Moonchild's recent activity
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Comment on Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide in ~life.men
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Comment on Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide in ~life.men
Moonchild Link Parentsure, education is sexist, but the girls aren't being treated well. the structural problems have nothing to do with gendersure, education is sexist, but the girls aren't being treated well. the structural problems have nothing to do with gender
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Comment on Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide in ~life.men
Moonchild Link ParentWell...sure. Children are being massively failed by the education system, and if this is your wakeup call, I don't know what to tell you.wonder if it’s possible to improve the young boys’ maturity through education
Well...sure. Children are being massively failed by the education system, and if this is your wakeup call, I don't know what to tell you.
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Comment on There used to be a people’s bank at the US Post Office in ~finance
Moonchild Link Parentthis is a policy level decision; the purpose of cryptocurrency is simply to provide mechanisms for attestation and auditability. aside from that, all of these are just one problem (not to minimise...fraud protection
this is a policy level decision; the purpose of cryptocurrency is simply to provide mechanisms for attestation and auditability. aside from that, all of these are just one problem (not to minimise that problem): adoption. the banking system is successful today not because of any particular technical merits, but simply because it's already successful
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Comment on Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide in ~life.men
Moonchild LinkSans paywall. I have been seeing these PSAs around town, but didn't realise and hadn't considered the extent or nature of the problem. Cynically—and of course meaning no disrespect to those...I have been seeing these PSAs around town, but didn't realise and hadn't considered the extent or nature of the problem. Cynically—and of course meaning no disrespect to those targeted—at a societal scale, this feels like a market-level response to certain forces driving the behaviour and sentiments of boys (which have been discussed to death in ~life.men); which response may cause some rebalancing and perhaps ultimately some good. (Hrm, is that cynical? I can't tell.) On the other hand, perhaps the whole AI image generation thing will nip the problem in the bud.
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Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide
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Comment on US Senate Republicans furious over Donald Trump derailing FISA bill in ~misc
Moonchild Link Parentremember 'SSL added and removed here! :^)'? yeah... e2ee works when it works but many things are not e2ee, and metadata is often more interesting anyway (even nsa doesn't have the resources to...the internet has made great strides in rolling out SSL, end-to-end encryption, and the like
remember 'SSL added and removed here! :^)'? yeah...
e2ee works when it works but many things are not e2ee, and metadata is often more interesting anyway (even nsa doesn't have the resources to store all the data indefinitely—but it does store metadata and doesn't even have to decrypt anything for that)
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Comment on Where will people commune in a godless America? in ~humanities
Moonchild Link Parentthis is closer to the munchausen trilemma and perhaps the church-turing thesis than godel (which is saying something extremely specific which we should be careful about generalising), but under a...If you consider yourself to be rational and scientifically minded, you must accept there are aspects of life which are both true and unprovable (see: Gödel)
this is closer to the munchausen trilemma and perhaps the church-turing thesis than godel (which is saying something extremely specific which we should be careful about generalising), but under a coherent metaphysics we should not rule out the possibility that there is a coherent, convincing explanation for everything simply because we have not come up with one yet
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Comment on Where will people commune in a godless America? in ~humanities
Moonchild Link ParentIf I claim to have seen a demon, and that the demon told me that the world will end unless we all do some thing, then you are completely within your rights to refuse to do that thing. But if I...If I claim to have seen a demon, and that the demon told me that the world will end unless we all do some thing, then you are completely within your rights to refuse to do that thing. But if I claim to have had an experience of seeing a demon, you are no more within your rights to claim I didn't have that experience or to demand proof of it than if I claim to have had an experience of being sad.
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Comment on The dark reality of Japanese host clubs in ~life
Moonchild Link ParentI think the issue is simply that the theory is bad and the practice matches. You can, for instance, hire a therapist; that institution seems to be broadly somewhat successful, and I would...I think the issue is simply that the theory is bad and the practice matches. You can, for instance, hire a therapist; that institution seems to be broadly somewhat successful, and I would attribute the difference to its incorporation of clear boundaries and constructive goals from the outset.
