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I think the trouble with application processors is you ought to have lower prices and margins compared to desktops and servers, so even if they do great there it's not that great financially. Intel is a relatively high margin business so it either needs to find markets where that works, or grow volume very drastically, which is hard given their already very high volumes, or shrink.

The religious version in fact seems more restrained in its promises, with the "arrested" bit at the end. (Not unexpectedly BTW; IMO comparing any such pitch to a religion is usually a compliment to the pitch, as religions of today evolved over many centuries and so are better debugged than many an age-of-reason attempt at scientific-sounding wisdom. And personally I'm deeply not religious, but still.)

I did read that rats run faster towards a reward than they run from a punishment etc., so yeah, scarcity vs abundance, sure, but if someone is paid to coach me when I have a deadline to meet, I'll show them some abundance.

Drawing programs such as Photoshop and Corel Painter can do it (in fact they tilt the window you paint into while keeping menus etc. straight which is what one wants them to do.) I guess it's a bit harder to do in one's program than it ought to be though, especially with the stellar hardware support provided by the cheapest integrated GPU.

If you seriously believe this moderator was biased in his examples because that's his "writing style" but that he wasn't equally biased in his moderation, fine (I'd bet money on you being wrong if I could.) And I don't think I was artificially polarizing this discussion, I think you were, which is exactly the kind of disagreement illustrating the need for moderate moderators who wouldn't delete either comment, which was my only point all along (and apparently we're mostly agreeing there.)

I dunno, you have to look at the cost side of these things and I'm not qualified in this instance. AFAIK India still protects its handloom manufacturers which IMO is madness cost-wise, but of course there's merit into looking at it on a case by case basis. I think the trouble with protectionism is you might end up subsidizing an inefficient domestic industry indefinitely; and I don't think "reinsurance" is a valid argument most of the time (there's usually enough sellers whom you can buy from even when things are very sour, and not having lost money on inefficient domestic production will keep you rich enough to afford it when things go sour), the valid argument IMO is you want to have a Korean auto company and you doubt that the first few cars it'll make will be able to compete with imported cars so you protect it. But what made this work great in Korea but not so great in India (which AFAIK produced pretty bad cars for internal market under similar protections for many decades) I'm not quite sure.

Similar dynamics in what way? Certainly there was no nominal wealth inequality in the USSR (there were of course people with wads of illegally obtained cash, and there were classes of people with access to a lot of things [which money couldn't legally buy] that the majority could not access, but officially wealth and income were very similar for everyone, in particular you couldn't legally own most sorts of assets traditionally held by investors, including real estate. So I wonder what sort of inequality correlated with life expectancy inequality in the USSR in the late 60s.)

You need to be a pretty big country with a wide variety of natural resources to be truly independent (for instance, your "independent" agriculture is only independent if you have domestically produced fuel, fertilizer and machinery, etc. etc.) In today's world I think it's pretty tough (how many countries have their own chip fabs and how many don't? Chips go into a whole lot of products indirectly, etc.)

Of course having to protect this very wide range of domestic industries to maintain true independence will result in a huge loss of economic efficiency; so even if it is done right (without an "oops, we forgot the bit about the fertilizer" issue), not only do you have to be a rather large country with a lot of resources, you also have to accept a significantly lower standard of living and a degree of backwardness.

How much it helps I'm not sure; Britain for instance managed to feed itself during WWII even though it relied on its navy for food shipments and of course its cargo ships were constantly attacked. Certainly it did better than it would without a strong navy but with an independent domestic agriculture, since it would have been invaded.

On the other hand, presumably importing vitally important things without exporting vitally important things in return might put you in a bad bargaining position in international politics in times of peace, and maybe then domestic industries making sure that you can survive without imports are helpful; though even that doesn't seem like a huge problem unless you're importing from a cartel (and even very powerful cartels sometimes break down, the way OPEC did recently.)

