If we manage to get through this chip shortage and then China decides to invade Taiwan and we lose TSMC, I'm gonna fucking lose it. Everything feels so fragile right now.
14,317 karma · joined March 14, 2012
If you want to email me: keybase > github > dotfiles > .gitconfig
The increased attack surface that all this brings, implemented in a way that's opaque and non-removable, makes me incredibly nervous. You think cars and IoT devices are insecure? We're going to end up with that level of danger baked into every PC on the planet.
As far as I'm aware, S3 and SOix both exist on AMD, but I'm not sure whether they can exist simultaneously. There seems to be just as much confused annoyance at power consumption issues on AMD laptops as with Intel, e.g. https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/P14s-Ge...
Not really sure what to make of that, but it sure is disheartening.
Separately, while AMD's better performance / watt would seem to make it a good candidate for laptops, lack of Thunderbolt across the board has also been frustrating, especially if you already have a nice TB dock setup.
In S3, the system controller powers down the CPU and nonvolatile storage while keeping RAM in a low-power self-refresh mode until you wake it up. Your operating system is not running -- the microcontroller that reads the lid sensor and power button determines when the laptop will resume.
In S0ix, the CPU is still running, and the OS kernel is supposed to put itself into a low power state most of the time, while periodically doing things like checking email and performing updates. The lowest power state still uses gobs more power than S3, and Microsoft is aggressively irresponsible about when and why it wakes up. It's more like "turning off the display and spinning down disks after inactivity" and less like a real sleep state. Windows is running the show 100% of the time, even when the laptop is in your backpack.
All this because Microsoft was jealous that Apple can check email and download updates without waking up using their T2 system controller and now their own SoCs. But Apple is way less aggressive about waking up, their firmware is generally pretty okay, and T2 still uses less power than an x86 in standby.
Windows, on the other hand, has to run on every PC, so they can't specify some crazy advanced system controller, nor does Microsoft have any control over the firmware it runs... Instead they had to ask Intel to add a new sleep state that puts Windows in the driver's seat, and in order to make sure it gets used and people don't "accidentally" get stuck using the "old" S3 sleep, they made it so that you can only have either S3 or S0ix enabled, so all system builders would essentially be forced to switch. Some (Lenovo) offered a BIOS flag to surreptitiously switch between S3/S0ix before boot time, but even that seems to be going away or broken lately.
I have to believe that this will get better eventually, if only because the current state of things is so atrocious, but I wouldn't plan on buying a new laptop in the next 2-3 years.
Okay, that was pretty good. I've long since lost track of the number of times I've had this exact exchange.
To continue working at a company, you are usually expected to sign every piece of paper that they put in front of you throughout your tenure. If you don't, the consequences could range from absolutely nothing, to being pestered every six months, to being kept off a project or not promoted, to being fired.
If at some point you become popular or are seen as critical, you may be able to spend some of your political capital to get around signing some of the papers that you don't particularly want to sign, but this doesn't always work, and you can't always get away with this indefinitely.
An amendment to your offer of employment that tries to prevent you from moonlighting could come after your first day, or after your third month. They get to choose the timing, and the more unscrupulous will absolutely use this to their advantage. They won't give it to you after the first day or week, so you don't just walk -- they'll wait until you've settled in and are more likely to concede in frustration.
Reposting one of my earlier comments [0]:
Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective.
But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.
If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.
I will not be upgrading them until after I can confirm that this mess has been fixed.
I no longer care whether blame lies with Lenovo or with Intel's reference platform. The product is so broken that it is fundamentally unfit for my use case.
But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.
If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.
Apple has been able to do "clever" things while asleep, like waking up the wifi chipset periodically to check for email / messages / notifications / updates, so that when you wake up, everything magically feels ready to go instead of feeling like you just woke up from 1984 and have reams of crap to download.
But this only works well because Apple does their own firmware for most of the machine, and seems to do a reasonably good job, despite a few issues. They're careful about only doing things that aren't going to obliterate the battery in a way that would be surprising.