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Comment on Why x86 doesn’t need to die in ~comp
Moonchild Link Parentthere is no reason that a riscv core would be more open than any other. and the reverse engineering on apple computers mostly has nothing to do with the cpu itself (dougall johnson did do some...there is no reason that a riscv core would be more open than any other. and the reverse engineering on apple computers mostly has nothing to do with the cpu itself (dougall johnson did do some work on the cpu, but that was just for fun).
there is a difference between the inner workings of the components being open, and the interface to them being open. the reason x86 pcs are 'well supported' is that the interfaces are, all things considered, incredibly well standardised, and you can in many cases just grab a spec document and read it. (sometimes you're supposed to pay for them. i'm not sure where i got my copy of the pci specs, tbh, uh...)
so if all you care about is the interfaces, then the x86 pc is about as open as it gets
if you are looking for an open (internals) cpu project, see libre-soc (which is based on power, not riscv). if you are looking for an open computer project then, um, keep looking
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Comment on Why x86 doesn’t need to die in ~comp
Moonchild (edited )Link ParentMeh ... not really. Decode is a thing, sure, and I don't envy the engineers that have to build fast hardware decoders, but it's worth looking at actual numbers. Typical execution averages about 2...- Exemplary
Meh ... not really.
Decode is a thing, sure, and I don't envy the engineers that have to build fast hardware decoders, but it's worth looking at actual numbers. Typical execution averages about 2 uops/cycle on a good day; intel has been at 4 decode/rename per cycle for a while now (we want the latter number to be larger than the former because it's bursty and there's a big queue in between, but how much larger do we need?); apple decode is 8/cycle. Recently, intel found a new strategy for accelerating parallel decode (don't remember the details, but I think it involves breadcrumbs marking the starts of instructions in the instruction cache?), employed in its little cpus and soon to be incorporated into the big ones, which gets it up to 6 instructions/cycle (and note that, due to memory operands, an x86 instruction not infrequently decodes to two uops). So this is not the biggest deal. This doesn't really affect 'pipeline length' insofar as it matters for branch mispredictions—the penalty for those is similar on intel and apple—because of the uop cache. My biggest complaint about the amd64 encoding is that it's not as dense as it could be, due to shortsighted (though likely justifiable) choices made by amd back in the day.
the SIMD approach manifest in AVX-512 requires you to recode or at least recompile your applications
If you're talking about variable-length vectors then 1, those are not a good idea (some exposition here) and 2, the interesting parts of avx512 have nothing to do with the size extension.
Avx512 wasn't fused off of adl big cores because of market segmentation; it was fused off because 1, it wasn't validated and 2, it wasn't supported on the little cores and software couldn't deal with that. (Imo software should be able to deal with it, but the fact is that it couldn't. I also think it should have been a toggleable default-off option.) Upcoming little cores can deal with avx512, now called avx10 and including a mode in which only 256-bit ops are supported.
If the point is that shipping is hard then, well, yes. But that goes for everybody; sve is barely shipping now.
If the point is that isas are bad then, well, yes. But, again, that goes for everybody. Ditto popcnt. It's not like aarch64 doesn't have the exact same problems; they come with the territory.
Requiring popcnt is not the same as detecting whether the hardware supports it and using it only if so (which is what good software does). Yes, that kinda sucks, but it's what you do when you have isas to deal with, and for workloads that really care about such features, that is already what they do; your computer has not been 'living below its potential'. (Edit: worth emphasising: workloads that care—most don't. Somebody attempted to recompile the entire userspace of some linux distro targeting x86-64-v3, and found no significant performance improvements. I'm sure the benchmarks were bad, as most are, and I don't remember the link, but the point stands: you are not going to see massive wins on stuff that doesn't really care, and stuff that really cares is already using the relevant functionality.)
If I had to guess, I would say windows is upping its hardware requirements because it's incredibly slow. Why is it so slow? No fucking idea. My old laptop runs freebsd perfectly fine, and win8 is okay—win10 dragged, and I refuse to ever use a newer version of windows ever again. No, this is just microsoft being dumb and hostile.
