wewbull

@wewbull@feddit.uk
0 Post – 466 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Marine drones. Basically remote control exploding speed boats, some with rockets on them. They basically attack like hyaenas bringing down a zebra.

2 more...

It's an area of 168,500 sq mi.

A patriot battery can cover 300 sq mi.

We do, depending on how you count it.

There's two major widths in a processor. The data register width and the address bus width, but even that is not the whole story. If you go back to a processor like the 68000, the classic 16-bit processor, it has:

  • 32-bit data registers
  • 16- bit ALU
  • 16-bit data bus
  • 32-bit address registers
  • 24-bit address bus

Some people called it a 16/32 bit processor, but really it was the 16-bit ALU that classified it as 16-bits.

If you look at a Zen 4 core it has:

  • 64-bit data registers
  • 512-bit AVX data registers
  • 6 x 64-bit integer ALUs
  • 4 x 256-bit AVX ALUs
  • 2 x 128-bit data bus to DDR5 (dual edge 64-bit)
  • ~40-bits of addressable physical RAM

So, what do you want to call this processor?

64-bit (integer width), 128-bit (physical data bus width), 256-bit (widest ALU) or 512-bit (widest register width)? Do you want to multiply those numbers up by the number of ALUs in a core? ...by the number of cores on a piece of silicon?

Me, I'd say Zen4 was a 256-bit core, but you could argue any of the above numbers.

Basically, it's a measurement that lost all meaning so people stopped using it.

19 more...

Is that when the Country leaves the EU or the people leave the country?

In other news. A factory fire in Hull, England received nothing more than local news coverage this week. Their product? Hand sanitizer. Turns out that 99% alcohol is really flamible.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/fire-breaks-out-at-hull-factory-and-spreads-to-area-holding-1000-litres-of-hand-sanitiser/ar-BB1oyRi8

I wonder why there's such a huge disparity in news coverage between these two stories. I guess it's because the building was evacuated successfully, right?

1 more...

We can, but it's awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don't need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.

Voters may want social care to be on the ballot at the UK general election, but no one seems to be listening.

Yes they are. You just need to be talking to a Liberal Democrat. It's part of the manifesto.

Yes, because 256 memory locations is a bit limiting.

So "instruction encoding length".

I don't think that works though. For something like RISC-V, RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding. For x86-64 those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

2 more...

If the 8088 had used all but one 256 8-bit values as legal instructions, all your new instructions after that point would need to start with that unused value and then you can add a maximum of 256 instructions by using the next byte. End result is 511 instructions can be encoded in 16-bits.

If they want to hurt us over it, it means it will hurt them if we do it.

though some bankers and European officials are worried that simply taking the assets would create a dangerous precedent.

Just make a law that it's a 100% tax on assets identified as falling under sanctions related to a aggressive invading nation. Precedent limited.

8 more...

Quite the statement that Gentoo has survived for so long compiling from source but, even with ever advancing processor speeds, they've finally gone "Nah... Takes to long. ".

I mean, I don't blame them. Yesterday I left my machine building a PyTorch package for 4 hours on a 12 core processor.

8 more...

Don't make the mistake of thinking that left mean anti-authoritarian. Left or right is an economic stance, and is orthogonal to beliefs surrounding government rights Vs population rights.

14 more...

Now tell your UN ambassador to reverse the veto in the security council so UN troops can actually do something about this.

PipedBot: no issues with it.

TldrBot: I get frustrated with the number of times I see a story where only the bot has commented. "There's someone here... No there's not".

It's not the bots fault really, but I wonder if it should wait until somebody else has commented so zero comment stories stay at zero.

1 more...

So... Absolutely need to be aware of the impact of what we do in the tech sphere, but there's a few things in the article that give me pause:

Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

  1. "Could". More likely it was closed loop.
  2. Water isn't single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.

What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.

Can you say non sequitur ?

The outdated network holding back housing is that it doesn't go to the right places with the capacity needed for the houses. Not that OpenAIUK is consuming so much that there's no power left. To use a simily, there's plenty of water but the pipes aren't in place.

This article is well intentioned FUD, but FUD none the less.

22 more...

A way of reading twitter posts without needing to go to twitter. Particularly useful since you now need an account to see twitter posts.

Nobody denies there are two armed forces in combat with each other. What people are objecting to is the lack of regard to anyone caught in the middle, especially from the IDF.

