stardreamer

joined 1 year ago
[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It's relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The argument is that processing data physically "near" where the data is stored (also known as NDP, near data processing, unlike traditional architecture designs, where data is stored off-chip) is more power efficient and lower latency for a variety of reasons (interconnect complexity, pin density, lane charge rate, etc). Someone came up with a design that can do complex computations much faster than before using NDP.

Personally, I'd say traditional Computer Architecture is not going anywhere for two reasons: first, these esoteric new architecture ideas such as NDP, SIMD (probably not esoteric anymore. GPUs and vector instructions both do this), In-network processing (where your network interface does compute) are notoriously hard to work with. It takes CS MS levels of understanding of the architecture to write a program in the P4 language (which doesn't allow loops, recursion, etc). No matter how fast your fancy new architecture is, it's worthless if most programmers on the job market won't be able to work with it. Second, there're too many foundational tools and applications that rely on traditional computer architecture. Nobody is going to port their 30-year-old stable MPI program to a new architecture every 3 years. It's just way too costly. People want to buy new hardware, install it, compile existing code, and see big numbers go up (or down, depending on which numbers)

I would say the future is where you have a mostly Von Newman machine with some of these fancy new toys (GPUs, Memory DIMMs with integrated co-processors, SmartNICs) as dedicated accelerators. Existing application code probably will not be modified. However, the underlying libraries will be able to detect these accelerators (e.g. GPUs, DMA engines, etc) and offload supported computations to them automatically to save CPU cycles and power. Think your standard memcpy() running on a dedicated data mover on the memory DIMM if your computer supports it. This way, your standard 9to5 programmer can still work like they used to and leave the fancy performance optimization stuff to a few experts.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So let me get this straight, you want other people to work on a project that you yourself think is a hassle to maintain for free while also expecting the same level of professionalism of a 9to5 job?

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is solving a problem we DO have, albeit in a different way. Email is ancient, the protocol allows you to self identify as whoever you want. Let's say I send an email from the underworld (server ip address) claiming I'm Napoleon@france (user@domain), the only reason my email is rejected is because the recipient knows Napoleon resides on the server France, not underworld. This validation is mostly done via tricky DNS hacks and a huge part of it is built on top of Google's infrastructure. If for some reason Google decides I'm not trustworthy, then it doesn't matter if I'm actually sending Napoleon's mail from France, it's gonna be recognized as spam on most servers regardless.

A decentralized chain of trust could potentially replace Google + all these DNS hacks we have in place. No central authority gets to control who is legitimate or not. Of all the bs use cases of block chain I think this one doesn't seem that bad. It's building a decentralized chain of trust for an existing decentralized system (email), which is exactly what "block chain" was originally designed for.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Stick to a small instance with a small witchy vibe. You can get by by looking at local + subbing to only topics that you're interested in.

Personally I find my current instance + some of the literature instances (literature.cafe) very comfy. I blocked out 196, but that was only because it was big enough that it was drowning out all other discussions.Then I join in on some niche lemmy.world tech topics from time to time.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a "cheaper" (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn't tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a "cheaper" machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.

That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I'm happy to report I've been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don't plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it's not stupid.

My T480 is my favorite laptop. But this is NOT one of its use cases.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Do not get a Thinkpad if you're using it for graphic design. The screen color calibration is terrible (even when compared to low end devices)

Last I checked I think some of the Dell laptops have a decent screen (XPS, latitude lines). But they tend to be more on the pricer side.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This person must be fun at parties.

Also, does nobody reach out to people privately to resolve conflicts these days? Even a simple "Hi, I saw my post was removed. Could you please clarify why it doesn't fall under the news category" would do (Not "I object. I'm right and you're wrong" though). There are more efficient ways to clear disagreements without immediately making a fool of yourself in public.

Oh wow. It supports Kobos as well. Gonna have to check this out. Thanks.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What's not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that's on them and not apple). I've been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing, small code demos, and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.

Is it Apple's fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because anyone who works at the assembly level tends to think that the x86_64 ISA is garbage.

To be fair, aarch64 is also garbage. But it's less smelly garbage.

That being said, I'm not expecting any of these CPUs to be hanging in the Sistine Chapel. So whatever works, I guess.

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