Backwards compatibility is a great thing. I am not looking forward to the fragmented hellscape that is arm taking over. (Or, worse, riscv—at least aarch64 is an actually good isa, and at least the core isa is well standardised even if the platform isn't.) x86 (or, I should say, x86-pc) pulled off the bios->uefi transition beautifully, I have no idea how.
make it up partially by having long but powerful instructions
Other than memory operands, this is not meaningfully more true for x86 than any other isa.
There's a couple other features holding intel back. One is the coherent instruction cache; I don't know how it manages that, but it doesn't seem to mind particularly. The other is the stronger concurrency model. It costs apple cpus about 10% to use the x86 concurrency model, so that's an upper bound (and it likely costs intel appreciably less).
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Comment on Why x86 doesn’t need to die in ~comp
Moonchild (edited )Link Parentthat's not javascript float/int conversions; it's x86 float/int conversions, which were adopted by js. and arm's squeamish about naming x86 for obvious reasons, so they called it 'js' instead....that's not javascript float/int conversions; it's x86 float/int conversions, which were adopted by js. and arm's squeamish about naming x86 for obvious reasons, so they called it 'js' instead. aarch64 also e.g. has 32 registers partly to make it easier to emulate x86, and they recently standardised apple's instructions for emulating x86 flag handling
reduced
(ed: it is true that aarch64 is not meaningfully different from x86 as far as instruction count or complexity goes)
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Comment on Analysis of Ludwig van Beethoven’s DNA revealed that he had a low genetic predisposition for musical ability in ~music
Moonchild Link ParentI don't mean to imply that it's more correct, but I certainly think it's no less incorrect.I don't mean to imply that it's more correct, but I certainly think it's no less incorrect.
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Comment on Analysis of Ludwig van Beethoven’s DNA revealed that he had a low genetic predisposition for musical ability in ~music
Moonchild LinkAnalysis of Ludwig van Beethoven’s DNA revealed that we were wrong about which genes indicate a predisposition for musical ability
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Comment on Seems like all socials are being scraped for AI and personal/aggregate data. Is Tildes? in ~tildes
Moonchild Link ParentI think the mention of E2EE weakens the point, and that even without that it's far too strong. Cryptographically you can, at least to a first approximation, send somebody an end-to-end encrypted...I think the mention of E2EE weakens the point, and that even without that it's far too strong. Cryptographically you can, at least to a first approximation, send somebody an end-to-end encrypted message in such a way that they can be assured that it was you that sent it, and yet they cannot prove to anybody else that you actually sent it. Practically speaking, trust is obviously something you have to reason about, both in real life and computer security—obviously, somebody you tell a secret of yours to can spill it. (How's it go?—'two can keep a secret, if one is dead'?)
More generally, we are faced with signals whose samples are noisy, imperfect, and doctored; and we have to reason about them. (Ohh, there is some juicy preliminary research into conceptual models for this at my work, which I sadly cannot share yet.) You can't have it both ways. It can't simultaneously be all noise ('nothing on the internet can be trusted') and no noise ('everything you do, everybody will know about it, with certainty, forever'). Certainly, there are asymmetries between actors (this is what the research at my work is into)—a large corporation or government has a lot more signal than you do—but 1) those asymmetries are not absolute, and they are not that large, and 2) extremely-resourced actors are not the only ones you need to think about.
If you see a picture depicting two people having sex, what do you make of it? Did somebody feeling horny punch those two celebrities' names into this month's 'ai image generator'? Is a trusted friend telling you they think your partner is cheating on you? There are higher-order considerations, too. Did they intentionally ask the image generator to make a less ... appealing picture, to make it seem more realistic? And isn't celebrity gossip a waste of your time anyway?
In the case of the large actors (since we are talking about them right now), the operative thing for them is scale. If tildes were invite-only, it would be a complete waste of google's time to send somebody to infiltrate and scrape it. (Jilted ex? Suspected of terrorism by the nsa? Different story.) Which means that, at a personal level, it's as 'easy' as opting out of scale. Structurally is harder—you have to deal with the scale, and that requires game theory and information theory. 4chan succeeded in making google's ocr see racial slurs where there were none once, but has so far failed to repeat the feat.
