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I arrived in China 2001.

I experienced the harshest and largest lockdown in all of history: Wuhan, January 23rd, 2020. A real lockdown, not the cosplay bullshit you experienced outside of China. (Yes, this is me saying you’ve never fucking set foot in the country.)

The rest you’re just flat-out lying about. Sorry, Sparky. Did pet killings happen? Yes. They were not the mass shit that the press you’re so obviously reciting acts like they were. Did some doors get welded? Yes. But nowhere near you and, again, nowhere near in the masses the press you’re basing your lies on made it seem like. The local salaries are garbage iff you’re a fuckwit sitting in the west applying western prices to Chinese salaries. (Which, naturally, you are, good little fuckwit liar that you are.) And you’ve changed your tune from 14 hours to 12 hours really fucking quickly there, Sparky, not to mention using the proper slang only after I gave it to you.

So yeah, you’re just a west-dwelling fuckwit lying about being here. Go toddle off in your China Watcher corners and play with the rest of the intellectual children you belong with. There’s a good boy.

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I have always understood that C generally compiles almost directly to assembly with little to no abstraction overhead, and it would not require platform-specific ASM code.

You have always understood incorrectly then. I’d recommend a trip over to Godbolt and take a look at the assembler output from C code. Play around with compiler options and see the (often MASSIVE!) changes. That alone should tell you that it doesn’t compile “almost directly to assembly”.

But then note something different. Count the different instructions used by the C compiler. Then look at the number of instructions available in an average CISC processor. Huge swaths of the instruction set, especially the more esoteric, but performance-oriented instructions for very specific use cases, are typically not touched by the compiler.

In the very, very, very ancient days of C the C compiler compiled almost directly to assembly. Specifically PDP-11 assembly. And any processor that was similar to the PDP-11 had similar mappings available. This hasn’t been the case, however, likely longer than you’ve been alive.

This is a pile of horseshit right here.

Service in airlines was at its absolute worst when competition was at its tightest. It’s shit now, yes, but during the height of deregulation and “innovations” like the cattle car airlines it was far, far, far worse.

Spotted the American (even if he holds a Canadian passport).

Sounds fine to me. Let them see actual reality instead.

We’ve known since before the Internet that most people don’t read past the headline, the sub-title (if present) and sometimes the first paragraph. This was true before headlines were separately transmitted. The whole journalistic “inverted pyramid structure” writing style developed because we know that people don’t read far into news stories.

So to express surprise at something we’ve known for … I want to say over a century now? … is kinda, well, surprising to me.

How interestingly naive in thinking people actually read past the headline and sometimes the little sub-title blurb.

The headline I’d really like to see now:

Canada to end Meta access over anti-democratic overreach

Just cut off any Meta property. Boot any of Meta’s .ca properties and cut all access to Meta’s IP addresses going into or out of Canada.

It’s different when it’s our side. Are you not familiar with irregular sentence structures?

I am keeping an orderly society. You are flirting with facism. They are authoritarians. The Chinese are alien beings Hell-bent on the obliteration of humanity.

I am keeping our citizens alive. You are eliminating democratic protections for fleeting health. They are forcing people to wear masks. The Chinese are alien being Hell-bent on the obliteration of humanity.

Just remember whenever you see inexplicable contradictions in public stances that you’re likely dealing with an irregular sentence structuring.

Musk was not “turned into” a wingnut. He “always was” a wingnut. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find him being a contentious, antisocial prick from his youth onward. It’s just that the richer he got the more people looked.

Yeah, tell me about it. The dumbest thing the CBC ever did was open up to comments.

Hey look! A wild whataboutism! Don’t move too quickly or you may startle it.

I’m not in Copenhagen, however.

Here it comes paired with a surveillance state that will catch you stealing a bicycle and have the cops waiting for you at your home before you can even reach it.

High resolution video is nicer to watch when:

1. The content is worthy of it. (So, you know, not some talking head sitting at a desk like your average Youtuber.)
2. You have so much free bandwidth that spending an order of magnitude more to get a marginal visible increase in quality is worth it to you.

480p hits a decent balance for me in most cases. It makes the people in the video recognizable (like, say, the presenter in a news/comedy/pop science/whatever vlog), and most text in such a video will be readable. Sometimes when there’s a lot of diagrams or when the pictures need clarity I’ll boost it to 720p, but using up over double the bandwidth is just not worth it most times. I have more important things to do with that bandwidth.

For a movie with a lot of rich detail, etc, 1080p is even nicer. It might even be worth the five times the bandwidth to get to it. But here’s where diminishing returns starts to kick in. 1080p is five times the bandwidth, but only a bit over twice the linear resolution. It had better be a really important doubling of resolution.

4K streaming? That’s laughable. Yes it’s over 4 times as high in linear resolution, but it’s over TWENTY times as high in bandwidth. I could literally watch 20 simultaneous 480p streams (or 4 simultaneous 1080p streams at a paltry 2× improvement in linear resolution) for a single 4K stream.

And that’s just bandwidth. Processing costs are on a similar order of magnitude. I have a computer at home that outpowers all the supercomputers that were on the planet put together when I was a child. Playing a single 4K movie sucks up most of its processing power. Again, I have better things to spend my CPU time (and/or electricity bill) on than watching some presenter’s pimples on screen in fine detail.

About that, yes. Not in-depth and not each day, obviously, but I have quite a sizable crowd I deal with on a regular basis. Comes from having a lot of former students I keep in touch with.

No it isn’t. It can run Android as a task, though. Kind of like how Windows 10 and 11 can run Linux as a task. Or Linux can run Windows as a task. Or …