throwawaylinux

Who alleged that?

Sorry to hear that. Must be be a heavy thing to carry.

SPU is significantly derivative from PowerPC, so that's quite expected.

> overconfident

> solutions

What's more tiresome is people spouting rambling and incoherent "critiques" of others which they are incapable of substantiating due to their dishonesty and/or other mental deficiencies.

So just to confirm, you are in the government, and you view people who say the government should be held accountable for its actions as "the enemy", is that right? If not it should be simple to explain how you thought I saw you as the enemy for my comments.

I'm sorry you're so angry you're resorting to not addressing my comments and doing the "I know you are but what am I" shtick, while still being incapable of pointing out this fanciful "over-confident solution" you had somehow dreamed up. Maybe it's time to stop thinking about things that scare you so much if this is how you react.

> That is how to conflate branches of government.

It's the government though. The point from the start was that the judicial branch is part of government control. You are the one confused if you don't understand that.

> IMO it also is an unfair characterization of the underlying complexity of the situation.

IMO it isn't.

> I love it when you disagree, because I believe lively civic debate is very important. It’s just hard for me to become concrete when we get stuck in generalities about “the elite” and “those in power” without precision about what it is exactly that is the problem.

And yet you seem to know that the government is the solution to them all apparently without knowing what they are.

> I also recognize my bias, because I am actually a (small) part of this omnipotent dangerous government filled with “others” you hate so much so I think we need to agree to disagree on just about everything.

I think you're angrily lashing out at strawmen of your own making because it has become difficult for you to reconcile the scary new ideas in this conversation. But I do find it very interesting how wildly irrational and angry governments and bureaucrats become at the suggestion that they should be held to account for their actions, or that anything they do could be questioned or disagreed with, and by those "hateful commoners" of all people!

> You have conflated major separate branches of not only government, but also society in general.

Where?

> You then build on top of these simplifications in the most general of terms in an attempt to strengthen your ideas about power and how it is distributed.

How exactly did I do that?

Pretty weak response to my post tbh. I get it though, it hurts to realize the benevolent and omnipotent protector and provider you are subservient to is anything but. Lashing out is not an unusual response.

> In contrast to … ? Systems of government in your utopian visions?

Non sequitur. One does not have to contrast something with something else to make a statement about it.

> You have made a sport out of oversimplifying complicated matters before attacking them unfairly.

Strange how fragile a lot of people are about daring to attack the government they are subservient to. I disagree, in fact I see you have made a sport out of oversimplifying complicated matters to defend them unquestioningly.

> These “governments” you are so fond of attacking are the best we can do in the present and they require enormous, continuous support from regular civilians. It behooves us all to be mindful of this.

That's just some declaration you've made. You've asserted it. And I disagree. It behooves us all to be mindful of government's corruption, incompetence, and growing dangerous power and greed.

> These “bureaucrats, politicians, judges, police, and other officials” are normal people, probably including members of your family. The enemy you are envisioning might actually exist, but I believe you are pointing your sword(s) in the wrong direction.

The fact you've equated holding people to account for their actions as being their enemy is telling.

> Private legal system with non-profit counsel. Would be interesting to try it again, but no state would ever revert that kind of power to its citizens.

"Over-confident"

"solution"

This is just too much, it's satire right? Really good if it is. Nothing more fragile and angry than an "expert" who has their proclamations challenged, or an indoctrinated follower who is threatened with scary opinions.

Presumably the people coming through these programs are a drop in the ocean next to number of Americans fluent in Chinese and Spanish, and likely able to teach it at quite a high level without a specific degree for that language.

I don't see how your comment address what I wrote. Systems of government are set up to gain and keep power over their citizens, and western governments have this down to a science, which is to give people the illusion they have freedom and self-determination.

I promise you your government does not give the slightest shit if it forces itself to force its citizens to pay more taxes on food and energy. Funny that they have people believing that is a "win" -- socialize the cost of climate change to the commoners. Have you not noticed that it has become fashionable for governments to apologize and promise atonement for such things? Have you ever wondered why that is? It's not because they are looking to take down the banks or the petroleum cartels or the billionaires or whatever. It's because government ~= people. They are accepting blame on your behalf to shield their friends and owners from the blame they deserve.

