powercf

… and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing

The world doesn't need any more people. Fewer would be an improvement.

My problem with AC is how ubiguitous it is, and how people use it without thought of the environmental cost. It's ridiculous in many cases: people who sleep with their windows open and AC on (this exists), AC bus travel, where one needs a jacket, jeans and warm socks as the bus will be cold after a few hours. Air conditioning shows how far some people have become distanced from nature, and the environment in which they live. People who live in warm climates should expect to feel warm, maybe (at times) uncomfortably so. But good building design, suitable clothing, an open window, and a fan when temperatures get unbearable can go a long way. In the summer, I sleep (comfortably) with a window open, listing to the sound of my neighbours' AC units kicking in. It's depressing.

That's not to say that AC doesn't have valid uses, but that in many cases a more balanced, environmentally-friendly approach can be taken.

It seems to be a mix of personal, professional and medical information, some of which will be permitted under GDPR (e.g. an employer recording LOC written by an employee is surely permitted). The outcome will be interesting to get a better understanding of how privacy law now works

> Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me

Solvable by reducing speed sufficiently. It's reasonable to expect the car to avoid a man travelling at 10kph from any off-road blind-spot, and a car travelling at 100kph from any on-road blind-spot.

> Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a time getting through cities. Kids are going to learn that they can trigger a squealing emergency stop by lunging towards the curb - great fun!

If you sprint to the curb in front of traffic today, drivers will stop/swerve. Almost certainly illegal too.

My interpretation of the parent post is that more responsibility can be put on the car to avoid accidents, than is currently the case today. Hence greatly increasing road safety. It sounds great!

> You know that the English language doesn't originate in America, right?

Of course, but it's not relevent.

> I see the spread of the Spanish language a step in the Peruvianization of the world, which is a shame.

Peru isn't driver of Spanish-speaking culture the way the US is the driver of English-speaking culture.

TV shows, music, film, technology news and discussion websites, …. Most are US-made, and go hand in hand with the spread of the English language. An English lerner in ${X} will watch Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Spiderman, … (all in English, maybe with suptitles), will listen to Rhianna, Eminem, …, and will talk about "Performance", "Data Center" or use other English loanwords (if working with technology at least). It's obvious to me enough exposure to US culture does lead to a US way of thinking.

My problem is that, as time goes by, English use will become more common, and Icelandic less. The spread of the English language (e.g. the children in the article who '“know what the word is” for something they are being shown on the flashcard, but not in Icelandic.') is accompanied by the spread of US culture (TV, film, music). While US culture isn't neccessarily better or worse than any other, I get a lot of enjoyment from visiting places where English isn't spoken, and where one can see different traditions, greetings etc. I see the spread of the English language a step in the Americanization of the world, which is a shame.

> The case was initially about patent infringement, and for undisclosed reasons they were all tossed out.

Possibly because the patents were invalid due to the existence of prior art? Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685

Yes, mostly at amateur level. Rugby (union) also has problems with serious injury, and it shouldn't be considered a better, or safer American football. At national level many teams play a very direct style - smash repetedly into the opposition until you create a hole. I think the IRB should make whatever rule changes are neccessary to encourage more running-rugby, and make "the hit" less important.

Being around long enough to recognize what's going on increases the chance of some intervention. Casual criminals usually try to avoid areas with a lot of pedestrians (more chance of a do-gooder I assume), whereas roads with a lot of cars seem to be less of a deterrent.

I was recently the victim of an attempted mugging, while walking. This occured on a busy road with dozens of cars driving by in the short time this took to happen, but with no other pedestrians around. No car stopped, no driver offered any assistance. I am convinced that, instead of cars, if cyclists or pedestrians were going by, someone would have helped me (even just by calling the police).

I've cycled for years, and gotten all the physical abuse, verbal abuse, horn-blowing, being cut-off, etc. that goes with it. I think a lot of drivers really aren't functioning members of society when they get in their car. They're in their own little world, not connected with reality.

It's not ridiculous, but there's pratically no more information about it. No major tech sites have covered it, beyond Phoronix. AMD haven't acknowledged it, beyond stating that "a performance marginality problem exclusive to certain workloads on Linux" exists, which is factually incorrect as it also seems to occur on other operating systems.

