Good word.

You’re absolutely right - it hadn’t even occurred to me that the paid support tier is probably just going to be ChatGPT in a trench coat. Ugh.

I was on the bus yesterday and was watching someone copy numbers out of Excel, paste them in Gemini, ask it “what is the total of these numbers”, then paste the answer back into Excel. I truly despair for the brains of some of the most AI-pilled folks.

MySQL often has moderately higher performance (particularly for workloads where you want your data clustered by PK, which is how InnoDB is natively structured) and its replication system is much more flexible than either of PostgreSQL’s. I like Percona personally, but MariaDB is fine too.

To answer your specific question: no. There have been and continue to be lots of CPUs that have things that could plausibly be called a “bit size” that aren’t a power of 2. Note that the “bit size” can refer to a few things (the width of the bus between the CPU and memory, the native size of a pointer, and/or the native width of the arithmetic units). I’ll give examples of each.

On essentially every “64-bit” computer, the bus to memory is not 64 bits wide. For example, the Apple M4 ARM CPUs are 64-bit but have a 128-bit memory bus over which they communicate something like 43-bit physical addresses. ARM has always been this way; the original 32-bit ARM1 had 26-bit physical addresses.

As to pointer size, the best example is probably the currently-being-developed CHERI architecture which is 64-bit arithmetic but 129-bit pointers.

For an arithmetic unit example, the floating-point unit on Intel CPUs was traditionally 80 bits wide. These days, it’s emulated on a 128-bit wide SSE unit but you still see 80 bits in code a bit.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/

Who would’ve thought those Arkady Martine books would be so prescient?

A startlingly high fraction of US businesses rely on a combination of tax evasion, accounting fraud, and wage theft to make the business work. Everyone knows this, but it’s still sufficient reason to keep reporting minimal.

Doesn’t this just bond neutral to ground? It’s definitely illegal and will kill you if some other device has a short and makes ground hot, but at least it’s not a suicide cord

So this is just binary red/blue? Seems iffy given how diverse states are (eg there are about as many Republican voters in “blue” California or in “red” Florida because California is way larger). I wonder what this would look like at the county level…

Safeway gives them so few hours, will we really notice? I’ve gone to the Rockridge Safeway at times and been certain there were no staff there at all (self checkout only, meat desk closed, pastry area closed, nobody stocking shelves)…