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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Kata1yst@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe decline of Intel..
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    2 months ago

    2009 era was also when Intel leveraged their position in the compiler market to cripple all non-Intel processors. Nearly every benchmarking tool used that complier and put an enormous handicap on AMD processors by locking them to either no SSE or, later, back to SSE2.

    My friends all thought I was crazy for buying AMD, but accusations had started circulating about the complier heavily favoring Intel at least as early as 2005, and they were finally ordered to stop in 2010 by the FTC… Though of course they have been caught cheating in several other ways since.

    Everyone has this picture in their heads of AMD being the scrappy underdog and Intel being the professional choice, but Intel hasn’t really worn the crown since the release of Athlon. Except during Bulldozer/Piledriver, but who can blame AMD for trying something crazy after 10 years of frustration?




  • Whataboutism? Really? That’s the game we’re playing?

    Sure, okay, I’ll bite.

    Edward Snowden: He’s a hero, no doubt in my mind. But from this perspective, no one has attacked him since his departure from the US. Formal requests have been made to extradite him and they’ve been turned down. Once on foreign soil the US respected Russian sovereignty.

    Julian Assange: Okay personally I find Assange to be a piece of shit, but that aside, the extradition process has been followed legally.

    Chelsea Manning: Broke the law. And while her initial imprisonment situation was absolutely concerning, it was legal. The legal process was followed, and the sentence given was far short of the maximum. Her sentence was commuted by a sitting president. No foreign governments were involved, so no sovereignty was violated.

    Drake and Binny: Always were on US soil. No foreign involvement whatsoever. They were raided and Drake was changed with crimes. He received probation and community service. Once again, the legal process was followed and no foreign sovereignty violated.

    Boeing Whistleblowers: What the fuck is this arguement? You think the US is happy one of it’s biggest military manufacturers and transportation providers has serious quality issues? You think the US is taking action against the whistleblowers? Be serious.

    Basically: you’re saying the US charges people who violate the laws around information handling as criminals. Yes, that’s true. Now, I personally am sympathetic to most of these cases. I assume you are too. Whistleblowers should be better protected, but at the same time some information, like the names and personal information of government assets abroad, reasonably should be protected. It’s a delicate balance, and one I think the US could greatly improve.

    However, these are not similar to the cases in question. The cases in question are actions by governments on foreign soil or against US citizens. This is an enormous violation of sovereignty, legality, and due process. That’s the issue at hand.









  • My favorite city builder in decades. A few notes.

    Pros:

    • Easy mode is relaxing and quite easy.
    • Medium mode is a fun challenge at first, eventually becoming fairly chill as you advance in skill and confidence.
    • Hard mode is always fairly hard, especially on harder maps.
    • There are many resources to manage, but none that feel burdensome.
    • The game is extremely thematic, it feels alive with charm.
    • Graphics are excellent, though sometimes graphical glitches can still be encountered.
    • The water. It’s so hard to explain to someone who hasn’t encountered this system before, but water is life in this game, and it’s both beautiful graphically, and extremely well simulated by physics. Learning to control the water, and see the shortest paths to end water scarcity with beaver engineering is an amazingly fun and unique aspect of the game.
    • Mods are well supported and the community is vibrant.

    Cons:

    • Not a ton of content. They’ve been very good about adding new mechanics (badwater, extract, etc) but there’s still just 2 races of beaver and a dozen or so maps.
    • No directed experience. In similar games I’ve enjoyed a campaign, challenge maps/scenarios, weekly challenges, a deeper progression system, just… Something to optionally set your goals. There’s nothing of the sort in the vanilla game. It’s fully open ended and there’s only one unlock outside of your progress though the resource tree in a map.

    All in all, I highly recommend it, especially at the modest asking price. If you love city builders, charming and beautiful art, thematic settings, dynamic challenge, and solution engineering, this is a fantastic game for you.

    Other games I’ve enjoyed that scratch similar itches:

    • KSP
    • Cities: Skylines (but Timberborn has been far more compelling)
    • Factorio
    • Mindustry
    • Planet Zoo (Timberborn has less of a directed experience, but is otherwise completely superior)
    • Gnomoria
    • Banished
    • Tropico series (though I view this as more casual)

    Get it and have fun is my recommendation.


  • Author doesn’t seem to understand that executives everywhere are full of bullshit and marketing and journalism everywhere is perversely incentivized to inflate claims.

    But that doesn’t mean the technology behind that executive, marketing, and journalism isn’t game changing.

    Full disclosure, I’m both well informed and undoubtedly biased as someone in the industry, but I’ll share my perspective. Also, I’ll use AI here the way the author does, to represent the cutting edge of Machine Learning, Generative Self-Reenforcement Learning Algorithms, and Large Language Models. Yes, AI is a marketing catch-all. But most people better understand what “AI” means, so I’ll use it.

    AI is capable of revolutionizing important niches in nearly every industry. This isn’t really in question. There have been dozens of scientific papers and case studies proving this in healthcare, fraud prevention, physics, mathematics, and many many more.

    The problem right now is one of transparency, maturity, and economics.

    The biggest companies are either notoriously tight-lipped about anything they think might give them a market advantage, or notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. We know AI has been deeply integrated in the Google Search stack and in other core lines of business, for example. But with pressure to resell this AI investment to their customers via the Gemini offering, we’re very unlikely to see them publicly examine ROI anytime soon. The same story is playing out at nearly every company with the technical chops and cash to invest.

    As far as maturity, AI is growing by astronomical leaps each year, as mathematicians and computer scientists discover better ways to do even the simplest steps in an AI. Hell, the groundbreaking papers that are literally the cornerstone of every single commercial AI right now are “Attention is All You Need” (2017) and
    “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge -Intensive NLP Tasks” (2020). Moving from a scientific paper to production generally takes more than a decade in most industries. The fact that we’re publishing new techniques today and pushing to prod a scant few months later should give you an idea of the breakneck speed the industry is going at right now.

    And finally, economically, building, training, and running a new AI oriented towards either specific or general tasks is horrendously expensive. One of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve had with AI is realizing the accuracy plateau we hit in the early 2000s was largely limited by data scale and quality. Fixing these issues at a scale large enough to make a useful model uses insane amounts of hardware and energy, and if you find a better way to do things next week, you have to start all over. Further, you need specialized programmers, mathematicians, and operations folks to build and run the code.
    Long story short, start-ups are struggling to come to market with AI outside of basic applications, and of course cut-throat silicon valley does it’s thing and most of these companies are either priced out, acquired, or otherwise forced out of business before bringing something to the general market.

    Call the tech industry out for the slime is generally is, but the AI technology itself is extremely promising.