Incidentally, the internet is neither here nor there considering how many 'security' cameras there are all over the place. Fun gait analysis research. Don't want to be tracked? Put rocks in your shoes. Or wear heels instead of flats (or vice versa). But then, you probably know if there are security cameras at your friend's house, and there almost certainly aren't any in the middle of the woods.
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Comment on Seems like all socials are being scraped for AI and personal/aggregate data. Is Tildes? in ~tildes
Moonchild LinkSelling? No, I don't believe Deimos is doing that. Scraping? Obviously. Think real hard about the world.same is true of Tildes?
Selling? No, I don't believe Deimos is doing that. Scraping? Obviously.
how would we know?
Think real hard about the world.
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Comment on From Red Riding Hood to Beowulf: On the essential role of literary reimaginings in ~books
Moonchild Link ParentTennyson's Ulysses comes to mind—though now it, too, is an old story. (I'd like to read the newer Ulysses, but haven't done it yet, and it is a big commitment.) And, in keeping with the theme,...Tennyson's Ulysses comes to mind—though now it, too, is an old story. (I'd like to read the newer Ulysses, but haven't done it yet, and it is a big commitment.) And, in keeping with the theme, Miyazaki's Nausicaä (the comic; I've not watched the movie, though I'm sure it's good too). Like all really good modern fantasy, it really is fantasy, not just fantasy-themed (insert Le Guin 'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie' here), but it also has a deep and abiding respect for its characters and avoids losing them to their archetypes. And the art is nice—it is grounded and integrated (e.g. the framing never feels forced or artificial), and the relationship between foreground and background is superbly done.
...it's not really clear to me where the line is between reimagination, influence, and fan fiction. (My dad argues fan fiction is conceptually bankrupt, but I think he is just conveniently and arbitrarily defining it that way—fan fiction is defined to be that class of literary works which is bankrupt in a particular way.) The linked article talks about how reimaginations can inform our understanding of the work they are based on, but it can't be that the purpose of a reimagination is to speak for the work it's based on; a work always speaks for itself. And, even though Nausicaä is called Nausicaä, and was explicitly borne out of Miyazaki's frustration that she didn't get more air time in the Odyssey, I think it ultimately says much less about the Odyssey than Brave Story says about The Neverending Story. And, for that matter, what about mythological traditions wherein the same stories get retold over and over, potentially over the course of hundreds or thousands of years—how much distance does there need to be between two renditions for the one to be an reimagining of the other, as opposed to their both existing in the same mythological tradition? On which note, I should point at Paradise Lost, which is just exquisitely written, if you can get past the archaic moralisation.
I know I must know better examples, but they are not coming to mind. Two more. Coraline was apparently based on a 19th-century story. I think I like the new version better, but am still not quite sure what to make of the original (this time I am comparing to the movie, as I have not read the book). And Loreena McKennitt has made a career out of (not exclusively) adapting old poems to song. Even where the text is unchanged, the interpretation feels very intentional—she owns her presentation of the work.
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Comment on There’s a crisis in male fertility. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many men behave. in ~life.men
Moonchild Link Parentwhy did I think you were going to suggest posting topics critical of women... :)Be the change you want to see in the world!
why did I think you were going to suggest posting topics critical of women... :)
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Comment on JavaScript bloat in 2024 in ~comp
Moonchild Link ParentAllowing this for arbitrary resources is problematic security-wise—browsers used to allow all cached resources to be shared between websites, and stopped for this reason. Suppose resource X is...Allowing this for arbitrary resources is problematic security-wise—browsers used to allow all cached resources to be shared between websites, and stopped for this reason. Suppose resource X is currently used exclusively by benign website A, which you frequent (and hence X is in your cache). Then, when you visit malicious website B, it can request X, and time how long the request takes. If it completes instantly, then it must have been in your cache, so B is able to learn that you visit A.
I agree with you that it is sexist. That's not the point. The point is that gender is completely incidental to the underlying problems. They happen to express themselves in a sexist fashion. It seems a lot more constructive to focus on solving the underlying problems, which will make education more equitable and better for everybody.
Edit: to put this another way. How much effort should we really be expending on getting boys to do better on broken metrics in a system which is fundamentally abusive to and disrespectful of everybody involved in it?