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beefokon Roosevelt Statue Removed from Natural-History Museum for Glorifying Colonialism

Hey sorry, I'm late to the game -- I didn't realize you responded. I do understand your view completely, and maybe I came in reactionary. Honestly I'd have to continue thinking about it to provide any sort of meaningful answer -- but I will definitely continue to consider it in any thoughts or comments I make in the future, haha.

beefokon Roosevelt Statue Removed from Natural-History Museum for Glorifying Colonialism

The comparison is not even remotely equivalent.

The statue hasn't been destroyed, it was moved to a different location. Islamic destruction of cultural artifacts for 'blasphemy' is a completely different reasoning because it disregards the value of cultural significance and instead creates an artificial 'metaphysical' reason to destroy something.

If for some reason you think we need a statue around that shows our 'mastery' over the natives and people we stole from their native lands to do work for free, then you are butt-hurt for the worst possible reason and only show your true color.

And if you think we need to teach children to be tolerant of slavery, then you are absolutely wrong for two reasons.

(PS: I think Teddy Roosevelt was a pretty cool guy and wasn't a racist beyond the norms of the time, so it's more a problem of what the statue represents at face value)

beefokon My Bose QC-35 II headphones burst into flames and left me with chemical burns

https://californianewstimes.com/sleeping-couple-wake-to-find...

I worry about this too. Cripes!

beefokon NASA returns Hubble to full science operations

cough Factorio cough :)

beefokon Verilog Simulation with Verilator and SDL

I didn't mean open source, no, and it looks like the free version of yosys has limited support of systemverilog.

What I meant were the free toolchains provided by all of the FPGA vendors. They typically support SystemVerilog in synthesis and modelsim as far as I have seen.

beefokon Verilog Simulation with Verilator and SDL

Hm, every vendor with free tools (Xilinx/Altera/Lattice/Microsemi etc), seem to be fine with it, along with the usual vendor-specific Modelsim. In fact, most "verilog" synthesis tools actually synthesize SystemVerilog. Out of curiosity what tool are you referring to?

Thanks!

beefokon Verilog Simulation with Verilator and SDL

I come from a VHDL background (the industry I work in is purely VHDL), but recently I've been enjoying Systemverilog in my personal projects and it fixes a lot of these issues!

You can even do:

  typedef enum bit[1:0] {

    my_one, my_two, my_three, my_four

  } my_enum;

  typedef struct packed {

    my_enum b,

    bit [3:0] x

  } my_struct

  my_struct.b <= my_three;

etc...

It's been a nice path since I last dealt with Verilog. The concept of interfaces makes struct/vector input/output even nicer.

beefokon Scientists discover a highly potent antibody against SARS-CoV-2

Personally I'd be worrying about the negative long-term effects of actually contracting COVID-19 [1] [2].

In any case, you're the one making a claim here: can you show the benefits of natural immunity? Can you show the risk vs reward of catching COVID-19, potentially spreading it to thousands, and getting natural immunity rather than just getting a vaccine? Bringing money into it just colors your argument poorly. It's not like getting the vaccine costs you any money personally.

Vaccines seem to provide better immunity than previously being infected [3]. In fact, a lot of research shows that getting a vaccine after being infected actually improves your protection against reinfection [4].

Would you argue in good faith this way about any other vaccine? Measles? Mumps? Anthrax? Ebola?

[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

[4] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211010/Research-finds-di...

beefokon Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong, according to leaked memo

Sometimes secrets imply protecting IP and nothing nefarious.

beefokon The Matrix Resurrections – Official Trailer

Could I please just get a full movie of The Second Renaissance? :)

beefokon Computer Engineering for Babies Book

I guess you need to define what a computer engineer is. To me, (as a computer engineer,) logic gates are a critical portion of my work. I would consider this a classical starting path towards what encompasses the discipline.

Of course, software is part of the degree as well, but for most computer engineers, that means bare-metal/RTOS embedded programming rather than higher level software engineering. In my opinion, this is a neat start to the process and encourages learning concepts of how digital electronics work.

Whether babies can grasp these concepts is up for debate. :)

beefokon Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

Sorry I never responded to this, yes it's absolutely possible. I think things are changing and a lot of companies will pay for your degree. Typically you can also negotiate it in a job interview. Usually it does involve keeping good grades in school (B or above), so yeah, that happens. :)

I ended up leaving the job and having to pay over $7k in classes, but the company I moved to had an even better deal and paid for my entire degree with no qualms. It's a lot of work and stress, but it was worth it. :)

If a company is going to help you get a master's degree, they should understand that they can't push you too hard, considering the degree is a job in itself!

beefokon Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

My college mentor always said, "do not pay for a Master's degree, find a company who will pay for it."

