I had a college roommate that slept 2 hours a night at most. He took 2 15 minute naps during the day and that's all he slept. He had two full time jobs and maintained a straight A college record at one point for Electrical Engineering (oh, and had time for a girlfriend). The guy he roomed with (same apartment, 2 rooms, 4 students) had an eidetic (photographic) memory and could read a page he just looked at in a textbook back to me. Stuff I studied for 10+ hours to do the homework he did in 30 minutes, but he only had 1 full time job because he needed 8 hours of sleep. The guy in my room needed like 14 hours a sleep at night if an alarm didn't wake him. I'd sleep probably 3 hours, be up for 3, then slept another 3.

I imagine if they did a case study for sleep on that apartment, we'd have broken it. I transferred after that year and had normal roommates except maybe one, but he slept a lot after getting really stoned every night, so I don't know if that counts.

I was going to say the same thing. In fact, my mom and I both sleep like that - 3 to 3 1/2 hours asleep, up for an hour or two, then another 3 to 3 1/2 hours. My dad and brother go to sleep at like 9:30PM and are up at 6AM like clockwork. I've heard that my (and mom's) sleep pattern is actually historically normal. Sometimes I do need 8-9 hours of sleep and sleep the entire night, but ~3 1/2 hour cycles is much more normal.

Is it better now, with east Texas patent trolls not winning most of their cases? A guy I went to high school with retired at like 45 after winning like 90+% (reportedly 100%) of his east Texas patent cases and making millions.

I saw this coming years ago, but unfortunately, I also saw a slave labor market for menial tasks to support the AI juggernaut that can't do them.

Fission only works to benefit the weapons industry with fast fission, which Nixon killed to fire Alvin Weinberg so he could get more conventional reactors built in his home state of California. AFAIK, we used nuclear material stockpiled since, but I'm sure there were reactors running for years after that. The lack of fast fission reactors has actually impacted the Helium supply.

As for accidents, most were preventable. Most US reactors run a negative coefficient, which means they shut down before going meltdown. In fact, I think CANDU in Canada are the only ones running positive outside of legacy reactors in the US.

Ha, yes - they bribed (for lack of a better term) to provide a local monopoly on cable and internet, and in return paid monopoly fees, which were passed on to consumers. I remember the fees being about the same cost as cable itself, but it probably varied by area. They were highly undercutting prices where they weren't a monopoly as well, but here you paid way more. So yeah, go fuck yourselves, Comcast. They also failed against competition when it arrived (WiMax, cell 5g. fiber to the home). They offer the second highest speed for the highest price now (by like $500).... sorry, no.

Not really correct - America actually has I believe the largest deposit of rare earth elements in the world and the US geological survey has identified 9 major deposits and much of the country could mine certain forms of rare earths.

The problem is pollution. America should've put trade sanctions on China for rare earth elements years ago, as they can't competitively be mined in the US (or much of the world) because China just landfills the radioactive waste that comes with the mining and it can leak into the groundwater, but they literally don't care about protecting their people from pollution. Mountain Pass, the largest known deposit in the US (and I believe world) and was once the largest supplier of rare earth elements now needs Department of Defense subsidies to pay for the cost of pipelining and storing the waste, and I imagine the $1.4 million in fines and additional cleanup costs when that pipeline ruptured (which effectively is a taxpayer subsidy). To put a bigger foot in America's (and the world's) ass, China also requires all manufacturing that use rare earth elements to be done in China. This really makes things like solar panels and wind turbines which require parts to be made in China not really clean.

Then there's that guy in the White House that is gung-ho on rebuilding the "clean, beautiful coal" market. Clean? No. Radioactive? Yes. But hey, it isn't about what is best for the nation, it is what is best for the polls, right? That said, I don't see how escalating tariffs with China is going to end well. He's playing poker with a nine high, went all in and China just called his bluff.

Honestly, this is stealing app behavior from long ago, I've had to do SVG graphics (Scalable Vector Graphics) for years, lol. All the Apps I support have to use them, thanks ImageMagick.

Brings more ammo for COVID being genetically targeted ammo to exterminate people of European descent. Probably didn't target wealth categories, thus emperor Trump and chief vassal Musk becoming the primary powers. Xi is a mastermind.

Nah, just McDonalds and Cocaine, just ask Donnie. Kinda funny when his radical choice of Kennedy actually calls him out on it. Still worried about that +9 immortality potion, though.

Jesus isn't even real.

OK, deep dive, Jesus exists because Joshua (Yeshua) wasn't translatable into Greek. Nobody named Jesus ever existed. I'm waiting for the savior to show up and nobody identifies him because he isn't actually called Jesus.

And sadly, one of the smartest people I know (/knew, he's dead now) was a holocaust denier. I get why, he was Muslim and destroying Judaism and especially an Israeli state was a central tenet in his belief, but this is why I just say sweet fuck all to most major religions.

Hmm, well Ray Tracing or Path Tracing (a simplified form of Ray Tracing that uses the most likely path to each light) need access to the entire scene and that takes more memory. Traditional rasterization culls the scene using the view frustum, backface culling, etc., so you end up with a much smaller dataset that needs to get processed, but you need those back faces and objects outside the scene to properly calculate reflections in ray algorithms. You could have a set of high speed memory for the rasterization and another set that calculates ray paths in the larger scene. It may be possible to arrange the larger scene memory accesses to optimize for their slower speeds, since they aren't accessed as much. In this case, your CAS and RAS numbers may be more important than the overall speed of the memory.

Just my thoughts, having written both ray tracers and rasterization engines. Also, they did state that it was for gaming.

As much as you're trolling, every male has undeveloped female genitalia and women male. We should all identify as she-male.

And yes, it needs to be. Trump's Executive Order requires the US to change the name to Gulf of America. The rest of the world is not bound by that, so they use Gulf of Mexico. For some dumb reason, US Presidents seem to thing EOs apply to everyone, but you know, lawmakers are in the same book, COPA and CFAA for example. COPA was dumped by the courts, CFAA is so vague it makes aliases a felony on the internet unless they're attached to your real name, address, etc. Pretty sure that one is unconstitutional, but so is the law it was based on, the 1917 Espionage Act it used as a model. That law has never really been tested, but the 1918 Sedition Act based on it was tossed out after a few years.