peterfirefly

Weren't both the Benin and Mali empires based on conquest, exploitation, and slavery?

> It can use very little memory (target <100mb for reasonable projects).

We live in a strange world.

I am very happy that the many glass shards and the inevitable cuts have been replaced by essentially zero plastic trash in streets/forests/seas in my country and all other civilized countries.

The problem is not Europe (outside of gypsy camps and illegal immigrant camps). It is mostly some parts of Asia (and it would likely also be some parts of Africa if they could afford as much plastic).

> It also shifted the onus from the producers of a wildly harmful material to the consumers. "It's those litterbugs!"

It mostly is those litterbugs in Asia.

1024 is stretching it a bit but several hundred are normal for high-end CPUs -- while pretending to have 32 (+ usually 32 SIMD registers that may or may not overlap with the normal 32).

"[...] and pretend that it only have [sic] 32" is EXACTLY what register renaming is.

They are real on slow CPUs and an illusion on medium to fast CPUs where they are just "value names" (register renaming, physical vs virtual registers).

You can still run out of value names, though. We rarely run out of them in straight-line code, we sometimes run out in absurd loop code, and we almost always have to do something for our function calls/returns to avoid running out -- we can't just assign each function its own set of value names. This means we need spill/restore instructions, either before and after the call instruction or at the beginning and end of the function. Sometimes both. We also divide our value names into parts that have to be saved by the caller and parts that have to be saved by the callee.

Maybe smarter call/return instructions will help a bit in the future by doing multiple register renames as part of a single instruction in order to make those spills/reloads faster/less necessary/more asynchronous.

Sparc and Itanic tried to do something like that (register stacks), but in a way that ended up being expensive to implement in hardware (high clock speeds were hard) and inflexible in practice -- and also annoying to support for the OS, the compiler, and the debugger.

> In comparison VAX needed separate pipeline for instruction decoding.

That's how the VAX 9000 and NVAX did it. It's not the only way. It is absolutely possible to decode a number of normal VAX instructions in parallel using a pipelined decoder similar to x86 decoders. It is also possible to use a µop cache similar to many x86 and ARM implementations.

Fallbacks are only needed for the weirder addressing modes and for instructions that positively beg to microcoded (system calls/protection level transitions, some bit vector stuff, COBOL decimal stuff, block copy/scan/fill/compare, probably POLY) and startup and interrupt/exception handling.

DEC never did this but they absolutely could have.

> but Intel now has AVX 10.1 and 10.2 in addition to the base set

Intel committed to not slicing and dicing the AVX instruction set going forward. AVX 10.(n+1) will not remove instructions that were in AVX 10.n. Feature testing is also easier: a single feature bit and a single version number.

I bet Intel's management will find some new counterproductive way of segmenting the market but AVX-10 (and therefore AVX-512) should be safe now.

A lot of the implementations have used cracking and grouping. They were/are definitely not doing anything like a 1-to-1 mapping between externally visible instructions and their implementation.

> There are edge cases in x86

Some early 386 CPUs had XBTS/IBTS instructions (extract/insert bit string). They used 0F A6 and 0F A7 encodings.

Some early 486 CPUs had CMPXCHG encodings that reused the XBTS/IBTS encodings. That apparently screwed up some programs that tried to execute XBTS/IBTS to see if they were running on early (buggy) 386s so Intel moved CMPXCHG to different encodings (0F B0 and 0F B1).

0F A6 and 0F A7 are still left unused by Intel and AMD in their modern chips.

There's also the delightfully petty story about SYSENTER/SYSEXIT and SYSCALL/SYSRET for fast system calls. Intel came up with the first pair, AMD with the second. AMD of course had to support both and operating systems generally only supported Intel's pair.

Then AMD extended the x86 to 64 bits and of course required SYSCALL/SYSRET for 64-bit system calls (and did not support SYSENTER/SYSEXIT in 64-bit mode). Intel had to support AMD's instructions in 64-bit mode but decided to also support SYSENTER/SYSEXIT there (which I don't think any operating system has ever bothered to support).

