hedgehog (u/hedgehog)

hedgehog commented on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/OlympicMarmoto

mook · 16 hours ago

Wouldn't that be an application (or at most system library) concern though? The OS is just there to sling pixels, it wouldn't have any idea whether those pixels are blurry… well for VR it would all be OpenGL or equivalent so the OS just did hardware access permissions.

hedgehog · 12 hours ago

I think the context is that foveated rendering ties sensor input (measuring gaze direction) to the rendering pipeline in a way that requires very low latency. Past a certain point reducing latency requires optimizations that break normal abstractions made by user land, so you end up with something more custom. I'm not sure why that would require a whole new OS, the obvious path would be to put the latency-sensitive code onto dedicated hardware and leave the rest managed by Linux. If a bunch of smart people thought XROS was a good idea there's probably something there though, even if it didn't pan out.

hedgehog commented on US Intel stratechery.com/2025/u-s-... · Posted by u/maguay

scarface_74 · 4 days ago

Yes. But Intel doesn’t have any customers and do they even have 14nm fabs online and how long will take to move customers to it in the case of a disruption?

hedgehog · 4 days ago

To have customers they need to do the actual work of closing deals, building the customer-facing support teams, building all the tooling integrations (PDK, simulation, etc). On the manufacturing side they have to figure out who will do all the stuff besides fab, I think they have 14nm currently in the US and Ireland but the packaging might all still be Asia. It's not something to be done in case of disruption, it's essentially starting 80% of a new company to serve customers who want a US and Europe based supplier. Government customers could work, or public/private joint venture to build commodity parts, but either way they need patient customers who can help work out the problems and pay a premium to do it.

hedgehog commented on US Intel stratechery.com/2025/u-s-... · Posted by u/maguay

scarface_74 · 4 days ago

The issue is that Intel manufacturing chips in the US wouldn’t have solved the chip problems with cars for instance.

What TSMC traditionally does is keep trailing edge fabs online that are fully depreciated and use those to produce chips that don’t need to be leading edge. It wouldn’t make sense to create a new fab for trailing edge chips.

Car manufacturers aren’t going to all of the sudden start using 2mm expensive chips for their cars.

Even for TVs, the BOM for the “smarts” need to be under $10.

hedgehog · 4 days ago

14nm is mature and would suit this purpose fine, and they have existing capacity. The business, tools, and everything else around would need to get built out.

hedgehog commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

hedgehog · 9 days ago

Having written a moderate amount of both Rust and TypeScript they seem different but I wouldn't say projects in one are significantly simpler than projects in the other. Rust itself feels a little more complicated than TypeScript, but more carefully thought out. TypeScript has more cruft and legacy footguns. Rust tooling is much better (and faster). For cranking out web front end code TypeScript will get the job done faster, most other needs I run into are easier solved using either Rust or Python when starting fresh is an option.

hedgehog commented on Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court malwarebytes.com/blog/new... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

gruez · 16 days ago

>Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes.

"chose" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Suppose you ran a Mastodon server and it turned out some people were using it to share revenge porn unbeknownst to you. Suppose further that they did it in a way that didn't make it easily detectable by you (eg. they did it in DMs/group chats). Sure, you can dump out the database and pore over everything just to be sure, but it's not like you're going to notice it day to day. If a few months later the revenge porn ring got busted should you be charged with "intentionally eavesdropping" on revenge porn or whatever? After all, to some extent, you "chose" to run the Mastodon server.

hedgehog · 15 days ago

Transmitting messages between users is a functional property of Mastodon that is of course visible and valuable to the users. Transmitting protected health data from Flo users to anyone with a dollar to buy some ads is not a functional property of Flo itself or a mobile ad product, and likely surprising to both Flo and Flo's users. Facebook has discretion on how they use that data. If this is a rare and unavoidable consequence of their business model Facebook should be comfortable paying the settlements as judgements occur.

hedgehog commented on "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit pluralistic.net/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/Refreeze5224

crote · 16 days ago

The problem with schemes like these is that it is reasonably easy to come up with something which is pretty close, yet still missing some crucial details.

- You do not want the government to know which websites you visit. This rules out any kind of redirect / forwarding via a government website or app.

- You do not want websites to correlate their requests, as that would allow for cross-website tracking. Request data from website A should be completely useless to website B. This rules out most regular certificate schemes.

