M277

Having been exposed to the internet at a very young age, I feel like an outsider in my own country and culture. There's just too much difference with others (hobbies, interests, way of thought... nearly everything), too much things I miss / don't (can't?) understand, and a lingering mental feeling that "I don't belong here". It's a really cold feeling that is always just there.

I was always lonely, but sometimes some people would be friendly towards me, and I'd feel sad... "Come play <some sport or a local game> with us," they'd say. "I would love to.... but I can't. I don't belong here," I'd think. Of course, I couldn't reply with that.

I don't really belong / resonate with foreign cultures either. The internet (at least the part I was on most of the time) is mostly Western, but there are many differences still.

My 'home' has become with individuals, instead. Some people really resonate with me and make me feel that I belong with them, that I am not a stranger, not an outsider. They are extremely rare, but they're here; parent and siblings, along with some very close friends. And I am honestly very thankful for their presence.

Communities like HN as well don't give me the "I don't belong here" feeling. I don't know why... maybe because I grew up with communities like this? (I grew up with the old forum boards of old. It's a shame that most are dead now.) Or maybe because these communities are mostly defined by their contributors, their users, and so I don't feel like a stranger? I am not sure, honestly.

I have been wanting to write about this for a while in full detail, but I haven't had the time unfortunately.

This is completely off topic, I am very sorry, but given your comment and your username -- are there any learning resources you would particularly recommend for graphics programming? I have collected a few already (however they are all beginner level), and was wondering if there are hidden gems I missed.

Ouch. My condolences.

Yeah, if things are that bad, it could be viable.

Civil war is another viable scenario. However, one should also assess the situation properly if his/her country is in civil war. If things go bad and you have to escape, "safe passage for x amount of gold I have on hand" is more guaranteed than "safe passage for x BTC I promise to pay".

How is it safe when it's so volatile and based on speculation?

As someone from a country which has had its currency's value slashed to half 5 years ago, I genuinely don't see how Bitcoin is safe at all. If anything, gold or real estate are safer.

Sure, if it is somehow guaranteed that I won't wake up tomorrow seeing 1 BTC = $30 000, I could see your argument. But is that guaranteed?

I would also like to add that the swings that BTC takes are unpredictable (at least for the common people who would benefit from it being a safe storage for their wealth).

Just a minor nitpick regarding your last paragraph, this is no longer the case. Intel is now significantly cheaper after they heavily cut prices across the board.

For instance, you can now get an i7-10700K (which is roughly equivalent in single thread and better in multi thread) for cheaper than a R5 5600X.

I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathize with your comment (indeed, I am suffering from it as well), however I disagree that it's an Islamic world issue. It's common in underdeveloped / developing countries, a large amount of which are Islamic countries.

As for why it happens or why it's common... there are plenty of reasons, really. (obviously, I will talk about my country only, and what I see) Personally, I believe that the most important one / the root cause is that the law isn't enforced, which erodes peoples' trust in it as well as people's respect, and you end up with people exploiting that (a vicious cycle, as you said). Not only that, but when the law is finally enforced, it's usually not enforced fairly[1].

If anyone is curious about Islam's stance, well, Islam explicitly says:

وَلاَ تَأْكُلُواْ أَمْوَالَكُم بَيْنَكُم بِالْبَاطِلِ وَتُدْلُواْ بِهَا إِلَى الْحُكَّامِ لِتَأْكُلُواْ فَرِيقًا مِّنْ أَمْوَالِ النَّاسِ بِالإِثْمِ وَأَنتُمْ تَعْلَمُونَ [البقرة:188].

Translation: "And do not consume one another's wealth unjustly or send it [in bribery] to the rulers in order that [they might aid] you [to] consume a portion of the wealth of the people in sin, while you know [it is unlawful]."

روى الإمام أحمد عن ثوبان قال رسول الله: لَعَنَ اللّه‏ُ الراشيَ والمُرتَشِيَ والرائشَ الذي يَمشِي بَينَهُما..

Translation: The Prophet (S) said, 'Allah's curse is on the briber, the bribed, and the agent between them.’

And there are more.

