RegalPotoo

@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨105 Trillion Pi Digits: The Journey to a New Pi Calculation Record⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Knowing the answer isn’t really useful - for reasons you’ve pointed out - and setting records like this is always just done for the publicity (if you wanted more digits, you can just keep the system running the calculations for longer).

  Doing the calculations themselves does have some uses though - it turns out that its actually pretty hard to find problems that can totally saturate the CPUs of high performance systems for long enough that you can see rare issues that only occur under significant load.

  For high end compute stuff, you need a task that you can run in parallel across hundreds or thousands of machines, that isn’t going to be bottlenecked by I/O easily, and where the results are easily verifiable - so you know the performance and reliability characteristics of your system before you commision it to run real work (where you operating costs might be $10k/hour+, and there is a large queue of work waiting to go)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have yourself a most wonderful time of the year!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  twitch

  The place I worked was too cheap for actually licensing music so just had a radio on. Crappy Christmas songs, plus utterly inane radio DJ banter and 30% advertisements by duration - including ads for our competitor down the street who were far cheaper than us