That would be porn featuring people who were born as a boy or a girl by mistake, and who have since tried to put that right. Rocky Horror Picture Show has a "sweet" song with the word which is apparently problematic.
Yeah, I was pondering this earlier. In exchange for giving up quite a lot of the CPU die, you can have some NPU functionality instead; rather than having to offload everything to the cloud, you can preprocess some of it first, and then offload it.
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech plus general battery efficiency are reasonable use cases for a phone, certainly more so than a laptop and much more so than a desktop. But as you note, those models are going to be small, and RAM and backing storage on phones tends to be slow and limited.
Was also considering that an NPU gives no benefit at all unless code has been written for it; it's a bastard to write code for something so concurrent, and giving up CPU die for an NPU instead of more cores and cache means that your phone will generally be slower unless it's largely used for NPU tasks. Plus if you need to offload to the cloud for most useful tasks anyway, it's just a marketing gimmick that makes your phone less good for most uses.
To be fair, compiling C code with a C++ compiler gets you all the warnings from C++'s strong-typing rules. That's a big bonus for me, even if it only highlights the areas of your C that are likely to become a maintenance hazard - all those void* casts want some documentation about what assumptions make them safe. Clang will compile variable-length arrays in C++, so you might want to switch off that warning since you've probably intended it. Just means that you can't use designated initialisers, since C++ uses constructors for that and there's no C equivalent. I'd be happy describing code that compiles in either situation as "C+".
Also stops anyone using auto, constexpr or nullptr as variable names, which will help if you want to copy-paste some well-tested code into a different project later.
Man alive, don't get the managers working with audio. "Doubling the stream" might work if you're using a signed audio format rather than an unsigned one, and the format is in the same endianness as the host computer uses. Neither of which are guaranteed when working with audio.
But of course, the ear perceives loudness in a logarithmic way (the decibel scale), so for it to be perceived as "twice as loud", it generally needs an exponential increase. Very high and low frequencies need more, since we're less sensitive to them and don't perceive increases so well.
Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you'd have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.
Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn't scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it's instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.
Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can't fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.
Surely i, j, k, l, m and n should be integers, and the rest should all be floats? Seems to me that this language model hasn't been trained up on enough FORTRAN77.
Bear in mind as well that the Scottish government rejected a lot of the privatisation that the remainder of the UK went through, so 'government' doesn't just mean civil servants in offices, it means things like Scottish Forestry and Scottish Water as well. Need to manage small teams of people over very large areas who are frequently out of mobile phone contact, as well as sharing information with subcontractors who will frequently be one-man-band operators who may just have a van and a mobile phone; no laptop, no IT team.
So 'convenient', but also 'almost nothing else would be practicable'.
The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they're exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.
Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it's not very easy to generalise as to whether it'll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.
If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you'd expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don't have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you've got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you've got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.
Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they're about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you'd expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux.
https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/
General experience is that generally there's no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.
Good news is that it's such a bastard to program efficiently that most games don't make full use of it and you can get away with a certain amount of approximation in its behaviour for speed. Nice work, Sony.
Compare that with z80 or 6502 based machines, where you need to be beyond cycle perfect in some cases. Need to simulate every rising and falling edge for the CPU and its coprocessors in a SNES if you want to avoid every edge case, for instance.
Ah yes. I remember preparing a recipe once that included frying up the ingredients in a cup of oil, and that turns out seriously fucking greasy if you use the UK cup size.
Bear in mind that the gallon we use is different from the US gallon, too:
a UK gallon is eight (imperial) pints of 20 fluid ounces, so 4.54 litres
a US gallon is 231 cubic inches, so 3.79 litres
The reason that I thought American car fuel economy was so terrible as a child is partly because UK mpg is +20% on US mpg for the same car on the same fuel. But also, because American car fuel economy is so terrible.
A shame that all the really early 3D games use their own software rendering engines, and aren't so amenable to being "cranked up" like later games when accelerators became common.
Get some of the early freescape games like Total Eclipse or Castle Master, early cyberpunk games like Interphase, or even Frontier: Elite II running in big resolutions with silky framerates and insane draw distances, I'd be so pleased.
Thermal expansion is proportional to temperature; it's quite significant for ye olde spinning rust hard drives but the mechanical stress affects all parts in a system. Especially for a gaming machine that's not run 24/7 - it will experience thermal cycling. Mechanical strength also decreases with increasing temperature, making it worse.
Second law of thermodynamics is that heat only moves spontaneously from hotter to colder. A 60° bath can melt more ice than a 90° cup of coffee - it contains more heat - but it can't raise the temperature of anything above 60°, which the coffee could. A 350W graphics card at 20° couldn't raise your room above that temperature, but a 350W graphics card at 90° could do so. (The "runs colder" card would presumably have big fans to move the heat away.)
That would be porn featuring people who were born as a boy or a girl by mistake, and who have since tried to put that right. Rocky Horror Picture Show has a "sweet" song with the word which is apparently problematic.