well the good news is you can indeed already just have unified cpu/gpu memory on linux with an igpu on good old replaceable ram. i've done it on 8th gen intel stuff i picked up dirt cheap used. for the most part, running on the gpu wasn't faster (nor appreciably slower) than the cpu for the things i was doing, just more power efficient. overall bandwidth is relatively limited regardless which would be the bigger difference comparing against the m chips. and of course, good luck if you're hoping stuff like opencl support hasn't long ago been ripped out of whatever software you might perfectly reasonably expect to run this way today

you can just hash the metadata masking out the hash as all zeroes or anything similar to get around that, like header checksums that ostensibly include themselves

(to be clear, i have been on mastodon/fedi for coming up on a decade now and have no qualms about the way leaving or sunsetting an instance works. part of the magic imo is that old posts from long-dead instances regularly go around again)

how exactly do you propose someone looking to delete all of their old posts from a dead instance might obtain the exhaustive list of instances that have historically received their posts via a long indirect cascade of boosts to send these formal or informal deletion requests? an allowlist-federated instance obviously makes that far more tractable, and otherwise I could potentially see annoying paths to doing it anyway if i had been the admin and had every log ever sitting somewhere to trawl through, but in the case of a normal user whose instance is already gone and who doesn't have an ongoing relationship with the prior admin, this is hardly a realistic way to address that concern.

Obtaining the exhaustive list of instances is very difficult, but typing your old handle into the search box of the ten largest Mastodon instances will get you many leads. Aiming for an exhaustive list is somewhat security theatre: chances are, many of your Fedi posts are in Common Crawl, which the instance sending DELETE wouldn't affect – and good luck redacting Common Crawl. Fedi is not a secret medium. (This is not to say that the maximalist "if it's technically possible, I have a right to do it!" position is anything other than a huge violation of privacy.)

i've always thought one of git's strengths is offering robust aliasing and subcommand flexibility. why not spend three seconds making git have split too?

And do that on every machine?

Easier to just use jujutsu. It has a lot of benefits than just this.

e in interactive mode lets you directly edit the patch line by line, so it depends how you count popping open an editor

somewhat relatedly, shell pipelining is very amenable to being massaged into (non stack-based) concatenative programming

dang, and here some us were doing it for free like suckers

with a numpad but without moving my hand

dell opts you in without telling you. one day you'll just reboot to an unexpected bitlocker screen and have to figure out whether you're getting ransomwared before eventually digging a key out of your microsoft account you weren't aware was there.

do we mathematicians do particularly much work with cows that is made simpler by assuming they're spherical?

At the very least the cow-equations are made simpler!