nybble41

In general integer division is implemented using a form of long division, in binary. There is no base-10 arithmetic involved. It’s a relatively expensive operation which usually requires multiple clock cycles to complete, whereas dividing by a power of two (“bit shifting”) is trivial and can be done in hardware simply by routing the signals appropriately, without any logic gates.

The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

If you’re writing “1 million bytes” and not “8 million bits” then you’re not using metric.

If you aren’t using metric then the metric prefix definitions don’t apply.

There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

Finally: This isn’t primarily about bit shifting, it’s about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.

That part is messed up. You shouldn’t be dealing with individual contractors as a patient. All billing should go through the hospital, and be considered in-network provided the hospital is in-network, regardless of what kind of specialist sees you there. Any exception, such as bringing in someone who doesn’t normally work there to treat a rare condition, should require separate and specific authorization from the patient in advance.

When you have an actual functioning competitive market the money you bring in correlates with the value of the service you provide, so it makes perfect sense to be happy about the money the new surgical center is bringing in. That means it’s useful.

The problem is that the health care market is regulated and subsidized in so many ways, many of them conflicting with each other, that competition is very limited and price discovery is reduced to “whatever the patient (and their insurance) can afford to pay” since they can’t go anywhere else. Fix that and there won’t be any reason for hospital owners or employees to feel guilty about making money.

Perhaps you could share a reference that supports your accusations? So far the only points made against the schools have been backed by nothing but hearsay. If you’re going to go around calling them “sociopath factories” you’ll need more to support that than your second-hand interpretation of an ad you claim you heard and a link describing how they teach their students to respect others’ rights.

If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

A smarter system won’t just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators’ ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.

There are charter schools around me that literally advertise how they teach kids NOT to befriend people who can’t help themselves (Challenger Schools).

I’m seriously not seeing how you managed to get that out of the page you linked. It says, as an example, that they won’t force their students to pretend to be friends, because they should be able to decide that for themselves. It doesn’t say that they instruct them not to be friends or in any way discourage genuine friendship.

The ubuntu:24.04 Docker image is only 77.30 MiB.

alpine:3.19.0 is 7.38 MiB.

Of course those sizes are without a kernel. Typical everything-included distro kernels are generally a few hundred MiB as they include drivers for everything that might be needed, but a custom build for known hardware can reduce that to just a few MiB.

Open primaries invite strategic voters to sabotage the party they want to lose rather than supporting the candidate they want to win.

Of course you can still do that with closed primaries—you just have to register as the party you want to vote for in the primaries, ignoring your own preferences. Nothing forces you to vote for your registered party in the general election. It’s slightly more involved this way since you would need to change your registration more frequently, and commit to it earlier, but that isn’t much of a hurdle.

Personally, I’d love it if Democrats became the right-most party by staying exactly as they are, and a new party breaks off of them or evolves out to their left.

I’d say it’s more likely to go the other way, with the more moderate or right-leaning Democrats breaking off to form their own party and perhaps steal away the more moderate Republican voters. There are a lot of voters who would naturally align more closely with traditional Republican political views voting Democrat only because the Republican party has been taken over by a radical faction. Having laissez-faire fiscal conservatives and outright socialists in the same party isn’t really sustainable long-term; there are too many critical points of disagreement.