As to agriculture - I sincerely think it's protected because producers simply bribe the people in the government; there was even research that the more concentrated and bigger ag producers are in a country, the more protected they are (even though a lot of the nominal arguments for protection are much stronger with many small producers than with few large ones typically employing fewer people), though I didn't look deeply into it and perhaps the researcher was biased by expecting this conclusion.

Actually it's 3 examples, which I think is enough to show a bias towards one of two sides (c'mon, nobody chooses one side out of two 3 times in a row accidentally, and if he chose a side with equal probability for each example - yeah right - the result we got is a 1 in 8 event, so not a great support for that hypothesis), and as to "familiar to his target audience" - again, come on, his target audience will be familiar with their fellow extremists' arguments just as much as it will be familiar with the other side's extremists.

As to what I think of my comment - I think it shouldn't be removed by a forum moderator, nor should your (IMO tremendously biased) comment be removed by a moderator, and neither comment constitutes "trolling" or "comment thread poison." A moderator removing either and doing similar things consistently is creating a forum I would not like to participate in either as a reader or a commenter.

Move - yes, but does this stop the government from collecting the capital gains tax? I think not.

So if you make American companies less profitable through some regulations, capital will move elsewhere, but if you raise the capital gains tax, I'm not sure it will.

Probably "yes" in the sense that it's those websites where they're being labeled "comment-thread poison", probably "no" in the sense that they certainly do comment on left-wing websites, they just don't ever "derail the discussion" in the eyes of this moderator.

I don't really have an opinion on what the optimal capital gain tax rate is, but wrt your specific point of capital being mobile in the sense of being able to evade a higher tax rate (as opposed to being mobile in the sense of being able to choose what to invest in) - I'm not sure it is except for the few very, very rich people. If an American divests from US stocks and reinvests the capital in European or Asian stocks, AFAIK they still have to pay taxes for their capital gains, and Americans specifically even have to pay capital gain taxes if they move elsewhere, unless they renounce their citizenship. Certainly pension funds managing the capital of millions of Americans will pay a higher capital gain tax regardless of where they invest the capital and millions of Americans will not emigrate as a result. As to corporations, the US is making it tougher to escape its unusually high tax rate on profits by targeting "inversions" right now.

So while I'd guess that higher taxes will hurt growth at some point, I'm not sure that they're that easy to escape; perhaps I'm missing some obvious loopholes.

To elaborate on your point - from the article:

"They are comment-thread poison – men’s rights activists who act as if articles about women’s issues are their gender’s single biggest problem, climate change deniers who will drag any conversation about energy policy into murky pseudo-science, and borderline racists for whom there is no issue that cannot be pinned on immigration (UK) or black people (US)."

...incidentally these are all people strongly opposing (perhaps to an extreme) some political positions of The Guardian. Not a single example of people strongly supporting (perhaps to an extreme) some political positions of The Guardian - these could never become "comment-thread poison."

I think the real extreme is a guy flip flops on an issue and someone assumes it's all sincere. Much more extreme than arguing which was the time when he wasn't. I guess I'm jealous as I never found a politician or a movement I liked enough to see no fault in them, in fact I've never even got to vote for someone who didn't make me a bit sick, nor heard about a politician in any of the countries far, far away who'd give me such an opportunity as a voter had I been a citizen there.

Even DRAM will be slowest on a random read/write 50% test (it has read-to-write and write-to-read penalties; admittedly these will be dwarfed by precharge/activate penalties, but still, mixing reads and writes will make things worse.)

You mean he was honest before he was ever elected president and needed votes, and now that he can no longer be elected and in this sense has nothing to lose, came the dishonesty? Is it not imaginable that, being a canny politician, he was dishonest then and is more honest now?

Well, either the Obama administration is composed of puppets of anti-gay fundamentalists (puppets who lit the White House in rainbow colors upon the SCOTUS deciding that gay marriage bans were unconstitutional), or perhaps their relationship with Saudi Arabia is motivated by reasons other than supposedly shared religious fundamentalism, and in fact religious fundamentalism has nothing to do with this.