Wake me up when they dismantle the carbon profiteers and seize their profits and the profits of their profits from the past century or so. Then the war profiteers, and so on.

Would be a government which is bound to work in the in the interests and to the will of the people, and one where bureaucrats, politicians, judges, police, and other officials receive hash punishments if they are found to have lied or profited from office or been negligent or corrupt in carrying out their duty.

I notice a lot of dirty corrupt western politicians have started a lot of unpopular wars and "interventions" that have killed countless thousands of people and stolen trillions of dollars from their citizens since WWII, and all have escaped justice for it. Worse yet, they have the gall to blame victims of their crimes and force them to bear the consequences, "we meddled and caused wars and destabilization, and therefore we (read: you) need to shoulder burden of the consequences and 'help' more". That's not winning. Avenues of hanged war criminals would be winning.

> How do you suppose that technology came about?

By people, inventors, creatives, entrepreneurs, explorers. Certainly not government or bureaucracy. Many of the most incredible inventions, discoveries, and creative works came about under governments that were not free or democratic.

I'm sure some amount of government is needed for a society to keep running. I have seen no evidence that it is what gives rise to technology and production rather than the other way around, or that bigger, costlier, more complicated, and more imposing is always better.

[snip]

> It's not just money. This could also mean forcing them to change course. We had something called "Urgenda" that took our gov to court (and won). In this case our government was blamed for doing too little about climate change and they had to adapt. There were also cases that for example challenged governmental oversight.

These are trifles. Corporations are all "on board" with climate change now. Petroleum profiteers have ESG scores. As far as the government is concerned, "doing more about climate change" means nothing for the people involved beyond making the commoners pay more for their food and energy.

Aahaha, "nobody may have an opinion about how they are governed, or an interest in thinking about different possibilities unless they are 'experts'". That's rich. Exactly what some kind of self-proclaimed "government expert" would say, thank you for that.

> You seem to equate government with the wealthy elite?

Strange.

> If not, do you think, there is anything positive, the government is doing?

Yes.

> And the question was, if it is possible for a lowly citizen today, to do anything against the all powerful leviathan. And yes, you can. And I would argue, easier than in the roman empire. But easy? Surely not.

I can't understand what you mean.

> national security, civic safety of any kind, health care, migration, education. I can see a lot of arrows pointing towards centralization of power and for good reasons.

Many "liberal western democracy" governments do very badly and and make ruinously expensive decisions that go against the interest and will of the citizens on some or all of those things.

Sounds like the kind of "win" where the government tells the government that the government has to stop excessive surveillance and the government promises the government it will and then it doesn't, and it also starts spying on the parts of the government that tried to stop it so it can bring them to heel.

You can change a few roads around from time to time, resulting in the government taking more of your money to build road that takes a longer route so you and your fellow plebs have to commute 10 minutes longer. That's not the "real" power previous poster was talking about, going up against the ruling class.

You might not, but you might. And there's nothing about a liberal democracy that says government must have a massive centralized concentration of power, it just happens to be going that way because power begets power.

I think you're romanticizing the present. There is no law that results in monotonic increase in "goodness" of social systems over time. It can appear that way if you look at the past few hundred or thousand years because incredible technological advances do tend to result in more, but that can also mask inequality and injustice on the fringes.

Would I prefer to live now than 2000 years ago? Certainly. Is that because of today's systems of governance, rather than today's technology? No.

It's a fantasy to believe the ruling class are not in an eternal struggle to take more, or that they have ever only restrained themselves due to the threat of revolt.

> I'd hesitate to call it real power as well. You could not just go against someone of let's say senatorial class or god forbid, the Emperor himself, without substantial (military) backing and/or being an untouchable demi-god yourself.

I wouldn't hesitate to call it real power. You're trying to make it an all or nothing thing, but it's not. There's a lot of power between cockroach and omnipotent.

> Today you can take the government itself to court and actually win.

And what does "winning" mean? It means the government decides that it must take some money from other citizens and give it to you.