I'm not spending hundreds of euro on a processor without knowing something more concrete about this issue. If you budget is really ~million dollars, do you have additional information about this that you can share?

> This problem only affects a minority of chips in the first place (likely a litho flaw in the cache section)

What are you basing this on? I've seen no good reporting on this* but the AMD Community segfault thread (https://community.amd.com/message/2796982) seems to suggest that almost all Ryzen CPUs manufactured before the end of June (which I assume is most of the current stock) are affected. Very few people load their Ryzens sufficiently to hit this bug, but a large number of those who attempt it seem to get the segfault.

* I would like to know the percentage of processors with the bug, percentage of review units with the bug (I would be very interested in this), and maybe some long-term testing of "bug free" processors etc.

> Lists are for humans to read and therefore should use the natural numbers, which start at one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms#Formulation

To address the content of your post: I agree, but humans aren't purely logical devices created by Dr. Noonien Soong, and we do enjoy playing with things and joking about.

Can you explain why you need 16/16/16? Wikipedia tells me that one x16 PCIe 4.0 connection has a capacity of 32GB/sec (x8 is 16GB/sec). A quick search shows NVMe drives with a sustained read or write speed of ~2-4 GB/sec. Equally for the GPU - you need to move a lot of data in/out of the GPU to saturate a x8 connection.

Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored.

I hoped this just affected Ryzen CPUs, but this Reddit post indicates that it affects Epyc also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6rmq6q/epyc_7551_minin...

The first post on on AMD's community forum (https://community.amd.com/thread/215773?start=0&tstart=0) is almost three months old, so AMD have known about this for a long time. If it's not something that can be fixed in a UEFI update, then it's bad news for everyone: a weakened AMD means more stagnation in amd64

Only AMD can really say whether Vega turns out to be a failure or not. We don't know what their goals or constraints were. In the end, if it has a performance/price advantage over Nvidia's (year-old) offerings, then it will be at least a relative "success" from a consumer pov.

It seems to be bringing some technological advancement too - using GPU memory as a cache seems like the way forward. Naive calculation gives me a couple of MB to store a single 1080x1920 texture. Current game usage is approx 1000 times that. It takes more than one texture to build a scene, but there seem to be gains if more textures are loaded on-demand (or slightly earlier).

This should get more recognition from the media. Especially as AMD are launching server and high-end CPUs with high core-counts (where I assume a large part of the market will be programmers), getting 120fps instead of 140fps in ${SOME_GAME} is irrelevant compared to unpredictable crashes during `make -j 16`.

Personally I would like to build a Ryzen (possibly ThreadRipper, depending on pricing) computer this year, but that is definitely on hold until this issue is fixed.

On my Windows 10 install, Windows Update uses 100% of one core to do whatever it's doing. Once it starts, it seems to spin away indefinitely. Some searching shows that it's not just me that's affected by this. I've also noticed high resource usage from Windows Update on a family-member's laptop (Windows 7 I think). I can understand people disabling Windows Update for performance reasons. It seems to be very buggy and offers few visible improvements to the user. Compare with "apt-get upgrade", which seems to use very few resources, provides visibility on what it's doing and usually takes less than a few minutes to complete.

Humans have more or less empathy for other animals. Some humans (me included) feel enough empathy for other animals, that they choose not to eat them, in order to reduce their suffering. I assume empathy is important evolutionarily to humans to ensure the society survives.

As to "why have empathy for non-human animals?": I don't know, but I guess having a somewhat-arbitrary rule of which animals it's ok to eat, and which not, can lead to a certain amount of congnitive dissonance.

There are also health issues with meat, that don't exist (or don't exist to the same extent) with a vegetarian diet.

re. UTF-8 support: ncurses does include this, in libncursesw. It seems to work, although I haven't tried anything outside of Latin-1.

I have used ncurses to build a simple backend interface, that I use for testing new features etc. The end result looks nice, and is functional, but ncurses the library is a pain. It feels like something that would not be written by a programmer today: C, manual pointer-management, the interface feels too low-level. I ended up writing a C++ wrapper around it, adding thread-safety, better scrolling and some convenience functions (the ncurses form library I believe was a particular pain).

