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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m a mech E in the medical field. We’re consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we’re probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.

    My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I’ll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It’s not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.

    Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There’s a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that’s how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.


  • Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don’t think I was looking at a Surface pro though.

    If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.


  • I haven’t dealt with HPC in a while, but Intel C compiler against MKL libraries were fastest CPU, and Nvidia CUDA was slightly easier to develop than OpenCL for other cards. I’m not sure if the situation’s changed.

    For my current applications, I use NumPy compiled against Intel MKV installed as a binary. It works great.


  • Almost a decade ago that was true. I use budget Android phones, and Brave was the only ad-blocking browser I could use. Firefox with ad-blocking plugins was slower than Chrome with ads. Brave was chromium based and was by far the most responsive way to browse the web.

    Firefox got their act together and now the Android version is great. And the plugins work well. Brave began substituting some site ads for their own ads, if I remember correctly. You’d see fewer ads, but Brave was getting some money to let a few through.




  • KaletoMemes@lemmy.mlit's that time of year
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    02 years ago

    I don’t have a refined palette, and I like fairly hoppy beers. It has to have a good flavor to it though. If it’s made hoppy for the sake of IBUs, then it’s probably bad. Like joke hot sauces are disgusting, but there are some that are delicious but really painful for me to eat, even one bite.

    Older IPA hops like cascade are great but only slightly hop heavy with their classic hop flavors. The hops used more recently (I think citra and mosaic?) have great flavors when pushed to high IBUs.

    Hops have amazing range. Fuggles smell like dirt. Lemondrop has a strong citrus smell.

    About half of beer variety is from hops. Unless your talking about Belgians. Then it’s all yeast.


  • The GIL only executes one thread at a time. A python program can be multithreaded, but only only thread runs in CPython at a time. If one thread does a system call (like copying a file), then when the python thread is sleeping, the system call can still run in the OS, so there are situations where multithreading can speed up Python programs, even running one thread at a time.

    You can run multiple instances of CPython, which is called multiprocessing, and each instance will run one python thread at a time. With different memory space, so all process communication has to be handled manually (afaik, by definition, threads share the same memory space, processes do not).

    Any library calls not written in Python don’t run in the interpreter, so most common critical things aren’t limited too badly. For example, I install a NumPy and SciPy library which are compiled against Intel’s MKL library. Any NumPy operations execute in MKL, not the Python interpreter, so are almost as fast as writing the program in C and compiling against MKL myself. And I can write Python and NumPy code about 10x faster than C/MKL. And if I’m on a computer that doesn’t have MKL, I can install a different NumPy library and it will execute just fine without changing the code.

    There’s a book called “high performance Python” that helped me figure out a lot of this.

    Edit: thought I was posting on the grandparents post instead of the parent post. Sorry.



  • Technically second distro I ever installed, but the first one I actually used. I purchased Mandrake when it was based on RedHat, but didn’t get very far with it. In college I inherited always on Internet in my dorm and ran a Slackware webserver, and later fileserver and BitTorrent machine. I tried running Slackware on my laptop but I couldn’t get the battery management to work, but I dual booted for a couple of years.