Best damn advice I've ever gotten!

beefokon [dead]

They weren't *all riots, for the most part they were peaceful non-violent protests. Your view of reality is through an obvious lens of propaganda if you think protests in Seattle about racial violence vs. attacking the US Capitol to stop an election is even remotely equivalent. You should be ashamed.

beefokon Developing the first ICs to orbit Earth

The ESA and NASA and the like are also using LEON [1] for a lot of their work these days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON

beefokon Steve Wozniak speaks on Right to Repair [video]

This is kind of off topic, but, in my mind, 'right to repair' has more to do with combatting throw-away consumerism versus quality products. Certain appliances could be made much better over having to buy 10 annoying dryers over the course of your lifetime (or whatever product becomes harder to DIY repair.) The amount of waste produced every time someone buys the next generation just because something broke outpaces the ability to recycle/repair, hell even lightbulbs [1]. There's also market value in making things intentionally obsolescent after a small amount of time. For instance, Apple purposefully slowing down an iPhone when there's a new model [2].

I'm not 'anti-consumerist', I'm just aware that we've built a society around throwing things away way before their expected physical lifetime of use.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635

beefokon Do we believe in UFOs? that's the wrong question

While there may always be unexplained phenomenon, it's hard to ascertain how long UAV/Quadcopter technology has existed. Perhaps the battery tech hasn't been here, but who's to say nuclear reactors aren't in play. People describe these things as big silent objects hovering. You have to wonder if nuclear engines haven't been a thing.

To go from 'unidentified flying object' to sentience or some sort of being instead of just "some weird phenomenon" is the hardest point to make with people I talk to. It's frustrating.

beefokon Irreversible warming tipping point may have been triggered: Arctic mission chief

Don't forget this happy little Earth hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater

edit: upon further investigation, maybe it's not much worse than a bunch of cows farting..

beefokon Compiler Class

I'm looking at this one for a CPU design I've been working on. :)

https://github.com/jserv/shecc They just released it!

beefokon LZ4 – Extremely fast compression

I've been hunting for a good decompressor to use in a low ram microcontroller, for instance, an ARM Cortex M0. I've read an article [1] on LZ4 decompression on the Cortex, but I couldn't understand what kind of memory requirements are needed.

I've yet to really understand what kind of footprint LZ4 uses, and if it's dependent on dictionary size used to compress. What if I have, say, 4KB that I could use to store in-place decompression. Is that related to the compression ratio?

[1] https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b...

beefokon New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

This book goes into some great detail about this. :) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZLS3TU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... I will always recommend it!

beefokon DOSBox-X: Free, cross-platform and complete DOS, Windows 3.x and 9x emulation

At the very least, there's also the Definitive edition which plays great in Win 10. I've enjoyed playing that game again.

beefokon The Genius of RISC-V Microprocessors

Originally MIPS (or DLX) was the dominant architecture used for teaching computer architecture because the standard Computer Architecture textbook (by one of the main designers of MIPS, David Patterson [1] along with John L. Hennessy [2]) was used in most universities [3]. These two authors were basically the university-lead designers of the RISC philosophy. Patterson's team designed the RISC-I and RISC-II processors (Berkeley RISC [4]). Hennessy and his team designed the MIPS processors (Stanford MIPS [5]). This culmination eventually begot the RISC-V. So yeah, the RISC-V is now the dominant architecture used for teaching computer architecture as they now use RISC-V to teach computer architecture with their latest book edition [6]. Also for more information on that, read [7].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Patterson_(computer_scie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Jo...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_RISC

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_MIPS

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-RISC-V-A...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#History

beefokon Catacomb Games: Play the series that pioneered the first-person shooter genre

I'd say that's more of a Dungeon Master/Ultima style system, not 2.5D raycasting [0].

I would argue that Midi Maze for Atari ST was more of a pioneer in 1987 [1]. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting#Ray_casting_in_ear... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hSoy1S43dw

beefokon Compiling to Assembly from Scratch: the book, released

Woo! Congratulations! I have really been enjoying integrating/applying what I have been learning in this book. I don't have anything to show, but it's been great to play with. Thank you for your tireless efforts, Vlad! :)

beefokon Ultra Safe Nuclear

With the size constraint of that reactor (in volume), what's to say it would be used for the public? It could instead be the source of energy for a factory, or a data center for instance. I don't think we have to keep thinking about public use for these at all.

beefokon Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t

Typically fabless CPU/MCU companies design and implement netlists to these CPU designs. It includes all of the logic to implement the CPU. This netlist/VHDL/Verilog design is the protected IP they sell, as well as the rights to re-use, etc.

The IP itself can be placed into semiconductor fabric and combined with many other parts such as peripherals, flash memory, sram, etc.

beefokon The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs

I feel you completely. The Vivado IDE/toolchain is absolutely atrocious and the designers should be shamed for the horrifying bloatware they push as the STANDARD. Sometimes I have better luck doing everything in tcl/commandline there.

beefokon California's new lockdown could be brutal for the economy

That's the point buddy. They will now be irrecoverably overwhelmed. Every portion of the infrastructure is going to be overwhelmed.

beefokon California's new lockdown could be brutal for the economy

It appears that you don't understand exponential growth. What just began in the USA is an all-but-reversible process now. This isn't just about death count, it's about a complete disablement of any sort of economy or infrastructure. We're basically fucked now.

Re-read your comment in like, a few months. I'd prefer not being prescient here.