(Incidentally, the majority of wars, adjusted by the number of victims, as well as the majority of repressive actions against citizens by their own states throughout the last century were initiated by people whom you could more accurately describe as anti-religious fundamentalists than religious fundamentalists. It could be that religious fundamentalism, bad as it is, is not necessarily the main theme in every bad event in history, but just one of the many variations on the main theme.)

Erm... you mean anti-gay fundamentalists like Obama? (From the article: "The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage... the administration has supported Saudi Arabia on other fronts, including providing the country with targeting intelligence and logistical support for its war in Yemen.")

Firstly, it doesn't even need to have anything to do with "ethics", it's just ridiculous to argue that "lions eat their prey alive, hence I find it fine to do so." Lions will lick their balls in the presence of, well, pretty much any other organism. Do you suggest that we do the same?

I'm not saying that people are "inherently more moral" than animals, or "far superior", I'm saying that they're inherently people while animals inherently aren't people. A lion will never compare its own behavior to the behavior of a toad or an elephant or a human in order to judge its propriety, but you do this sort of thing, and you doing so is inherently human. A lion doesn't argue that it's superior to its prey and hence it's OK to eat it alive, but you do make this argument (or a different argument, the point is you're arguing about this on the Internet) and this is inherently a human thing.

You being a human makes it possible for me to ask you, why would you want to eat an animal alive, why not kill it first? What's in it for you? It's obviously painful for the animal and the vast majority of humans derive a certain degree of displeasure from observing the suffering of living organisms that they don't have a particular reason to harm. Perhaps the desire for philosophical consistency is the inherently human trait causing you to argue in favor of eating animals alive ("since most of us would kill an animal to save a human's life, it must also be OK to cause animals suffering for a near-zero gain or even just to derive pleasure from it, otherwise it's a slippery slope at the end of which we grant animals voting rights")?

With Python, numpy for instance will use multiple threads under the hood, even though the calling Python code might be single-threaded, and numpy's execution is completely unaffected by the GIL. Incidentally, to get Python code to run really fast, you'll have to offload most of the heavy lifting into libraries in any case. But it's still a Python program - in that most of the source lines, especially most of the source lines unique to the program as opposed to library code, will be still in Python, and in that in some cases you couldn't have written the program in a "more performant" language getting either the performance or the flexibility (Go for instance doesn't have operator overloading nor can it be used to implement linear algebra as efficiently as C/assembly; so a pure Go program doing linear algebra will be both slower and uglier than a Python program using numpy. A Go program using a C/assembly library will be very marginally faster than said numpy program, and just as ugly as the pure Go program.)

Also, in my understanding TFA applies to multiple processes just as much as multiple threads.

I believe that people are not animals (and that computers are not people), both may be controversial beliefs for some but are rather widely shared.

In particular, nothing constitutes an ethical problem for animals, computers, plants, and other non-human entities, while some things are unethical for people.

Well, I'm certainly against eating all animals alive. Not a complicated issue.

It's human motivations which are not necessarily "well attached" to human motivations, to the extent that one human wants to benefit at the expense of another (which indeed works increasingly badly over time - people clubbing each other to death is one thing and humans throwing nuclear weapons at each other is another thing; but this has nothing to do with AI or superintelligence and what-not, and everything to do with basic human selfishness powered by increasingly better technology. In this sense there's no difference between corporations which are nominally supposed to operate within the law but in practice do everything to bend and change laws to their benefit, governments which are nominally supposed to operate in the interest of the people but in practice are run by people operating in their own interest, or machines programmed to profit at someone's expense, the root cause is always people fighting people in the hope to gain something, and people fight because they do. When a machine evolves with no human oversight and causes some damage that'll be a sort of AI apocalypse - this is IMO the existential threat number 1000000 on humanity's list.)

