I had to step away from this conversation because of how aggressive you were being.  Now that no one is watching, we might try to have a productive conversation.<p>Please consider dropping the adversarial attitude.  This place isn&#x27;t like other sites.  The way people converse is equally important to what they say.  It&#x27;s better to transcend than to dominate.<p>For example, we do not slip in underhanded comments like this:<p><i>&gt; In that scenario, your surgeon would see the program suddenly freeze.<p>Only if the programmer or his management were incompetent</i><p>This is just short of a personal attack, which is against the rules.  I know you probably didn&#x27;t mean it that way, but look at how you&#x27;re framing the debate.  I felt as if I&#x27;d been teleported onto Fox News and forced to defend myself from an aggressive interviewer&#x27;s mischaracterizations.<p>Now, you can take the stance that &quot;It&#x27;s not against the rules, so I can say whatever I want.&quot;  That&#x27;s true, you can.  But we&#x27;re worse off for it.  We optimize for good conversation here.<p>The point I&#x27;m trying to get across is that if you really throw yourself <i>into</i> this community, wholeheartedly and without a feeling of having to prove something wherever you go, then this place has a lot to offer.  You&#x27;ll meet a lot of interesting people, you&#x27;ll hear a lot of interesting stories, and perhaps you&#x27;ll have an opportunity to contribute to something quite unexpected.  But none of that will happen if you try to skewer your opponents wherever you go -- or if you see people here as opponents.  We&#x27;re people.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter what the conversation is.  It doesn&#x27;t matter whether it&#x27;s about life-or-death, or that this one happened to be about a surgery.  The goal is to put yourself in the other person&#x27;s shoes and to ask yourself, &quot;If I were them, why would I say that?&quot;<p>Regarding our conversation, if you want to continue it, I&#x27;d be happy to. But unless you&#x27;re trying to learn as much from me as I&#x27;m trying to learn from you, it&#x27;s not going to go anywhere productive.  And what would be the point?  No one&#x27;s looking anymore -- it&#x27;s fallen off the front page, so it&#x27;s just you and me here.  But why should our conversation be so different just because nobody is watching?<p>There are things to be said, but I have no time to defend myself.  You can characterize what I was saying however you want.  Or, alternatively, you could ask me what I meant.<p>I won&#x27;t pull one of those &quot;I&#x27;ve been in the field for a pretty long time, so I bet you&#x27;ll learn something...&quot; routines.  Those are tired refrains, usually coming from people who have long forgotten what it&#x27;s like to be young and hungry.  But I&#x27;m still pretty young, and money&#x27;s low enough that I&#x27;m pretty hungry.  Being unable to afford meat is unfortunate, but it&#x27;s worth not having a job for a little while to throw myself into my research.  See why there&#x27;s no time to defend against aggression?<p>I think I wrote this because in many ways, you remind me of how I used to be.  And if I could go back in time, I&#x27;d ask myself what I was doing and why.  This type of discourse is an intellectual dead-end.  No one is going to learn a thing from watching people try to tear each other apart.  Maybe you didn&#x27;t realize that&#x27;s what you were doing.  It&#x27;s very easy to slip into that mindset without realizing it.<p><i>As for displaying random data, why would the programmer want to do this?</i><p>GPUs are bastards. They ignore what programmers want, almost by definition.  And as someone who has spent way-too-many years wringing as much performance as possible from them, I assure you that this is a realistic characterization of a possible outcome.<p>Perhaps that piques your curiosity. If so, then that sounds like the start of a good conversation, no?