What I would like is a high-quality redesign of ncurses with a modern C++ interface.

> It's anandtech, it will be accurate.

There are 87 benchmarks there. I do not believe they re-do all 87 each time someone releases a processor. It's more likely that they are reusing old 8370 results and comparing with new 6600 results. I question whether all variables (OS, drivers, minor version numbers of software, etc.) are the same. (I'm not saying that re-doing the 8370 tests would favor AMD, just that it would give more accurate results). They don't mention what settings they used for the software, and what exactly each program is stressing. Splitting the PhotoScan results into five seems very arbitrary. Two decimal places in each result with no error bars, no indication of how they performed the measurement, no indication of the number of times they performed the test leads me to think that it's not a very well conducted set of tests.

> > They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan

> No. We don't seem to have the same benchmarks.

We clearly have the same benchmarks. "evenly matched" was a poor choice of words, but I don't see a ~23% advantage for the 6600 to be very significant, when other results have the 8370/6600 100% faster than the 6600/8370.

> They mean get an i5: Way better in single threaded workloads which is what counts for 90% of software, faster in realistic multi-threaded workloads.

For browsing, office and most games the 8370 and 6600 are close enough that the average user won't notice a difference. Most users don't spend any time waiting for software that eats 100% of <= 4 cores, which is where the i5's advantage lies. What you find "realistic", I may not, and vice-versa. It depends on the user, and what he's using his computer for.

The i5 may well be the better choice for most users. It certainly has a number of advantages: less power-hungry, newer chipset/features, more upgrade options. My point is simply that the FX cpus are still price and performance competitive with new i5s. Which is better depends on the needs of the user.

The results on that page seem to indicate that the i5 is faster (sometimes up to twice as fast) than the FX on single-threaded workloads, while the FX is faster (sometimes up to twice as fast) than the i5 on multi-threaded workloads. They're evenly matched on other tests (e.g. Handbrake & "Agisoft PhotoScan") - I would bet these aren't getting 100% core usage out of the FX. I'm surprised by how close they are in games.

If those results are accurate, they do seem to support that AMD FX CPUs are still competitive with new Intel CPUs in the same price range.

That case seems* to have been dismissed. My (very brief) reading of it is that there is no industry-standard definition of what a "core" is (other than possibly being able to simultaneously execute), and what can or cannot be shared among cores. I see no issue with AMD calling a module of two integer units and one floating point unit "two cores"

* http://www.leagle.com/decision/In%20FDCO%2020160408M22/DICKE....

Games are a very specific workload, and I find the focus placed on gaming performance in CPU reviews to be ridiculous. For another specific workload: software that can use 100% of 8+ threads, the FX CPUs are probably ahead of Intel CPUs in the same price range. They do run hotter, but that's not necessarily a huge drawback in a cold country.

56.8…

Given that they've defined "::" differently to the usual "as" the answer could be anything. More specifically, the answer is f(64), where f(x) is wharever was in the head of the guy who made the question.

The same goes for the "what is the next number in this sequence" questions: unknowable given the information provided.

> He spent the night insulting them and they told him that no one cared, that's not rude that's response in kind.

That's not true. Asking, in one tweet, if it's "narcissistically gratifying" for MW to be the "chill dictionary" may be insulting, but not needlessly so, as I think that's the central point he's trying to make. Overall though, they are a meandering, somewhat pointless series of tweets, aimed at a company, and not an individual.

Stating that "No one cares how you feel." is needlessly insulting and isn't attempting to make any point. It's also directed at an individual, and not a large company, so it's always going to be perceived as more cutting.

That "No one cares how you feel." is, apparently, an expression commonly used in English teaching doesn't excuse it: the author, and the vast majority of Tweeters didn't get the reference.

Pretty shocking - the response from MW, and then the vitriol on twitter, and on the slate article.

Having been using ddg for the past year, I can say that its results are, unfortunately, noticeably worse than google's. For a lot of technical searches I end up resorting to google.