got me into Alan Wake, and now onto Alan Wake II


I think the course by Richard Fitzpatrick is a much better selection of content if you want to actually do computational physics: https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/329.pdf


Should be modernized to Python or similar.

In 2026, I don't want to do numerical programming in C. That was fine 30 years ago, but today, I expect to have garbage collection or to be able to multiply a matrix as A×B.


If that's what you want, use Matlab. High-performance scientific computing is still using C, C++ +/- CUDA, or Fortran, with Rust a growing segment.


Different strokes for different fokes.

In 2026 I don't want to use a slow interpreted non-typed language like Python.

C++ (for example) has excellent super fast matrix libraries where you can do AxB.


Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.


Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.

The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.

But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.

For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.

Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.


Yeah but when you are talking about energy levels in the nuclear bomb range, the threat to the passenger stops going up. If im in a craft with 1 Hiroshima bomb of energy and another guy is in one with a million tsar bombs worth of energy, we would both be obliterated before we knew anything was wrong no matter how small of a mishap.


You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.


The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.


A very different problem then the one I proposed an answer to, no?


System76 sells some pretty nice computers with Linux preinstalled. Not to mention every Chromebook is a Linux machine.


> Not to mention every Chromebook is a Linux machine.

.. which might need a bit of tinkering to install Linux on. Just because it runs a kernel doesn't mean it will be usable out of the box.

For example this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1nc1jui/how_to_actua...


I think GP's point is that a chromebook is a perfectly cromulent apternative to windows, running normal ChromeOS, for users looking for a simple web/docs/email machine.


It's very telling that the very first feature listed is that you can position the taskbar on the bottom, top, left and right side of the screen.

Can I change it's color, too? Amazing! /s

Microsoft appears completely bereft of creativity and innovation now.


> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...

In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.


That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.


Every field and every publisher has this issue though.

I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"

Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.

If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.

*Usually it's actually one of their grad students


I completely agree. Sophisticated marketing campaigns include academic literature to bikini clad women.


That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.


I don’t buy “some fields are just more honorable”. Everyone uses publishing for personal gain.

But yes it’s a people problem, not an arxiv problem.


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