gdwatson (u/gdwatson)

gdwatson commented on GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs? gmplib.org/gmp-zen5... · Posted by u/sequin

mastax · 4 days ago

Enthusiast-oriented motherboards often default enable Precision Boost Overdrive, causing higher power and temperature limits for longer periods. To run the CPU at “stock” you need to go in and disable that. Their default Load Line Calibration might be aggressive as well.

gdwatson · 4 days ago

Which motherboards enable PBO out of the box? That’s crazy! I know that motherboard manufacturers set some sketchy default turbo durations for Intel CPUs back when Intel was cagey about the spec and let them get away with it, but I thought that AMD was stricter about such things.

gdwatson commented on GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs? gmplib.org/gmp-zen5... · Posted by u/sequin

dspillett · 4 days ago

While they can't publish it themselves this at least achieves the goal of the information being spread, along with the knowledge that it was their investigative team that did the work in the first place.

But yes, once they reedit and republish themselves (or manage some sort of appeal and republish as-is) then of course linking to that (and a smaller cut of the parts they've had to change because Bloomberg were litigious arseholes, if only to highlight that their copyright claim here is somewhat ridiculous) would be much better.

gdwatson · 4 days ago

It sounds like their lawyers have done the appropriate counter-challenge with YouTube, so the video will go back up unless Bloomberg sues them in the next so many days. And this is Gamers Nexus, so I presume they will fight to keep it as is on principle.

Personally, I found the length of the quotes from politicians kind of tedious, but I sure wouldn’t want them to capitulate to Bloomberg after this.

gdwatson commented on Building the mouse Logitech won't make samwilkinson.io/posts/202... · Posted by u/sammycdubs

Liftyee · 6 days ago

Not sure about online mouse communities, but it intrigued me that you prefer replaceable AA batteries to built-in rechargeables. I realise now that because of my dislike (leaning towards hatred) of single-use alkaline batteries I unwittingly dismissed the benefits of having quick replaceability.

Nickel metal rechargeables are a good AA/AAA substitute for devices designed to tolerate their lower voltage. For more power, 14500/18650/21700 cylindrical lithium cells are my go-to.

Personally though, I find it more convenient to have a charging cable on hand vs keep some charged batteries on standby. When the built-in battery eventually goes bad, I am confident that I could replace it myself (not a universal position).

gdwatson · 6 days ago

My Logitech G603 runs quite happily on Eneloops, for the best of both worlds.

gdwatson commented on German contest to live in depopulated Soviet-era city proves global hit theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/c420

armada651 · 7 days ago

Being pro-immigration used to be a right-wing sentiment, because it was a good way to get labor costs down. And it used to be the left-wing labor parties that were against immigration for that very reason.

True left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders are still against immigration because it lowers the wages of working class people.

gdwatson · 7 days ago

This is one of those cases where the left–right spectrum just doesn’t capture the interplay of various economic, social, and cultural positions.

gdwatson commented on UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/azalemeth

dvtkrlbs · a month ago

I mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.

gdwatson · a month ago

That didn’t placate the UK government, because it didn’t just want access to British users’ data – it wanted access to any Apple user’s data from anywhere in the world.

I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.

gdwatson commented on Stdio(3) change: FILE is now opaque undeadly.org/cgi?action=a... · Posted by u/gslin

blueflow · a month ago

fopencookie seems glibc-specific, so unavailable on BSD.

gdwatson · a month ago

BSD has had funopen(3) since 4.4, so it has an alternative. FreeBSD has implemented fopencookie(3) since v11, but FreeBSD is the BSD most willing to implement Linux interfaces for various reasons.

gdwatson commented on German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws therecord.media/german-co... · Posted by u/bundie

jxjnskkzxxhx · 2 months ago

You guys remember how 5+ years ago, an headline like this on HN would invariably prompt cries from the Americans that this was just the Europeans finding excuses to take advantage and steal from poor innocent American companies. How the mood has changed on this huh. I'm glad to see the European approach vindicated, even if at times not strong enough.

gdwatson · 2 months ago

As an American, my reservations about European privacy laws are related to jurisdiction, and none of them applies here. I welcome this decision.

gdwatson commented on Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android localmess.github.io/... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

gdwatson · 3 months ago

If unethical behavior is more lucrative than ethical, it will always be tempting. But that doesn't make it ethical.

gdwatson commented on Parallel ./configure tavianator.com/2025/confi... · Posted by u/brooke2k

lazide · 4 months ago

Eh, in this case not splitting them up to compute them in parallel is the smartest thing to do. Locking overhead alone is going to dwarf every other cost involved in that computation.

gdwatson · 4 months ago

Yeah, I think the dream was more like, “The compiler looks at a map or filter operation and figures out whether it’s worth the overhead to parallelize it automatically.” And that turns out to be pretty hard, with potentially painful (and nondeterministic!) consequences for failure.

Maybe it would have been easier if CPU performance didn’t end up outstripping memory performance so much, or if cache coherency between cores weren’t so difficult.

gdwatson commented on Parallel ./configure tavianator.com/2025/confi... · Posted by u/brooke2k

moralestapia · 4 months ago

>The purpose of a ./configure script is basically to run the compiler a bunch of times and check which runs succeeded.

Wait is this true? (!)

gdwatson · 4 months ago

Historically, different Unixes varied a lot more than they do today. Say you want your program to use the C library function foo on platforms where it’s available and the function bar where it isn’t: You can write both versions and choose between them based on a C preprocessor macro, and the program will use the best option available for the platform where it was compiled.

But now the user has to set the preprocessor macro appropriately when he builds your program. Nobody wants to give the user a pop quiz on the intricacies of his C library every time he goes to install new software. So instead the developer writes a shell script that tries to compile a trivial program that uses function foo. If the script succeeds, it defines the preprocessor macro FOO_AVAILABLE, and the program will use foo; if it fails, it doesn’t define that macro, and the program will fall back to bar.

That shell script grew into configure. A configure script for an old and widely ported piece of software can check for a lot of platform features.