2) there are algorithms that calculate digits of Pi or e.
so... yes?
but if I just took any old Pi-digits algorithm and encoded it on GoL, its appearance would not be meaningful or "elegant" to our senses. You're probably asking "what does the shortest/most elegant program to calculate Pi in GoL look like, and does it maybe have some unexpected relation to other mathematical terms like, I dunno, Euler's identity or... Mandelbrot set?" And then you would probably need to answer the question "Well, how would you like the digits encoded and represented?".
All of a sudden your question becomes a bit ambiguous. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?
I mean.... I think I feel what you're asking, like... is there some primal version of Pi that can be encoded in GoL initial condition with as few bits as possible but I'm afraid that the answer is something like "well, that depends on what you mean by [...]"
Nvidia has open-sourced the kernel module "driver", which recently have been declared stable enough for general consumption.
But the kernel-mode driver is only a small part of what you would call the graphics card driver, and the bulk of it is still very much a proprietary blob.
The true open source driver for NV cards is Noveau[1] which works ok with older cards but is slow to support newest cards and features. Performance, power mgmt and hw acceleration are usually worse or not working at all compared to the official drivers.
The amount of deliberate damage anyone on my team can do is pretty much catastrophic. But we accept this as risk. It is appropriate for the environment. If we were running a bank, it would be inappropriate, but we're not running a bank.
I pushed back on risk management one time when The New Guy rebuilt our CI system. It was great, all bells and whistles and tests, except now deploying a change took 5 minutes. Same for rolling back a change. I said "Dude, this used to take 20 seconds. If I made a mistake I would know, and fix it in 20 seconds. Now we have all these tests which still allow me to cause total outage, but now it takes 10 minutes to fix it." He did make it faster in the end :)
The abbreviated story I told was perhaps more dramatic-sounding than it really played out. I didn't just say "Nothing." mic dropwalk out :)
The client was satisfied after we owned the mistake, explained that we have a number of measures in place for preventing various mistakes, and that making a test for this particular one doesn't make sense. Like, nothing will prevent me from creating a cron job that does "rm -rf * .o". But lights will start flashing and fixing that kind of blunder won't take long.
I didn't want to add a wall of text for context :) And that was the only time I've said something like that to a client. I was not being confrontational, just telling them how it is.
I suppose my point was that there's a cost associated with increasing reliability, sometimes it's just not worth paying it. And that people will usually appreciate candor rather than vague promises or hand-wavy explanations.
One of my guys made a mistake while deploying some config changes to Production and caused a short outage for a Client.
There's a post-incident meeting and the client asks "what are we going to do to prevent this from happening in the future?" - probably wanting to tick some meeting boxes.
My response: "Nothing. We're not going to do anything."
The entire room (incl. my side) looks at me. What do I mean, "Nothing?!?".
I said something like "Look, people make mistakes. This is the first time that this kind of mistake had happened. I could tell people to double-check everything, but then everything will be done twice as slowly. Inventing new policies based on a one-off like this feels like an overreaction to me. For now I'd prefer to close this one as human error - wontfix. If we see a pattern of mistakes being made then we can talk about taking steps to prevent them."
In the end the conceded that yeah, the outage wasn't so bad and what I said made sense. Felt a bit proud for pushing back :)
In my first attempt I've actually deleted the directories altogether but later wanted to scan a system manually and I couldn't repair the installation and get WD to run again.
My preferred way of disabling Windows Defender is to boot Linux, mount windows partition and rename windows defender directories to *.disabled or whatever.
I had these two dual-18-core xeon web servers with seemingly identical hardware and software setup but one was doing 1100 req/s and the other 500-600.
After some digging, I've realized that one had 8x8GB ram modules and the slower one had 2x32GB.
I did some benchmarking then and found that it really depends on the workload. The www app was 50% slower. Memcache 400% slower. Blender 5% slower. File compression 20%. Most single-threaded tasks no difference.
The takeaway was that workloads want some bandwidth per core, and shoving more cores into servers doesn't increase performance once you hit memory bandwidth limits.
Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since.
Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76RYHY7L1YzE...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0