At my last job, every time they added or removed someone’s key card access, the system would reboot and everyone would be locked out for like two minutes.

We also had two floors that were connected by a fire stairwell, so you needed a card to re-enter the next floor.

At least twice my card stopped working in the middle of the word day while I was standing in the stairwell and I assumed that they just fired me and assumed I’d see my own way out.

Survived three layoffs at that company.

See also: Jesse Owens.

He must have been waiting for me to buy a copy.

Meanwhile Disney is sitting on The Black Hole like “won’t somebody sue us?”

Leeches are such cool creatures. I had a run-in with them while canoeing in Manitoba. Just one or two latched on. It’s really incredible how they can move their bodies around in the water yet maintain the exact texture and fluidity of the water itself. You’d never be able to feel one if it brushed up against you.

Also crazy how well whatever numbing chemical they produce works.

If you want to safely observe one up close, you can get them to latch on to your finger nail where they can’t do any damage.

I scrolled down and saw the video.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Oh right, duh. Thanks.

I believe the optimization came because the denominator was a power of two. In my memory, the function counted up all of the bytes being sent and checked to see that the sum was a multiple of 16 (I think 16 bytes made a single USB endpoint or something; I still don’t fully understand USB).

For starters, you can split up a larger modulo into smaller ones:

X = (A + B); X % n = (A % n + B % n) % n

So our 16 bit number X can be split into an upper and lower byte:

X = (X & 0xFF) + (X >> 8)

so

X % 16 = ((X & 0xFF) % 16 + (X >>8) % 16) % 16

This is probably what the compiler was doing in the background anyway, but the real magic came from this neat trick:

x % 2^n = x & (2^n - 1).

so

x % 16 = x & 15

So a 16 bit modulo just became three bitwise ANDs.

Edit: and before anybody thinks I’m good a math, I’m pretty sure I found a forum post where someone was solving exactly my problem, and I just copy/pasted it in.

Edit2: I’m pretty sure I left it here, but I think you can further optimize by just ignoring the upper byte entirely. Again, only because 16 is a power of 2 and works nicely with bitwise arithmatic.

Lol, no, but in the summers we were allowed to wear t-shirts on Friday.

Thanks!

And it was. They told me to take the rest of the day off which at the age of 22 was unheard of.

Thank you! But this was 12 years ago lol. Think they’ve moved on.

Whoops. Formatting got lost in the transfer. Fixed now.

That’s a good point. My number is all of the current biomass (according to Wikipedia), but all the CO2 we’ve produced since the Industrial Revolution was also originally captured by living things. So add all the gas and coal that ever existed on earth to that number.

The total biomass on Earth is 550 billion tonnes which at some point would have just been CO2, so that’s got to count for something.

That’s interesting. I’m running a software raid since I’ve been warned of dying raid controllers making your data irretrievable unless you buy an exact replacement. I guess the enterprise folks have that figured out.

Having a little trouble finding details online. Do those two cables going off to the right split off into a bunch of SATA connections?

Yeah, I have an offline backup I do every year in a fireproof safe in my basement. Might open a safe deposit box at some point, but I feel reasonably safe.

Good call on power efficiency. I’ll have to keep that in mind. I think I’m currently drawing around 100W which is mostly the hard drives (the CPU doesn’t even need a fan). I assume that might go up a bit in a new build, but I think the benefits will be worth it.

Not sure what Plex is using, but Shinobi and Photoprism do.

Plex usually runs at native resolution, but it can just barely run if it has to downscale or bake in subtitles in real time. I’ll have to check the settings to see what it’s using.

Edit: Ah, looks like you need to pay for Plex Pass to enable Quick Sync.

So my current processor has QuickSync. Are there generations of quicksync? Would a newer implementation be faster? There’s not a lot of data out there. It seems like QS support is either yes or no.

Thanks for the tips!

To clarify, by “x99,” do you mean LGA2011-3? That’s the socket wikipedia associates with the hardware.

And as for Arc, it looks like they’re a great option for video encoding. I’m actually using QuickSync already on my Celeron processor which has helped. From what I can understand, it looks like QuickSync is basically the same processor on all of the Arc cards, so I can just go with the cheapest card if I don’t plan to use much of the other features? Looking like an A380 can be had for $100 or so.