I do not blame you (nor anyone else) for the correlation, I just wanted to clarify.

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[1] This is off-topic, but there was a huge issue in Egypt with regards to people building apartment complexes and buildings illegally, through bribing the province officials. Well, recently,the government said that enough is enough and went to crack down on that. They placed huge fines on the illegal buildings (supposed to be paid by the builder in question / building owner, but he/she actually have no incentive to, so the people who paid were actually the building residents), and said that if the fines aren't paid, the buildings will be bulldozed (and indeed, some were).

They punished the people who bought residence in the illegal buildings (some of whom actually didn't know that it was illegal). But the governmental workers / officials who gave out the fake permits and took the bribes? Not a single one was punished.

As an Egyptian, my thought is that it's a conscience issue, and also a law-trust issue. People in Anglosphere countries respect the law better than here (and the law is also actually applied and enforced), while here people just don't care (and the law isn't applied in many cases). Some people actually boast that they're breaking the law :)

Good point, but wouldn't there have been more pressure on the OEMs to increase security patch support if this were a widespread issue? Because most do 2 - 3 years.

I keep hearing this argument but I don't understand it. What does not having security patches do?

I am using an HTC Desire 826 from 2016 running Android 6, while my father is using a Galaxy Note 3 Neo running Android 4.3.

I personally don't have much issues with regards to not having security patches.. the phone itself does most of what I want, although I am having issues with other things unrelated to security patches -- it's getting a bit sluggish, the 16GB storage does get annoying, and the battery barely lasts two hours of web browsing. Also, it no longer accepts SIM cards for whatever reason. But it's not a big deal to warrant spending money (I don't get called at all and I do have a dumb phone that I go out with for emergencies. Besides, I no longer get annoying messages and calls from my carrier)

Similarly, my father's is doing alright, and the issues he is facing are unrelated to security patches -- many apps don't support Android versions older than 6.. some of them are essential things like Google stuff. YouTube and Gmail for instance outright don't work, and Chrome occasionally brings up messages along the lines of "Please update your Chrome version". But nothing is caused by not having security patches.

What am I missing? This is a genuine question.

It's not just the fixed pricing, but everything is more expensive there. Much more. The poor part of the population couldn't even dream to live in the new capital.

There's a theory that the recent minimum wage increase for the government sector was actually because some government workers now have to live there, but they financially can't.

The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market with _very_ attractive pricing.

In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were available for the cheap in the second hand market. The problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying that, just bought used Pascal cards.

IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.

Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with a $500 RTX 2070)

These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.

++there was some software that allowed you to render on a GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully remember. These days, this functionality is actually integrated into Windows 10.

Yes, this was what immediately came to my mind as well.

For an interesting, albeit slightly unrelated read, see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art

>"Prior to 1984, these doodles also served a practical purpose. If a competitor produced a similar chip, and examination showed it contained the same doodles, then this was strong evidence that the design was copied (a copyright violation) and not independently derived."

Just a small correction, most of the AM4 motherboards released in 2016 and 2017 do _not_ run Zen 3. Only few vendors (I think ASRock is the only one?) added support for Zen 3 on B350 / X370 / A320. The rest only added support on B450 (2018) / X470 (2018) / B550 / X570 / A520. If you were one of the original Zen buyers in 2017, you are unfortunately limited to Zen 2 CPUs, unless if you had an ASRock motherboard.

Oh, yes, I understand now.

The original post was talking about changing surnames in general so I thought that it was criticising the norm, and my reply was in similar fashion - "why does the norm exist?"

Should have clarified, sorry. It [not changing names] really wouldn't work out well if it wasn't the norm in place as you say, there are plenty of issues that could happen.

What's wrong with the wife not changing her last name? Why does there have to be change?

Islam does it, and there are no issues at all.

Yeah, and how many citizens of these countries buy and use BTC? Particularly with how unstable it is compared to other assets like e.g. gold.

Mind you, I speak as someone who is a citizen in a country that experienced that. Not now, but back in 2016, our currency got halved. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody ever thought "I should have bought crypto."

When the 2017-2018 crypto rush happened, and people started mining ETH, well-off people* here got onto it and started mining ETH.... only to immediately sell it as they mined. Nobody held onto it.

