2,896 karma · joined April 8, 2021
https://dennisforbes.ca/articles/understanding-floating-poin...
At the time it was to educate a group I was working with about why their concern that "every number in JavaScript is a double" doesn't mean that 1 is actually 1.000000001 (e.g. everyone knows that floating point numbers are potentially approximations, so there is a widespread belief that every integer so represented is the same).
Originally the certificates were simple "yeah, they are vaccinated" PDFs that people would alter, which was a pretty low bar.
In discussions like this I think we really need to frame this in the proper context. We're talking about a certificate saying that you did something that you could do for free, which has significant personal benefits, and even greater social benefits, and that a large majority of the public is entirely behind. Making a fake vaccination certificate is like making a fake Grade school graduation certificate -- if someone is at that point in their life, something has gone seriously wrong.
The demand for certificates was just trying to entice the small percentage of holdouts, and of those surely there will be some who will go to great lengths, including committing pretty significant crimes, to avoid it. That pathology can't be fixed easily.
nvidia is currently selling very low power control boards for robotics, computer vision, drones, cars, etc, built on 12nm. There simply was no compelling reason for them to have a higher BoM to go smaller, and they had proven existing designs. There is a world of excess 10nm fab capacity, and you can sign up for 7nm all day long. Nope. Because what random blowhards say on HN has little correlation with fact.
Don't manufacture arguments and then soundly beat them down. They didn't prioritize the new process so they ended up at the back of the line. They made a choice (to virtually no market detriment, and improving their financials in the process). As mentioned, both companies often run on older processes because power simply didn't matter, and wafer yield just mattered more. nvidia often has monster chips because...eh. If your GPU or giant AMD processor uses 300W, eh, that's life.
This may come as a shock to some, but despite all of the nonsensical rhetoric posted on HN (by Apple naysayers who have to dismiss anything Apple does with One-Simple-Trick nonsense that has zero association with reality -- I recall when it was the magical "big cache", as if Apple was sneaky having big caches, cheating the system), process improvements are not as big as they are held on here. They are of course a benefit, but a process improvement yields power or performance or density benefits (yup, even that last one is conditional on other factors), but the fiction spinners declare that no really it's everything all at once. It doesn't work like that. So they opted not to prioritize it.
Yet read your other posts and not only would AMD and nvidia be world's better than Apple in every dimension (see above about the Apple naysayers and their ignorance), but also they couldn't afford to because I guess the $1500 GPUs and $5000 CPUs just can't afford the big bucks Apple can spend making a smartphone CPU (where apparently they're outbidding everyone on every component, yet also simultaneously having by far the highest profit margin in the industry...my normal brain cannot even comprehend the lengths of how ludicrous and contradictory this nonsense is). Oh, and HiSilicon making chips for discount, very low end smartphones also apparently has more money to blow on this.
"The issue is that we're in a market where Apple can afford to pay suppliers so much that other companies literally cannot afford to compete"
So the bill of materials for Apple products must be enormous, right? Oh wait, they're absolutely rolling in profit, with some of the highest profit margins in the business. No, it isn't that whatsoever. Absolutely nothing indicates that Apple used its "warchest", or that it is paying a penny more than anyone else. Can you point out a single authoritative source claiming that? Because actual economics say no, that's utter nonsense.
But sure, Apple is "slowing down technological advancement" in the same post where you declare that they're paying more for that technological advancement. The desperate lengths this rhetoric has to go, with laughable self-contradiction, is embarrassing.
Reality: Apple had designs ready and committed to production. Indeed, the first 5nm production was Apple chips, and HiSilicon. Yes, HiSilicon with stock ARM cores somehow managed what AMD and nvidia (who are barely even Apple "competitors") couldn't.
"They are using their warchest to ensure their competitors do not have access to high quality processes."
Again, nvidia and AMD both tend to hang two processes behind (making their chips cheaper, higher yield, and because they have a slow design iteration for new processes), but let's pretend that they were really trying for the newest process (you know, the one that HiSilicon managed to get). Apple's evil here is apparently simply making products. Because you know that Apple isn't just reserving unused capacity -- they are literally making A15s and M1s and soon 5G models in the hundreds of millions. It's pretty amazing that simply making your products is now nefariously blocking competitors (if you're ignorant enough of actual fact to think that was actually happening).
"somehow delay their competitors from launching new and better chips"
Both AMD and nvidia have designed and built on older processes long after newer process capacity was available to them. They aren't being delayed at all.
Apple committing to production capacity is neither "Apple first", nor is it Apple "delaying" competitors. There is finite production capacity, and customers spread across the available options. There is literally nothing notable or interesting in that.
But once you add words like "Mutiny", you pander to a very gullible crowd.
It is amazing how much more cogent and actually interesting tech twitter is when you remove all of the "Will this make me rich and important, and quick?" web3 noise. It's the most fetch thing out there right now.
On the flip side, at least it drowned out the "Miami is the new silicon valley" noise (though humorously almost the same set of people are behind both)
Maybe other people are better at it, but when self-interrogating and inspecting one's own vision, it just completely falls apart. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
Normally.