I got that "force multiplier" had to do with productivity, but I didn't get how compensation is supposed to be set as a function of productivity (as opposed to supply and demand, and/or arbitrary rules), or even why it should be. Certainly (and thankfully, for those of us buying their food) a combine harvester driver does not get paid 100x the compensation of a farmer who harvested before combine harvesters were invented (of course the driver neither invented nor manufactured the combine harvester; well, a programmer neither invented nor made computers - or compilers, or most of the ideas they apply.)

I kind of believe, I think not controversially, that compensation results from supply, demand, and a bunch of more or less arbitrary rules which either affect supply & demand or directly affect the price (price controls, visa regimes, etc.) Productivity (value created) sets an upper bound for compensation (well, actually, it doesn't, perceived productivity does; and even that isn't true - building a barely working website for the government for several hundreds of millions of dollars is one of the countless counter-examples), but productivity certainly does not set a lower bound for compensation - competition does. How much labor you save is beside the point.

Erm... How many people are fed by a combine harvester driver? How many babies and mothers are saved by the staff of a modern hospital, who drastically lower child mortality? If 10 future programmers are delivered by a single nurse, should she be paid 10x what a programmer makes?

(Supply and demand I get, "force multiplier" I don't get.)

We're lucky that those evil businessmen line up to fill the pockets of the various nice politicians with tens of millions of dollars of, ahem, speaking fees and what-not - the politicians surely deserve it, with their "tough job" and all. As to favors given to businessmen in return for the money at taxpayers' expense - we can't really blame politicians for that, since being the nice people that they are, they just act on their nature of doing good!

Displacing CPUs is not the issue (the CPU occupies less than half the area of a modern application processor chip for instance), the problem is displacing CMOS. I don't know much about the alternatives, but I trust Colwell's skepticism.

Erm... Not necessarily. The only way to travel quickly between 2 cities is a direct flight, but there isn't a direct flight between any 2 cities, because the cost of having such a flight didn't yet drop to the point where it's economical. So it will be with many types of custom hw.

There's a limit to what you can do without "simple" scaling, meaning, without making cheaper, faster, smaller individual gates. That is, an architecture optimized for a given problem domain will give you maybe 1000x efficiency improvement over a more general architecture, but that's it. (Typically it will be <1000x, but let's say you're lucky; the point is, that's your last 1000x, and then you'll see no improvements, ever.)

So if Moore's law is indeed over, progress will be slow, domain-specific, and decelerating due to diminishing returns (specializing for a problem domain is worth it as long as that domain is not too narrow but at some point it's too narrow to justify the investment into building specialized hardware for it; you'll be better off using something less specialized. GPGPU, which does not provide amazing performance in an absolute sense, but does beat CPUs on a large range of problems, is an example to this - any accelerator more efficient than GPGPU needs to be justifiable in the sense that GPGPU is already there wherever there's a need for GPU doing graphics, which is where GPUs do provide amazing performance in an absolute sense [you can totally beat GPGPU with more specialized hardware on most benchmarks, while you can't beat GPUs in graphics.])

I'm a chip & accelerator architect, so it's not like I'm particularly happy about this, I think I'm realistic though. A higher-caliber architect saying the same pessimistic thing is Bob Colwell.

The one nice thing about really stopping at some manufacturing technology and not being able to improve any further is that the cost of using this technology will likely continue dropping for some years. Only when it reaches the bottom will progress have truly stopped.

I dunno, I'm Jewish and I wouldn't mind this particular remark, and a sister comment claimed it seemed typically Chinese just as much and claimed to be Chinese themselves.

One point here is that it's seemingly OK if it's not derogatory plus one is talking about one's own group. Another point is there's a continuum between nationality and culture, and it ought to be OK to point out that something is specific to a culture, and American specifically is very likely to be used to label a culture and not the people as in a bunch of guys and gals with specific genes. This is not to say that one ought to agree with grandparent's views on American culture, just that those views probably aren't racist.

BTW I personally try not to say this sort of thing since people might be offended all too easily, so I guess I agree with you in that way.

I've already seen such an article, but I still can't imagine hordes of protesters fighting for the privilege to invest in unicorns, especially now that much of the bubble has popped.