*well-off because GPUs were absurdly expensive due to the inflation, and it only got worse when the shortages hit.

EDIT: I also want to add that very, very few people here in my country actually understand what bitcoin even is (or cryptocurrency or blockchain). The people that I have seen support mining here only really view it as a way to earn some money while doing nothing.

I don't know about that. Plenty of people are using Intel non-F CPUs which have iGPUs.

Honestly, the worrying part is that NVIDIA may block this. If I remember right, they did something similar back in 2017 with the P106 mining cards (GTX 1060 equivalent) when people bought them for cheap.

Mostly software subscriptions, actually.. things like PS Plus, etc. On consoles, you need to pay money (subscription) to be able to play multi-player for instance (whereas on PC it's free), and games in general are more expensive compared to PC (last time I checked).

Yes, but do they really start out like that, or is it a gradual descent? There's usually a catalyst that starts it in kids. Parents demanding success at all cost / rampant cheating around them (or just being surrounded by ruthless kids) / a very competitive rat race that turns out to be pretty dirty / the parents themselves are without conscience / etc.

Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience.

Conscience doesn't really die overnight (and this is from my experience of living in a corrupt society), it's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. The beginning is "Come on, everyone is doing it" and you can guess the end.

Thank you very much for your reply.

Finding a mentor is very difficult for me unfortunately (from a third world country, and not particularly rich). I will check out the books and research if there are any obsoleted / old parts. Thanks for the heads-up on SystemVerilog.

Thanks again :)

Hey there, sorry for going off topic, but as a FPGA designer, are there any learning resources you would particularly recommend for someone starting with FPGAs by themselves? With the goal of learning more about computer architecture and the way CPUs work on a lower level.

It does look like an interesting read. Thank you :)

Off-topic, very sorry:

Are there any resources you particularly recommend if I wanted to learn more about quantum computing and how quantum computers work on the hardware level?

It was helpful, thank you :)

I never really tried mixing things up before. In hindsight, I really should have because routine does bore me a lot.

Getting out of my comfort zone is what I have been doing this semester, and it's going well, I'd say.. haven't really made any friends (like you, I prefer fewer, closer and deeper friendships), but I have been having fun and gained some valuable experiences, so I guess it balances out.

Thanks a million! :)

Thank you so much, truly. This is all really helpful. r/ADHD and your comments do resonate a lot with me, but I haven't checked out "Driven to Distraction" nor How to ADHD. Will check them out and see how things go, then go seek diagnosis.

>Maybe it was the long bicycle rides where I can peacefully wonder about what I want to focus on today, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, I have recently picked up the habit of walking daily for 30 - 60 minutes, but at the end of the day. It's quite refreshing and helpful, not to mention the physical exercise aspect. It feels good to think on the day's decisions / what happened, and think if what I am doing is what I really want or not.

>[...] by now I've seen firsthand how little practical relevance most school and university lectures had.

Yeah, I have heard this a lot. My problem lies in GPAs being used as filters, both for job applications and scholarships. It just hurts to think of the possibility that I could be passed over, not because of my actual skillset or level, but due to exam performance.

Does the diagnosis (and the medication) at least help with balancing things a bit?

I still haven't actually got diagnosed. It's only recently that I started suspecting I may have some form of ADHD.

Yeah, this really resonates with me. I am starting to feel it's a burden, though, because I really feel that I have no life.

I can't do multiple things... either focus on studying and studying alone (and get above average grades).. but basically end up like I am now -- friendless, with boring hobbies and interests and very lonely. Or focus on things that fill my life, and catastrophically mess up my education. And for the discipline I want to work in, I really need good grades (but also good social skills).

I also want to add that despite studying nearly 24/7, and fully understanding every single concept (and much more!), I still manage to mess up in exams due to the lack of concentration (I.e. accidentally saw that plus as a minus, didn't see that term, etc. Dumb things like that). (I need time to hyperfocus, and the exam durations don't permit this)

I am still young, so this really worries me. I feel that I have basically wasted my teenage-hood, childhood, and now on the path of wasting my youth as well.