Private legal system with non-profit counsel. Would be interesting to try it again, but no state would ever revert that kind of power to its citizens.

It's very cool, I just don't know what I would ever do with it. And I'm not saying that means therefore I don't see why anybody else would need or want it, I would never use it though. I was thinking about running an ethernet cable or two around the house to hook up a 1gb link but I couldn't be assed in the end because wifi is good enough. It's not like I can max out my 11mb/1mb home internet. \My new laptop's wifi is a bit flaky so maybe I'll do it this year if the drivers and firmware don't come good.

Cameras and weather station are nice though.

Maybe it only seems divisive depending on what side of the divide you find yourself.

I've seen a lot of hateful, unhinged, divisive attacks from the health establishment on ordinary people in the past few years. Much of it cheered on by people in internet forums such as this one.

x86 lock-in benefits AMD greatly, just as it does Intel. It is my belief that they started looking at ARM cores when they thought they would never be able to be competitive with Intel in x86 (pre-Zen was a bad time for AMD). And when it became clear that actually their new cores would do very well against Intel, they dropped ARM plans. They don't want to move off x86 if they don't have to.

Intel Xscale were a different beast. They got that through StrongARM from DEC as part of some law suit wheeling and dealing. They never seemed to really want to push it, preferring instead to try competing in mobile with a string of failed x86 cores.

Rule 46. They can ask you anything, but you don't have to answer.

Is it that easy? There would be some tractable number of arrangements this would spit out, and from there you can work backwards and find all materials that could form these arrangements, and try to synthesize them and see what works? Might be easier said than done.

> I’m saying that if their models worked in a predictive way, since they have been established for so long and the value of confirming them is so high, they would have been confirmed by now.

So, just run all possible materials through this hypothetical superconductor predictor model, and any that do exist would be found?

There are security teams and/or methodologies inside all major CPU designers today that look at speculation and other side channels. Although these might still not be up to quite the kind of rigor that you see in traditional verification. That is to say, their unit tests and fuzzers and formal analysis and proving methodologies are all well set up to verify that architectural results are correct, my guess is that they don't all verify intermediate results or side effects can't be observed by different privilege contexts.

In many ways it is a much more difficult problem too. Going back to first principles, what execution in one context could have an affect on a subsequent context? The answer is just about everything. If you really wanted to be sure you couldn't leak information between contexts, you could only ever run one privilege level on the machine at any time. Not just core, entire machine. When switching contexts, you would have to stop everything, stop all memory and IO traffic, flush all caches and queues, and idle all silicon until all temperatures had reached ambient, voltages, fans, frequency scaling had settled. Then you could start your next program. Even then there's probably things you've forgotten -- programs can access DRAM in certain ways to cause bitflips in adjacent cells for example, so you've probably got a bunch of persistent and unfixable problems there to if you're paranoid. That's not even starting on any of the OS, hypervisor or firmware state that the attacking program might have influenced. So the real answer is that you simply can't share any silicon, software, or wires whatsoever between different trust domains if you are totally paranoid.

All of these things are well known about, but at some point you make your best estimation of whether something could realistically be exploited and that's very hard to actually prove one way or another. Multiply by all possible channels and techniques.

That's probably why you see a side channel vulnerability discovered every month by outsiders, but very few architectural defects (Pentium FDIV type bugs).

That said, this issue looks like a clear miss by their security process. Supplying data to an untrusted context, even if it can only be used speculatively, is clearly outside what is acceptable, and it is one of the things that could be discovered by an analysis of the pipeline.

Contrast with the recent AMD branch prediction vulnerability, which could plausibly fall under teh category of it being a known risk but was not thought to be realistically exploitable.

As others have said though, everyone makes mistakes, every CPU and program and every engineering project has bugs and mistakes. I don't know if you can deduce much about a CPU design company's internal process from looking at things like this.

> 1) If his models could predict useful room temperature superconductors, it seems we would have found one already.

How do you arrive at this?

It actually wasn't bad in its time, and it's not about the technology its the conventions. Those purple/blue borders were immediately recognizable as links. A lot of people today wouldn't understand it, but a lot of people wouldn't understand Shakespeare today either. It's just a product of its time.