Microsoft is jealous of this functionality and knows they want something like that for Windows. They also know they need to cater to the lowest common denominator with system builders, so they asked Intel to put this kind of capability into their platforms, and to explicitly disable the old modes, so that system builders wouldn't be able to drag their feet. The result is that they've all switched, but the outcomes are generally poor and high variance. Sometimes they're passably okay within Windows, but not always. It'll probably get better, but for now things are crap, especially on Linux.
I kind of want to buy a framework though, just to support them? But I have no use for another laptop, let alone a small 12" one! Should I get one anyway because, what the hell, why not? Should I wait and then jump on one if/when they release a larger model?
Anybody else have similar feelings?
Edit to add:
I also have one of the last Thinkpad models that support S3 sleep (T480 -- within a model or two, I think?), which is currently super critical for Linux... I need to be able to close the lid and come back after a week.
It's easy to blame the manufacturers for this, but the consistent answer seems to be "Intel's Tiger Lake platform does not support S3 sleep," and all of the system builders base their work on what Intel's reference platform does. So short of going to extreme effort to hack it together themselves (something that is likely not their specialty), reasonable sleep behavior is not going to be an option unless Intel brings S3 back, or does work to improve the S0ix states.
I absolutely do not want to support the no-more-S3 clusterfuck right now.
The "power pack" is the power bank sized thing with the battery and a smartphone caliber motherboard (ARM application processor and a mobile GPU).
There are around half a dozen cameras on the headset, and the GPU is too taxed generating content visuals to do real-time localization and eye tracking. Even if you had enough bandwidth to get all the frames down the cable, it would still be a difficult problem to solve on the GPU while still meeting latency requirements. So instead, there's a dedicated "vision processor" on the headset that processes all of the camera inputs and sends the localization results to the GPU. This vision processor chip gets quite hot.
The projectors themselves can also get pretty hot, especially if you need to crank the brightness up. Difractive optics have a lot of losses, unfortunately...
[0] I worked on parts of ML1 at Magic Leap, but no longer work there.
There's nothing stopping you from deciding to use Super+c/v as copy/paste instead of Ctrl+c/v or Ctrl+Shift+c/v. Apple doesn't use Ctrl+c/v either... they use Command, so the conflict you're referring to doesn't exist there either.
All of the desktop/laptop CPUs that I currently use are 14nm, and I think the oldest is around 7 years old and still working fine. In the past I've tended to use personal machines for around a decade, and I don't really have any desire to move to a shorter cycle. Better battery life is great, but most things are already plenty thin and fast.
Unlike modern laptops, the T430 motherboard had a socketed CPU (like a desktop motherboard). Upgrading the CPU was only marginally more difficult than upgrading the RAM (as long as the replacement CPU had the same package/pinout and was supported by the chipset). Lenovo datasheets would even give you a table of every CPU configuration they tested.
The "hardcore guys" mentioned by the parent are installing bodged motherboards that were never designed to fit in a given model's enclosure, occasionally doing major board surgery to make it work.
If you believe that something you're doing is making things difficult for people you care about, it's not narcissistic (even in the common usage) for that thought to make you sad -- that's just how empathy works. Empathy works by making you feel bad when your brain thinks other people are feeling bad.
If that thought never even occurs to you, and if your friends repeatedly tell you things like "when you do X, it makes things difficult for me because I then have to do A, B, and C, when I could have just done Y" -- but you are still unable to wrap your head around or even acknowledge this, then you might be a narcissist.
Describing in detail how something made you feel isn't narcissism or arrogance... it's the author's stated reason for writing this piece, and it doesn't seem like he's fishing for pity points. If you're not interested, that's fine... you don't have to finish reading it, but other people can find it helpful to compare how they feel in their current situation to how the author felt then.
In particular, that feeling of "I can clearly see how my own issues are causing problems for my team -- I can see that they're frustrated with me, and I really want to fix things, both for them and for myself, but I don't know how and I feel stuck" is pretty common.
It's not necessarily self-centered to have the meta-discussion about how this thought makes you feel, because this "feeling like a failure" is often driving a positive feedback loop that turns a few relatively manageable issues into an insurmountable monster. You need to understand what this feeling is doing to you in order to have any hope of fixing yourself.
