x86 has bit manipulation instructions for any bit. If you have a book stored in bit 5 it doesn’t need to do anything masking, it can just directly check the state of bit 5. If you do masking in a low-level programming language to access individual bits then the compiler optimization will almost always change them to the corresponding bit manipulation instructions.

So there’s not even a performance impact if you’re cycle limited. If you have to operate on a large number of bools then packing 8 of them in bytes can sometimes actually improve performance, as then you can more efficiently use the cache. Though unless you’re working with thousands of bools in a fast running loop you’re likely not going to really notice the difference.

But most bool implementations still end up wasting 7 out of 8 bits (or sometimes even 15 out of 16 or 31 out of 32 to align to the word size of the device) simply because that generally produces the most readable code. Programming languages are not only designed for computers, but also for humans to work on and maintain, and waisting bits in a bool happens to be more optimal for keeping code readable and maintainable.

A wooden toothpick is probably a bit too thick. You’d want something thin enough that it can be inserted without touching the electrical contacts. If you do have something plastic then that’s probably better, but if you do the cleaning when the device is off the USB port should be unpowered and there shouldn’t be a risk of causing a short, and modern USB ports are quite well protected again shorts anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause damage just by being conductive. You mainly want something that is long and thin enough to get all the way to the bottom of the port without having to apply any force. If the only things you have that are long and thin enough to reach the bottom of the port without having to be forced in are made of metal, then that’s still a safer option than jamming something too thick into the port that can deform the center contacts.

Grab a thin needle or piece of wire, thin enough to easily insert into the USB-C port, and scratch all of the dirt and lint out of it. Always point the needle towards the outer surface so you don’t scratch the electrical contacts in the middle.

There is often a surprising amount of junk inside even if you can’t see it from the outside, and that can greatly affect the connection quality.

My phone recently had a similar issue where it would only charge if the cable was inserted in a specific way, and any movement would cause it to stop charging. The cable also wasn’t really held well even though it looked like it was fully inserted. I cleaned out the port even though I couldn’t see anything inside, and managed to pull out a bit of dust anyway. And now my phone no longer has charging issues and holds on to the cable much better.

USB-C unfortunately just seems to have a design that makes it very easy for dust to get stuck in it, while also having a relatively low tolerance for foreign material buildup before the connection quality gets affected, making this a quite common issue.

The enshittification of Duolingo has already been going on for quite a while. It has really gone downhill in the last few years.

Depends on viewing conditions. As of yet there isn’t an objectively superior display technology.

OLEDs have the best contrast in a dark room as black pixels can be fully turned off, but they are generally less bright and use more power than comparable LCD TVs or monitors (especially when you compare models of a similar price range).

LCD based monitors and TVs can get brighter and can actually achieve a higher contrast in a well lit room as the black pixels on an LCD are less reflective than black pixels on an OLED, and when viewing in daylight the ambient light is more than enough to drown out the backlight bleed.

There are also other smaller pros and cons. OLED for example has a better pixel response time, while IPS LCDs are more colour accurate. Text rendering and other fine graphics also generally look slightly sharper on an LCD than on an OLED display (when comparing displays of equal resolution / pixel density) due to the subpixel layout.

Any guesses how long it will take for someone to use this jailbreak to get Doom to run on just the CPU?
In theory, at least some of the affected processors should have more than enough cache to run it directly from there, right?

Though I have to admit that I don’t understand CPU internals well enough to know if the microcode even has enough control over the chip to make that physically possible.

It was successfull for a while up to 10 years or so ago, when it was the main free option for video calling. But nowadays there are plenty of alternatives, pretty much all of which do a better job than Skype ever did.

Skype has now been pretty much obsolete for years so I don’t think it’s too bad that it’s ending.

The Google approach would have been to already have killed it in 2004 before it ever even had a chance to be successful.

Most electric cars are pretty much computers on wheels, and voltages, currents and temperature are constantly monitored. It totally should be possible to log battery health and diagnostic information and generate a battery health report for when the vehicle is sold. But standards would need to be put in place for that to force manufacturers to implement it and to make sure the results are actually meaningful.