I can only speak to personal experience, but under the influence of psilocybin I find that closing my eyes and visualizing complex environments and machines -- of literally inspecting and walking through gearing systems, for instance, and rationalizing their operation -- with complex lighting, etc, leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity. It literally feels like looking into another universe, the construction of the reality simply too complex to be imagined and visualized.
I've actually felt my head to ensure I'm not overheating, contemplating the process like the mind was a GPU.
Even if we think scientific fact changes based upon polling, "MSM" videos on YouTube aren't 55% positive, they're often < 5% positive. Because some people truly believe that clicking a little arrow on YouTube, or disagreeing with a "narrative", changes reality. A tiny minority, and ultimately the total engagement level is a rounding error generally, but throughout this discussion we've seen people take that tiny, self-selecting group and hold it as universal truth.
> Perhaps instead of trying to dismiss this dissent as part of an echo-chamber, you might look in the mirror and ask if your perception of these issues is governed by your own echo-chamber?
Throughout this thread there are a small number of people declaring that likes/dislikes lets you detect "propaganda", "misinformation", or demonstrates "public opinion". This is laughably, ridiculous untrue. Any actual poll has perilously little in common with the ratios seen on YouTube.
No, a tiny representation of excess idle time YouTube arrow clickers demonstrates nothing. We have seen many times throughout this very discussion that loads of people have gained the confused, self-destructive notion that it is a proxy for the public at large.
Mask mandates and vaccine mandates are supported by a majority to heavy majority of Americans (obviously varying by area, but over the country). What do you think the representation is on YouTube videos discussing the same? Now as homework, contemplate why that is.
Likes or dislikes in isolation are pretty coarse metrics. Is it small, medium, big, or a huge number? Outside of that, it doesn't really matter.
The ratio, however, can be hugely misleading, and is most certainly one of the factors leading to ignorance bubbles. I just replied to another comment that held this ratio as a demonstration of "popular opinion", and this is a very common assumption.
It isn't popular opinion. It is the usually tiny, self-selecting group of individuals who seek out this information and then purposefully engage with it. The more engaged a bubble is, the more outsized this ratio will be.
Vaccination content is a great example. A heavy majority of the public is pro-vaccination, pro-mandates, pro-masking, etc. But they do it and go on with their life. They aren't watching videos and clicking little arrows hoping to change the world. Anti-vax people spend their days filling Facebook feeds, sharing memes, and clicking up and down arrows. So videos for the former tend to have terrible ratios, while the latter have great ratios. Despite being fringe beliefs. But then people come out of it deluded into thinking it's popular sentiment, and they're really just the "silent majority", etc.
Do you think like/dislikes on YouTube represent popular opinion?
If so, you are profoundly deluded.
Imagine that there was a group that really, really hated the color green, and they're so passionate that they fly "We Hate Green" flags outside their house, completely tie their identity with hating green, go to we hate green rallies (imagine having that little respect for your own time?), wear we hate green shirts, make up childish "We Hate Green" code words (e.g. Let's Go Purple!) for when they are among the greenies, and these people seemed to have endless idle time to sit brigading every bit of content to downvote it or leave nasty comments because something in the video was green. That is just noise to everyone else. Everyone else -- the majority of the public -- finds no value in their hyper-polarized, agenda-driven contributions.
And I'm not just talking about people who like green, but people who are indifferent or even anti-green but they don't find any value in having a review bombed because this idle group was mad that they thought it was "green woke".
It is impossible to discuss this without it becoming ideological, and the asymmetry is exactly why it is a massive problem.
The "you made me do this!" tactic is as old as time. In your case, the claim is that YouTube not hosting ignorant anti-vax content, and Biden making a factual claim about the unvaccinated, made people (at least proxies that substantiate your story) not get vaccinated. Therefore, YouTube and Biden are actually to blame!
Nonsense.
I was going to put the cart back in the corral, but then I saw the sign asking me to put the cart back and that offended me because now it's a demand and not a courtesy! The store is to blame that I left it rolling in the lot.
Whatever terrible, selfish thing people do, there is an argument they make where actually it is everyone else's fault.
Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
Set the header and call it a day, and at this point browsers should default to same-origin. The only outlier is IE 11, with 0.5% usage, and it is so grossly out of date it's pretty reasonable to just dump.
I remember in the very early Internet trying to raise an alarm that a lot of people didn't realize the privacy implications of referral headers (run a website and you could find all sorts of crazy niche discussion forums, see the resources people were referencing, etc). I certainly am not claiming prescience, but it was amazing how little anyone cared. Mind you, I also once promoted the notion that browsers should only ever send strongly, expensively domain-specific hashed passwords from password elements, and that too was pooh poohed. Several billion pwned passwords later...
If you want to give some specific example, go ahead, but as is the statement is nonsensical.
You can kill insects and pests with a neurochemical. Or you can put sharp rocks (diatomaceous earth) and traps to do the same, albeit with more labor and less efficacy. Are you sincerely arguing that these must be the same? That an organic burger has rat traps in it?