To summarize: AMD supports both methods outside of 64-bit mode and only their own in 64-bit mode. Intel supports both methods in 64-bit mode and only their own in 32-bit mode. Or at least that's how it used to be. Maybe they've mellowed out by now.

It'll be fine, Nick will pay for it.

> space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts

Which is very cheap if it means they can launch it quickly instead of being in permit hell for a year. You can also avoid sabotage (including via lawfare) and dishonest TV reporting à la "I'm standing here in front Big Bad Evil Datacenter that the local community says causes cancer and bad hair".

They also get lower latency to pretty much everybody except the neighbours of such a terrestrial data center.

The latter is an honest advantage. The former is a way of routing around damage. Both can be very valuable.

> Everything else is harder and more expensive

permits? connectivity?

And the first one is about Christoph Hellwig who has a long history of being awful to communicate with. He should have been kicked out of the Linux community two decades ago for that reason alone. For some reason, he has decided that he doesn't like Rust and he does what he can to keep it far, far away from any code he has anything to do with. If that requires 10x more work for others, that is a price he is willing to pay.

You underestimate the craziness of Occupy Wall Street and other leftist causes.

Laura Loomer is another crazy person who went from extremely crazy to just... untrustworthy but not totally crazy on Ukraine. I still think she is crazy underneath, though.

Bearings is another good subject to dive into.

> I wasn't sure how it was possible for a leather belt to transmit so much power.

Friction is also one of the main reasons why rivets work. And why ropes work and why knots don't unwind and lashings work and, and, and ... and of course also nails and screws and worm drives. Friction is awesome.

> Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine

I saw them start this little beaty more than a decade ago:

https://dieselhouse.dk/en/videnom/#BW2000

It was not exactly a quick and simple job.

> though immune system killing the viruses may be nullifying the treatment

That's a problem for some types of RNA/DNA vaccines where they use a virus as a vector. You can usually only use a specific kind of virus once per patient.

Despite all the details, you still left out a lot. Safety valve, pressure gauge(s), regulation of the water pump, water level gauge for the boiler, lubrication (you only have two of the glass/metal can reservoir types for the main axle), and then maybe also the valve gear (the control mechanism for the valves which takes into account where in the cycle the machine is and maybe also how fast it is going, how fast it should be going, and in which direction). And a way to drain water from the bottom of the cylinder + maybe a way to make the steam as dry as possible.

And each of those could be expanded to much more than the page you already made.

Things are almost always a lot more complicated than they seem. It seems so simple -- "water + heat makes steam, steam pushes piston, back and forth motion makes rotary motion" -- but it is really anything but.

We are all Wigner's friend. That rock over there, those specks of dust here, the wings of all the butterflies, the moons of Titan, and SN 1987A. Everything is just Wigner's friend.

I just listened to it. I think she handled it remarkably well.

When rich people started having their kids educated with children of other rich people instead of at home by tutors.

Why? She went from crazy (that you sympathize with) to crazy (that you don't sympathize with). She was always crazy.

I'd say it makes it "fewer" true ;)

Surely we can agree that if such kids exist then they must be very, very few in number?

I don't think so. It was a "support" comment, not a "you're wrong" comment.

And then he became a Socialist with power. Seems to me he remained a Socialist.

The people who have managed to build countries people wish to live in are Euros or East Asian. Nothing intrinsically to do with their skin colour, of course, but it is a fact that some peoples have done it again and again (and again) and the rest haven't.

The sex tourists in Thailand and Cambodia are vile.

Most of those children wouldn't be able to communicate with their own parents, if that were the case.

Somalis are usually not spread out among the natives. They tend to clump together in ethnic enclaves where it is very easy to learn Somali (and where life is unpleasant for the unfortunate child who doesn't learn it).

Why? It is perfectly possible to be a legal immigrant and a parasite. It's even possible to be a completely homegrown native and a parasite. Wouldn't you call essentially all career criminals parasites?