lol, some of these are new to me!
Know your nut jobs
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Category Archives: Chatter
Infinity
There’s infinity, right there:
Lorentz Factor
ChatGPT tells me about the Lorentz Factor.
Scott Aaronson
Today I learned of Scott Aaronson who has a blog Shtetl-Optimized. (ChatGPT explains the blog title.) I heard of Aaronson via this SMBC comic. I’m interested in his book Quantum Computing Since Democritus but I’m not sure I can quite prioritize the time and money for that one just at the moment, especially as it’s a little outside my areas of focus. (I’ve been thinking recently about what my areas of focus are, and they would include mathematics, electronics, and computing (hardware and software), but I’m not sure I’m ready to take on quantum computing at this stage. I’m also interested in philosophy, particularly postmodern philosophy, so I have an almost unlimited amount of other reading to do.)
Atavistic
I read this comic and ended up having this chat with ChatGPT. My idea was basically that our fear of “monsters” was really just a fear of predatory animals which are to be genuinely feared.
Um, America?
I was reading the Obituary for Don Lancaster (RIP K3BYG) and I noticed the two ads, shown below. I wasn’t sure at first if this was satire, or not… ah, crime and commerce in the land of the free.
California Sunshine – Midian
This makes me happy. <3
RTL
The initialism “RTL” can stand for both “Register Transfer Level” and “Resistor-Transistor Logic” as explained by ChatGPT.
Critical Path != Critical Section
I always get the concepts “critical path” and “critical section” confused.
The “critical section” is the part in your algorithm which you must hold a lock for; whereas the “critical path” is an idea from hardware design which relates to the time taken for the longest combinatorial logic that needs to be processed during a clock cycle, thus limiting the frequency you can run your clock at.
Although the terminology “critical path” came from hardware, the same terminology is used in software. ChatGPT has a fairly good write-up on the two uses of the term “critical path”.
I learned a little more about this in Introduction to VHDL for FPGA and ASIC design.
Oplus
ChatGPT is too good!