As for soldiers being taken as prisoners, it sounds completely normal in war. I've not looked at this footage as I've no desire to watch violent images. Maybe this treatment is brutal, but being captured by the enemy is rarely a fun affair.

2 more...

I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?

18 more...

No. No credit.

This is the old embrace and extend strategy. They know they are losing the argument, so they'll embrace it and redirect to a version they control. It's good for them, not the consumer.

In microelectonics, there's not really such a thing as an "off brand part". Nearly all the parts that matter in an iPhone are custom. You're not going to buy just any old camera module and shoehorn it in. It won't physically fit, and it likely won't support the right commands. If somebody makes one specific for the iPhone, well... Look at that... It meets the specification.

Even if it does become an issue because (for example) the optics aren't exactly the same and face ID doesn't work, would someone complain to Apple or the repair shop that didn't do an effective repair?

Really, because of the custom nature of most components, what Apple is trying to stop is the canibilisation of iPhones to fix other iPhones. That would give old broken iPhones value. Only Apple is allowed to exploit that value.

A lot of people vote far-right out of despair. A "things are shit and can't get any worse" mentality.

The best defence against the right is government that actually works for the people.

3 more...

Absolutely this. Microsoft is going headlong into the AI abyss. Google should be the company that calls it out and says "No, we value the correctness of our search results too much".

It would obviously be a bullshit statement at this point after a decade of adverts corrupting their value, but that's what they should be about.

1 more...

You are, if you're calling for Apple like features.

You might argue that "private cloud" is privacy preserving, but you can only implement that with the cash of Apple. I would also argue that anything leaving my machine, to a bunch of servers I don't control, without my knowledge is NOT preserving my privacy.

4 more...

(Stupid people + confidently wrong AI = bad decision making) is the danger. Always has been.

2 more...

Arabic has lots of dialects. English has lots of dialects.

If a British person wants to "bum a fag" they want to cheeky "borrow" a cigarette. If an American wants to "bum a fag" they are using offensive terms for homosexual sex.

Dialects matter.

Second diagram, yes absolutely.

Short lived (1-2 day) branches, and a strong CI systems to catch regressions.

Be warned, the strength in the CI lies in its capacity to detect when some functionality that previously worked doesn't work anymore. So, the flow must be green always, and it must evolve as the features evolve. Without good CI you're destined for failure.

...but you've got Microsoft writing the OS.

Power draw is not all hardware.

Everyone post-WW2: "Never again"

  • Some people: "Never again should that be inflicted on anyone"
  • Other people: "Never again should that be inflicted on the Jewish"
5 more...

They're reinventing fax-spam.

1 more...

That is actually pertinent information. If the supreme leader is seen as weak at 85, and the next two steps on the ladder are now vacant... Well let's just say that nature abhores a vacuum.

3 more...

Everything is contaminated with micro plastics.

Got it! Understood.

  1. What damage is it doing in these places?
  2. How do we mitigate that damage?

That's what papers should be focusing on at this point IMHO.

3 more...

He's not right. He's asking the BBC to forego it's neutral stance. That's not okay.

...I think this is a right move, as scalpers became a real plague during Covid.

Tesla have no right to sue somebody selling their own property. This is just another attack on the concept of personal ownership by corporations.

If the car is leased, fair enough, but the fact Musk thinks he can do this shows how all the power is with the wrong people.

I think people believe that the ARM ISA brings a power efficient design but what really made Apple able to sip power on the M1 was a decade of phone processor design experience and full control of the software stack.

4 more...

Sadly, pacifism only work if everybody agrees to it.

15 more...

Furthermore, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot.

The fact that this line is in the article just reminds me how dumb tech illiterate most people are.

2 more...

I think we've started to discover what the ???? steps before profit were.

The model was:

  • Start streaming service
  • ????
  • Profit

It's now:

  • Start streaming service
  • Subsidise it heavily creating premium content whilst undercutting competition.
  • keep doing it until competitors go broke
  • Raise prices to an actually sustainable level
  • Profit (although we've lost a ton of capital)

This is a form of market manipulation which is outright illegal in some countries (e.g. Australia) and can be illegal in the US and EU if it meets certain criteria. It falls under anti-trust and monopoly prevention laws.

Basically our regulators aren't doing their job well enough, but what's new?

They've got problems in their tests though. There are 5 packages in core that are "unreproducible" and one is the kernel. Pretty significant package, except it fails because of a timeout.

2 more...

So when is somebody going to sentence this shit weasel?