This same insincere argument appears in every discussion about organic practices. A sort of hand wavy "it's all the same". No, it isn't all the same. Farming has been pushed to the level of extraordinary efficiency -- as mentioned, conventional farms are basically gross factories, having nothing to do with "nature" -- and to do this the practice is massive applications of pretty nasty chemicals. Not many organic farms operate in such a manner.
I'm not sure these are in the same league.
If they tested the feed of course they would know the difference because the non-organic feed would be contaminated with pesticides/herbicides. And organic livestock is fed organic feed because of course the contaminants are reflected in the meat. This is easily verified as basic fact, though actually testing the feed or the meat is an expensive process hence the whole honor system.
This doesn't make organic a scam. Exactly the same reason you might not want an apple sprayed with a pesticide applies to eat a burger from a cow that was fed feed sprayed with the same. In many ways moreso given that these things are concentrated as you go up the food chain.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-E...
Conventional red meat can have 20X the amount of glyphosate than your apple can.
This was a failure of the certification and monitoring system. Often by design.
I don't buy organic. Too niche of a section and the risk profile seems low enough that it doesn't seem worth the attention to me. But I'm not threatened by it, as many seemingly are, and get why some people are focused on that. Years back I did subscribe to a CSA that followed organic principles not because of the organic element, but because their land use was sustainable and quite beautiful (most farms are dire factories, in essence, whereas this place was an eclectic wonderland).
I have absolutely no doubt that this person is having bad memory leaks (though their narrative about SoC memory or other elements seem unlikely to play any part whatsoever). Software has faults, and something in their environment or stack is causing problems. I have an M1 Mac and used every beta of Monterey, and now the release, and have had zero problems. Like nothing at all. I use XCode, IntelliJ, Chrome, Safari, Excel, Logic Pro among others all day long, heavily. Loads of other people seem to be having no problem with their systems. Eh.
If something has literally millions of users, saying "{X} happens" will invariably draw out someone with a similar anecdote, but that doesn't mean it happens to everyone, or even a significant minority. Some unique combination of factors is yielding a poor user experience, and hopefully there is a resolution, but it just doesn't seem likely that it's widespread.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-...
To be clear, the researchers kept doing research and progressing. Whether some layman could tout it, mixing their advocacy with a myriad of disproved cures (along with anti-vax disinformation), had positively zero bearing on what they were doing, and if anything is a massive distraction.
Talking about something by sharing a Facebook post or posting a YouTube video or even HN comment has a negligible to negative effect on actual efforts.
That doesn't change the fact that the above claim about "laptop Xeon chips" beating the pants off the M1 Max is delusional nonsense.
I have to comment on the RTX 3080 bit: I have used many PC laptops over my career, and currently have a Lenova with a fat, barnburner Nvidia dGPU. The GPU is literally never used, because the moment it engages my battery life falls to cartoonish levels (somewhere in the range of 40 minutes), the laptop becomes a space heater, and the fans turn into jet engines. This is the sort of "spec chasing" that the industry is addicted to, providing absurd, completely unreasonable solutions just so someone can boast. One of the things about Apple, quite contrary to your claim, is that they don't do that. When they provide something, it is meaningfully usable and useful 100% of the time.
[Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]
Intel wasn't in competition for TSMC's processes at all, and AMD was in absolutely no hurry to 5nm (especially given that they were targeting cost effectiveness). The fact that Apple readied a 5nm design, and decided that it was worth it for their customers, in no way indicates that they "bullied" to the front.
Quite contrary, for years Intel made their mobile/ "low power" parts on some of their older processes. It was a low profit part for them and they saved the best for their high end Xeons and so on (where the process benefit was entirely spent on speed -- note that there is a lot of BS about the benefit of process nodes where people claim ridiculous benefits when in reality you can have a small efficiency improvement, or a small performance improvement, but not both. The biggest real benefit is that you can pack more on a given silicon space, in Apple's case loads of cores a fat GPU, big caches, etc). If Apple upset their business model, well tough beans for them.
As an aside, note that the other initial customer of 5nm was HiSilicon (a subsidiary of Huawei) with the Kirin 9000. That's a pretty sad day when AMD and Intel are supposedly sad also-rans to Huawei. Or, more reality based, they simply weren't even in competition for that space, had zero 5nm designs ready, and didn't prioritize the process.
Qualcomm has loads of 5nm chips. They're pretty solidly beaten by Apple's entrants, but they've been using them for over a year now. Huawei, Marvell, Samsung and others have 5nm products too.
This notion that Apple just bullied everyone out of 5nm is not backed by fact. For that matter, Apple's efficiency holds even at the same node.
There is this weird thing where some demand that we put an asterisk on everything Apple does. I remember the whole "sure it's faster but that's just because of a big cache" (as if that negated the whole faster / more efficient thing, or as if competing makers were somehow forbidden from using larger caches so it was all so unfair). Now it's all waved away as just a node advantage, when any analysis at all reveals that to be nonsensical.