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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Kale@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlC Compilers be like
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    11 months ago

    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.






  • I do a lot of camping in bear country. I’ve been to Bannf. Bear spray is more effective than a firearm at stopping a brown bear attack. Bears have super sensitive noses and eyes, bear spray is immediate pain.

    Bears are extremely muscular from the front, so even if you could manage to shoot one several times from the front, you’d have to use non-expanding bullets like hard cast lead or full metal jacket, which aren’t as lethal as expanding bullets like flat nose or hollow points are (for people). Expanding bullets would be stopped by muscle in bears. Non-expanding bullets are slower at killing things (I believe it’s illegal to hunt with FMJ around me). Bears can run so quickly that a lethal shot killing a bear in two seconds might not be enough time to stop the bear before it could hurt you. And if a lethal shot took a minute to kill a bear, it’s not effective at stopping an attack.

    9mm has stopped brown bear attacks plenty of times, but it’s risky. Both US Parks Service and Parks Canada say bear spray is more effective at stopping a bear than a firearm. I think Parks Canada still uses 0.303 rifles to rangers, but that might be for polar bear. Canada is really strict on pepper spray and mace, but you can purchase bear spray, even if you’re not a citizen. I don’t think a non-citizen would be able to hike with a holstered 10mm or .40SW pistol anyways.

    Bannf was really crowded when I went there. It’s beautiful but the “must see” scenic spots are all filled with Instagrammers. Bears are probably less afraid of people, and I saw plenty of idiots 10 meters from a brown bear with an SLR camera without any precautions at all.

    Pro tip: Jasper is very similar terrain, is also a Canadian Park, and is much less crowded. When I was there a couple of years ago, there was zero cell signal an hour before we arrived at the park. You’ll need paper maps or offline GPS. If you want wilderness with fewer people, try Jasper Park.




  • Fundamentalism in Christianity means you interpret Scripture with two rules that are a lot like Occam’s Razor. The first is that text is interpreted literally unless it has obvious indications that it is not literal. The second is that the Tanakh (which Christians call the Old Testament) is followed unless the New Testament specifically comments on it.

    Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe in evolution because there’s nothing in Genesis that hints at allegory, and it’s not mentioned in the new testament. Eating pork and shellfish is allowed because that is specifically addressed as being Ok. Something like the Talmud in Judaism or Papal Bull / Canon in Catholicism, where Scripture can be interpreted in a more complex light, is not used at all. That’s a hallmark of fundamentalism in Christianity.



  • A lot of that is selective breeding. Humans add a ton of extra stuff to breed, but groups of breeds are not as arbitrary. Pointers have been bred for bird hunting, shepherds for livestock, retrievers for waterfowl, terriers for small game hunting. Bulldogs were bred for 150+ years to attack bulls, bears, and other dogs (until animal welfare laws banned dog fighting). Further division of breeds (like rat terrier vs feist) is arbitrary and doesn’t represent anything meaningful genetically.

    My opinion is that bulldog / terrier mixes (like the pit) represent a greater risk to humans than the average dog. I don’t think it’s anything unique to the pit, which has a lot of media hysteria. The data look so bad for pits because they are so popular. If Staffordshires were more popular in America, they’d show up in the stars more.

    The name “pit bull terrier” did originate from bull terriers used in professional dog fighting. Dogs would fight in a pit. Until animal cruelty laws became a thing.

    Just being upfront: I wouldn’t own a pit due to the number of instances of friends having a pit that is the “nicest dog ever” and it randomly attacked them one day. I also extend this to Persian cats, btw. But we can’t ban particular breeds. Punish bad owners, continue selectively breeding dogs to reduce aggression.

    Extreme example: Adults who were abused as children are more likely to be child abusers themselves. Should we ban people who were beaten by their parents from being teachers? They are statistically more likely to abuse children.


  • Barking is a performative aggression. It’s meant to intimidate. Predatory attacks frequently don’t have warning barks. It’s quiet staring then a lunge.

    The behavior you described sounds dangerous, but it’s a known thing (that doesn’t make it less dangerous, but does give opportunity to blame the owner that they should have known they had an aggressive dog). Terrible owners don’t correct this behavior and have dogs that are dangerous to people. But there are many dogs that show zero aggression before attacking. There’s a bunch of biased sources but I think there is some truth to it, nearly half of dogs that kill have not shown aggression towards humans before.

    Side note: Rottweilers are the #2 killer dog breed in America. They average about 10% of all fatal attacks. Pits are the #1 killer dog breed. The past couple of years they’ve been 65%+ of fatal attacks.


  • It’s becoming more common to see police departments ban Malligators. Less predictable than GSD.

    Any dog can be aggressive, yes. Most pits have great personalities, sure. But I’ve known a few pits that weren’t aggressive towards people. Until they were.

    The owner problem is a real factor (owners who are likely to raise aggressive dogs are more likely to get pits), but there’s an extra layer to pits. They are raised to be muscular with very strong jaws. If a Yorkie turns on it’s owner, someone’s getting bloody ankles. A pit (and chow, and Rottweiler) can really hurt people.

    On top of this, there’s two types of aggression in dogs: performative aggression with barking and short charges, and prey drive which is quiet staring and sudden lunges towards the throat of another dog or animal. I was under the impression for a long time that dangerous dogs had terrible tempers and were “grouchy”. No, dangerous dogs are social creatures like most dogs and many show affection to other pets and humans, until something triggers their prey instinct. The website I cite below has a statement that pits are less likely to act aggressive before an attack.

    There were a string of dog deaths in my city last year. All pits. Two were family pets that both attacked their toddler playing in the family’s yard. The mom ran to help and the dogs attacked her and their infant. Both children died and the mom was hospitalized. And a friend of mine had to mace a dog doing his job last year for the first time, it was a pit. Anecdotal, I know, but it’s changed my mind on pits.

    This group says 69% of dogs involved in fatal attacks in 2019 were pits: https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2019.php

    One 2019 fatality was from 8 different breeds. This means that if you flip that statistic around to “percentage of fatal attacks involving pits”, that number is even higher.

    Pits are estimated to be 6.5% of American dogs.


  • Melting tundra releases methane, accelerating the increase in temperature. Rising temperature reduces polar ice, making oceans absorb more heat, accelerating heating. Climate pattern changes cause more frequent and larger wildfires, accelerating heating.

    There are probably processes that work to reduce heating as it increases that I’m not aware of, but there are a lot of positive feedback processes which is concerning.

    I believe the IPCC 1.5C was criticized because it included effects of a carbon sequestering process that hasn’t been invented yet. That’s pretty optimistic.



  • 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.