zh3 (u/zh3) - Readit News

zh3 commented on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6? righto.com/2025/08/Cr2Ge2... · Posted by u/freediver

dawnofdusk · 4 days ago

As any practicing scientist knows even good research papers may be littered with blatant but unimportant errors. There is unfortunately no good reason or system to "correct the record", and it is not clear to me if such a thing is a good use of human resources. Nonetheless, I think correcting the record is always appreciated!

zh3 · 4 days ago

Like the legal principle of "De minimis" ('the law does not concern itself with trifles').

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

zh3 commented on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6? righto.com/2025/08/Cr2Ge2... · Posted by u/freediver

rdtsc · 4 days ago

Gr is the science journal version of Van Halen's brown M&M rider -- it's how you can tell the reviewers and the authors had no idea what they were doing and just copy pasted junk around.

I think established authors should try to sprinkle obvious mistakes like that on purpose once in a while in the literature and then see how much it spreads.

zh3 · 4 days ago

Map makers have done this for a very long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

zh3 commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

gnfargbl · 7 days ago

OK, I'm convinced. Can someone tell me what to buy, specifically? Needs to run Ubuntu, support 2 x 4K monitors (3 would be nice), have at least 64GB RAM and fit on my desk. Don't particularly care how good the GPU is / is not.

Here's my starting point: gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen™-ai-max-395-evo-x2-ai-mini-pc. Anything better?

zh3 · 7 days ago

Multimonitor with 4K tends to need fast GPU just for the bandwidth, else dragging large windows around can feel quite slow (found that out running 3 x 4K monitors on a low-end GPU).

zh3 commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

diminish · 7 days ago

Multi-core operations like compiling C/C++ could benefit.

Single thread performance of 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is only 1.8x of my poor and old laptop's 4-core i5 performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6211vs3830vs3947/AMD-Ry...

I'm waiting for >1024 core ARM desktops, with >1TB of unified gpu memory to be able to run some large LLMs with

Ping me when some builds this :)

zh3 · 7 days ago

Yes, just went from i3770 (12 years old!) to a 9900x as I tend to wait for a doubling of single core performance before upgrading (got through a lot of PCs in the 386/486 era!). It's actually only 50% faster according to cpubenchmark [0] but is twice as fast in local usage (multithread is reported about 3 times faster).

Also got a Mac Mini M4 recently and that thing feels slow in comparison to both these systems - likely more of a UI/software thing (only use M4 for xcode) than being down to raw CPU performance.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9900K-vs-Intel...

zh3 commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

userbinator · 7 days ago

I wish developers, and I'm saying this as one myself, were forced to work on a much slower machine, to flush out those who can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

zh3 · 7 days ago

Develop on a fast machine, test and optimise on a slow one?

zh3 commented on How Not to Buy a SSD andrei.xyz/post/how-not-t... · Posted by u/speckx

dotancohen · 9 days ago

Most definitely what? There are counterfeits, or there are not counterfeits?

zh3 · 8 days ago

Definitely fakes.

zh3 commented on How Not to Buy a SSD andrei.xyz/post/how-not-t... · Posted by u/speckx

gmac · 9 days ago

I’ve seen this stated many times on HN, but never knowingly experienced it with Amazon in the UK. Is it possible this varies by market?

zh3 · 9 days ago

Amazon UK With replacement phone or laptop batteries, most definitely. I've seen other stuff sold that looked sketchy enough to not be worth the risk.

zh3 commented on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 cybercultural.com/p/inter... · Posted by u/herbertl

zh3 · a month ago

Going back a few years (from 1998), it was all dial-up and I was working in London on a stand-by. Happened to be paired with someone I respct, so I showed him "the internet" - pretty much Pat Sharp and mtv.com back then.

Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a few days ago.".

It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.