It wouldn't even occur to a narcissist that they're making things difficult for someone else. If you have a voice in your head telling you that you should feel guilty about all the ways in which you're making things hard for others... sure you might have an anxiety or a burnout problem, but you clearly have empathy.
If you need a car, eventually these will be the only options available. Tampering with or removing these misfeatures will eventually be classified as a felony, and suspicion that you may have done so will eventually be used to justify violence against you from the police.
The only correct response is "Fuck you Microsoft/Google/etc. You're expunged and I'll never trust you again."
1. Hackers acquiring private keys and stealing an actual NFT (the token) and moving it into an account they control. Aside from the base-level cryptocurrency malware/phishing, this doesn't seem prevalent, and is really the only thing in this list I'd describe as actual theft.
2. Non-artist creates an NFT using someone else's art, without their knowledge or permission. This might be a copyright violation, depending on the terms set by the original artist when publishing their work. Maybe it's a derived work... is "this jpeg but as an NFT" art in and of itself? I don't think so, but what do I know. This seems like what you're referring to here.
3. Artist creates an NFT of a jpeg of their own art, and then either sells or keeps the NFT. Later, someone views the corresponding jpeg in their web browser, right-click -> save-as, now they have a digital print of art that they paid nothing for. I've seen NFT cryptobros sensationally refer to this as "right click fraud," but it really just sounds like crocodile tears. I mean, really. Everybody knows how browsers work. This is one of the many examples of why NFTs are utterly stupid, but this also seems like it would be a copyright violation, at best.
4. Various combinations of 2. and 3. Maybe you right-click "stole" some images from one NFT, and then mint your own NFT of bit-identical images on a different chain. Or maybe you modified the image encoding so that the images are pixel-identical but not bit-identical, and minted NFTs on the same chain. This is all still just "maybe a copyright violation" until you try to pass it off as something it isn't, and then it's "maybe fraud" as well.
Honestly? If they want an easy win, that someone should be Intel or AMD.
They already design and release desktop and mobile chipsets with "platform specs" that are designed to be copied wholesale by all the major motherboard and PC vendors.
If Intel released a socketed ARM CPU with a chipset and a platform spec to go with it, you'd be able to buy a motherboard for it from ASUS or MSI for $150 within six months.
> PRO TIP Use screws for everything; if you mess up, remove the screws and redo it; with nails, it’s a lot harder to do that.
You absolutely should not do this for framing, and most building codes specify the type and size of nails that you must use when fastening load-bearing structural components.
Screws are convenient, sure, but they are necessarily much harder than nails and are prone to embrittlement and cracking, while nails are soft and pliable. You can get structural screws, but they're uncommon, expensive, and I'd wager they weren't used here (they're much beefier than a similarly rated framing nail).
I would have attempted a controlled crash over gentle mountainous terrain like this. You want to dump the aircraft's kinetic energy rapidly but not suddenly -- gliding into the side of a cliff will kill you, but keeping the airplane pointed forward while shearing off the wheels and crumpling the nose is fine. It looked like there were several areas where this would have been relatively safe to attempt. You don't need a nice flat field for a survivable crash.
After you're on the ground, you also need to be able to survive (possibly for days), and then be visible enough to be found and rescued. Staying with the aircraft is usually considered the safer approach, both for visibility as well as the emergency gear that you're supposed to be carrying in the back.
The only terrain where I'd seriously consider bailing out (assuming I had a parachute) is dense forest with no clearings. Surviving a crash like this is incredibly difficult -- you hit a redwood, shear off your wings, and then plummet 250 ft to your death. It'll be hard to spot the wreckage of a small plane from above. Even with a parachute, there's a serious risk of getting stuck in a tree (or impaled by branches). There are basically no good options here.
In short, mountains aren't so bad. But be super careful flying over forests. If this video was a stunt, there's a reason why he decided to stage it over mountains rather than a forest.
Points to slowest / lowest throughput / most expensive database ever designed
Sigh.