I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
This argument that nuclear power generation is clean if you ignore the times when it isn't seems a bit no-true-Scotsman to me. It's a thing I've changed my mind about more than once in the past. What sways my thinking now is:
- most nuclear power does indeed seem to be well run with minimal pollution.
- when it goes wrong, the consequences are awful and long-lived (I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted. I suspect there are others that don't have the same cultural resonance for me.
- the alternatives in terms of renewables and storage are improving seemingly from one day to the next.
The long term consequences, and human frailty in the face of a requirement for total and eternal vigilance convince me that the risk outweighs the reward. Where nuclear power once seemed [to me. I appreciated that some people have always been anti-nuke] like the least bad option compared with e.g. coal, now there are better ways to make our lives work.
If the endless 50-years-in-the-future ever actually expires and we get practical fusion power, it'll be interesting to see how this changes my thinking. Perhaps that will will have fewer toxic side effects when it goes wrong.
If I set up a wind generator and then leave it with no maintenance it's a risk to an area a little bit bigger than its maximum height. If I leave a nuclear reactor unattended it's a risk to hundreds of thousands of square miles.
So jelly and ice cream for the founders and a pat on the head for everyone else? Surely even by the cockeyed logic of usual startup exits this is egregiously nasty?
Perhaps there’s some nugget of gold that the papers haven’t reported? If not, and I were an employee of Groq, I’d be feeling ill used.
I will never understand how someone can build a company, generate huge value thanks to employees and early hires, and then just abandon them with almost nothing. Who would ever want to start another company with this person ever again?
This is shameful and attacks the social contract of silicon valley. What a slap in the face to all the employees who grinded over the years for their options, only to be left with a hollowed-out zombie shell of a company.
Wholly ignorant passer by here. Is this a thing that’d make (notoriously) slow FPGA synthesis (by which I think I mean the conversion of VHDL or Verilog to something that can be injected into an FPGA) much faster?
No, but it could help people build those synthesis tools much faster.
P4Synth takes a (mathematical) group of functions/expressions and finds strong candidate implementations for every class in that group. Then, as long we have a fast (expression → class) mapping for that group we can use the generated solutions as a database embedded within the compiler for automated expression replacement (or mapping from expressions to circuits/technology).
Vivado/Quartus (FPGA) technology mapping and LLVM's InstCombine stage are essentially this. InstCombine's pattern library is partially human-authored, partially generated by search tools; it lists ~30k subexpression replacements like a+a+a → a*3. P4Synth competes with those search tools. For hard function classes, existing methods might take weeks on a supercomputer: P4Synth speeds that up exponentially.
It only solves a narrow toy problem right now (4-input boolean functions), but I believe the technique could scale with modifications (like A* style prioritisation over signal-set novelty and implementation score).
As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.
Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.
There's an interview show on RTE presented by Tommy Tiernan. I don't care for him much, but I happened to be watching the episode where JJB was interviewed. The thing that makes the show interesting (modulo Tommy, the prick) is that he doesn't know who the next guest will be, and often doesn't know why they're notable even when he is told their name, live. So, he has to ask them questions. "Why are you notable?". This I love, because it's a recognition that there are many people who do, and have done, really interesting, worthwhile things without necessarily being known to more than a small segment of the population. [I feel this way about footballers and opera singers. I know a few really big names, but it's mostly a clouded mountain top to me]
So, JJB is interviewed. Approximately like this:
TT: So, who are you? Why are you interesting?
JJB: I discovered pulsars.
TT: ... what's a pulsar?
JJB: <explanation>
.. drifts into talk about Nobel prizes. JJB continues as you say to be a class act. Then onto spirituality [not my bag]
I wish I could find the whole interview for you. It was gold. Although the subject matter of the segment I linked isn't that interesting to me, the format, and spirit (sorry) of open and honest enquiry is really good IMO. I wish we had more TV like this.
Isn’t this already a well known thing? I first learned of it reading The Great Mortality by John Kelly maybe eighteen years ago. An excellent book by the way; funnier than you might expect a history of the Black Death to be.
One more reason to look to an electrically heated future. Where I live the air becomes unpleasant in winter as some neighbours heat their homes by burning what i can only assume are old tires and horse carcasses.
oh, it's illegal where I live. But some people pretty clearly ignore that. Enforcement doesn't seem to be a thing. I think this is one of those laws that falls into the category of things that we just have to rely on people's good will to carry out. Like small-time littering and not cleaning up after your dog, some people just don't seem to care.
FWIW, I think - based on not feeling my throat close up most of the time - that the number of people who do this is small.
I remember as a kid visiting the home of a relative who had an old oven for wood/coal heating, even though the primary heating was now a gas (natural gas not gasoline) heater.
The old oven remained though, and was used as a self-emptying trash can. When it filled up, a fire was lit to empty it. I don't remember what the sorting rules were (I assume "does it burn well and not smell up the apartment too badly when lighting it") and how common plastic packaging was back then, but I'm sure that the emissions coming out from the chimney were not a concern.
I have happy memories of the struggle to open the Trotsky boxes. In my house we used to have them with cocktails, so it was easiest to just pull out the bar tools and hack away.
I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.
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