Unfortunately Tesla’s specifically really don’t feel like they’re designed to last when looking at their materials choices and build quality (either that or my manager just bought a particularly bad sample, I have to admit it’s the only Tesla I ever been inside of) so I don’t think having a good reseller experience or longevity is really a part of their business model.

The battery is still a big problem when selling on the used market because there’s not really a way to see how much it has been abused, and it’s also not really feasible to replace. If the previous owner abused their battery by constantly fast charging, and always charging it to 100% and driving till the battery is completely empty, then the battery can decrease much faster.

My manager has recently bought a used Tesla model 3, and the battery had been abused so much that he only has about 150km of actual range on a full battery. With the advertised range being close to 500km and the car being only 5 years old that seems to be a lot more than 2% per year. Even if you assume that the effective range when new was only half of the advertised range, then that battery has lost nearly 40% of its capacity in 5 years.

The main reasons why it’s Doom specifically are also because:

• The game is open-source: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr This makes it much more doable to port it to other platforms (and to strip out anything not absolutely required to get the first level to run when you run into technological limitations) than when you have to rely on unofficial modding tools.

• It’s nearly 30 years old and designed for computers with only a few megabytes of memory and for processors of well under 100MHz, which are specs which the majority of modern systems have, even embedded systems. It also renders fully on the CPU and doesn’t require specific hardware like a GPU or a specific graphics chip.

• Being a first person shooter with 3D-ish visuals it looks a lot more impressive than if you show off a simple game like Pong orTetris or something like that. It has the right balance between performance requirements and impressiveness, and it’s also a game that was very popular in its time and it’s instantly recognisable to a lot of people.

It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.

I’ve seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn’t actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don’t remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.

Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.

There are several those keys can be obtained, and most of them don’t involve fraud:

• Purchasing keys in a region where they’re cheaper, and reselling them in regions where the game is more expensive

• Purchasing keys during a sale, and reselling them after the sale

• Claiming keys from giveaways and selling those when the giveaway is over

• Buying a bundle (such as Humble Bundle) and selling the keys you aren’t interested in or you already have

• Buying games with stolen credit card and reselling those keys

Only the last one is illegal and costs the developers money. Digital storefronts have made it harder to obtain raw, transferrable keys and have introduced region locks to try to combat those top 3 methods, but they all were very common in the past.

Key resellers like G2A are pretty much just an eBay for keys. It’s not an illegal organisation, they just provide platforms on which people can sell their game keys, but they don’t know (and probably don’t care) how those keys are actually obtained. The majority of keys on those platforms are actually legit (iirc by far the biggest category is games purchased out of region).

HOWEVER,

The legally obtained keys sold on the platform are all obtained in such a way that the developers get little to no money from it, so chargeback fees from a few fraudulent purchases easily outweighs the small amount of money they get from the legit keys there. So even though the majority of keys sold on such platforms are not illegal, the few illegal keys that do exist are enough to make the developers still lose money on average with keys sold there.

That’s pretty much how it used to work.

The main reasons why it changed are:

• Space, as a connector is slightly bigger than a soldered connection, and the battery itself has to be slightly bigger and stronger too to be safe to transport and handle without being protected by the phone’s case.

• Water resistance; it’s far easier to make a phone’s case waterproof by just glueing the whole thing shut than having to use seals and gaskets and such to make it possible to open and close it at will.

I’d say just try it and see what you prefer. The app also has some occasional weirdness as it’s still an alpha version, but it usually works well.

I just prefer having it in an app, and the app is tiny anyway (about 20MB on my phone).

I still mostly enjoyed it, but I do agree that it’s way overhyped. The game has a ton of great and fun moments, but it also has so much filler that causes the sense of progression to really grind to a halt.

It’s a game that IMO would have benefited from leaving some parts on the cutting room floor, but otherwise it’s not a bad game.

I’m trying to switch from Rif to Jerboa too. Setting up an account and the front page was a bit unintuitive, but once that was done the app works very well and feels at least somewhat similar to Rif.

I’m glad some people have been posting guides though, those really helped as the fediverse is still rather new to me.