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.

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.

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.

It is just as ridiculous that Republicans in California have little say in the presidency as Democrats in Wyoming.

The Republicans in California have a better chance of seeing a Republican president with the electoral college than they would with a national popular vote, even if their particular votes carry less weight. In a sense that gives them more representation in the end, not less—their voices are ignored but they get what they wanted anyway.

Most of this is personal opinion and snobbery that I can’t do much about except maybe ask that you examine how anarcho-capitalist your takes sound.

Objectivist, perhaps. They’re the ones who obsess over controlling and monetizing free external benefits. There is no copyright in anarcho-capitalism (including “moral rights” etc.) so the GP doesn’t sound at all anarcho-capitalist while arguing for infringement of others’ real property rights to prop up their own artificial (non-rivalrous) “intellectual property” rights.

They didn’t say it shouldn’t have been developed. Improving the AI models so they can deal with this kind of malicious interference gracefully is a good thing.

The EULA also prohibits using Nightshade “for any commercial purpose”, so arguably if you make money from your art—in any way—you’re not allowed to use Nightshade to “poison” it.

Bingo. They could do it themselves, but they want to spend other people’s money, not just their own. Same as any other tax. Bonus PR points for appearing “generous”.

It would be a nominal charge for storage, bandwidth, and indexing. Book stores carry public-domain titles, for profit, and most have no issue with that. You can always procure the same files somewhere else—they are public domain, after all. Those who pay are doing so for the convenience, not because they’re forced to.

They could stick to public domain & indie titles. They won’t, but they could.

It’s a case of overlapping coverage. Her personal insurance company isn’t disputing that the uninsured driver was responsible. They’re arguing—not unreasonably—that the organizer of the event is more directly responsible for damages incurred while participating in their event (after the driver, naturally), so their insurance should cover the expense.

No one likes to be caught in the middle of something like this, but at the same time it would be irresponsible of the insurance company, toward both their investors and their other customers, to simply pay out without question when someone else should be paying.

You’re restricting speech whether or not you confine your censorship to only AI-generated images.

Correction: Fortunately, not unfortunately. A rule like that would prohibit any form of public / street photography, news videos, surveillance videos, family photos with random strangers in the background… it’s not reasonable at all.

Since you don’t understand, quotes denote emphasis or specificity, not emotion.

Actually quotes denote quotations. When used casually around an individual word or short phrase they generally indicate that the writer is emphasizing that these are someone else’s words, and that the writer would have chosen a different description. As in: These people are described as “teens” but are probably not only/mostly teenagers. That may not be what you meant, but it’s how that text will be read.

If you just want emphasis you might consider using bold or italics rather than quotes.

I’d settle for just the limits, personally.

The part that makes me the most paranoid is the outbound data. They set every VM up with a 5 Gbps symmetric link, which is cool and all, but then you get charged based on how much data you send. When everything’s working properly that’s not an issue as the data size is predictable, but if something goes wrong you could end up with a huge bill before you even find out about the problem. My solution, for my own peace of mind, was to configure traffic shaping inside the VM to throttle the uplink to a more manageable speed and then set alarms which will automatically shut down the instance after observing sustained high traffic, either short-term or long-term. That’s still reliant on correct configuration, however, and consumes a decent chunk of the free-tier alarms. I’d prefer to be able to set hard spending limits for specific services like CPU time and network traffic and not have to worry about accidentally running up a bill.