- You do not want a website to correlate multiple data requests, as that would allow websites to create some kind of supercookie. Requests should be completely independent, and two requests from the same user should be indistinguishable from requests from two different users.

- You do not want to lose privacy when the government and the website work together. The request should still be anonymous when the two collaborate, or else there can be no reasonable assumption of privacy. This rules out most clever pass-a-one-time-code schemes.

- You want the request to be unique and time-bound. It should not be possible to replay a response, either to the same website or a different one.

- You do not want to send more data than strictly necessary. If a website needs to know if you are 18 or older, it should only receive a boolean flag.

Getting some of those properties is easy. Getting all of them at the same time? Nearly impossible. And the worst part is that I almost certainly forgot a handful of requirements!

hedgehog · 16 days ago

The technical issues are workable, the really difficult issue is none of the big stakeholders really care about the level of privacy you describe. Priorities like audit compatibility, cost of deployment, etc all end up governing what standards get adopted.

Edit: And as Doctorow points out there are a host of other issues that arise from actually deploying a working system.

hedgehog commented on Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court malwarebytes.com/blog/new... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

gruez · 16 days ago

>Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it)

Court documents says that they blocked access as soon as they were aware of it. They also "built out its systems to detect and filter out “potentially health-related terms.”". Are you expecting more, like some sort of KYC/audit regime before you could get any API key? Isn't that the exact sort of stuff people were railing against, because indie/OSS developers were being hassled by the play store to undergo expensive audits to get access to sensitive permissions?

hedgehog · 16 days ago

Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes. If it's too hard to provide strong assurance that errors like Flo's won't result in adverse outcomes for the public, perhaps they should have designed a system that didn't work that way.

hedgehog commented on A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees newsroom.intel.com/corpor... · Posted by u/rntn

20after4 · 21 days ago

This is such an obvious gap in the market for GPUs right now. Nobody wants to make an affordable card with a ton of vram. 32GB isn't even enough. Someone needs to make 48 or 64gb gpus for reasonable prices. Surely GDDR isn't that expensive. AMD and nVidia margins must be insane.

hedgehog · 21 days ago

This doesn't seem like a bad idea but let's follow it a few steps. If a key tactic is to take share by shipping LLM-friendly consumer GPUs, one question is would this work. Setting aside the technical issues, they'd certainly sell some. They'd be limited by software, that's still much better on Nvidia, so it would be people with a near-term need for inference at lower cost than Nvidia's going rate. Two things to think about:

1) How might Nvidia etc respond? They've made one-off SKUs for crypto, they could certainly respond quickly with a part that matched on memory but had much better software (meaning, more compatible with tools and better performance. AMD doesn't have the software, but their hardware is find and they could similarly up on-board memory. So Intel would really have to compete on price.

2) Ok, now we've found some 2nd or 3rd place success in a business built on logic fabbed at TSMC and DRAM from Samsung or Micron. If this is the future, why have fabs or any of the associated R&D?

I don't know what the right answers are but maintaining Intel at anything resembling its current size seems like a pretty tough puzzle.

hedgehog commented on A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees newsroom.intel.com/corpor... · Posted by u/rntn

cyberax · 22 days ago

> Fixing the willful ignorance that the market structure today is very different from 20 years ago

Indeed. And his first action was to diss their own AI efforts. Because AI is just some niche area that they can ignore.

Just as Battlemage GPUs were getting decent reviews and sold above the MSRP.

hedgehog · 21 days ago

What's your source for that? All I've read is that he recognizes that Intel has not had been selling competitive amounts of product in the core areas where Nvidia and others are making most of their money. You could debate why that is but it's certainly not that they've been ignoring AI.

hedgehog commented on A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees newsroom.intel.com/corpor... · Posted by u/rntn

jordanb · 22 days ago

Fixing how? His first major act is to fire 20% of employees, refocus on old technology (smt) and deprioritize next gen (14a) process development. This is tantamount to surrendering as a leading foundry.

hedgehog · 22 days ago

Fixing the willful ignorance that the market structure today is very different from 20 years ago. Process leadership and volume leadership are tightly coupled, and no integrated chip company will again have volume leadership. Intel's historical margin power built on a combination of monopoly on performance (in some markets) and superior economies of scale, that's not coming back. The question is not whether they can get fabs up and going with process nodes competitive with TSMC, the question is whether doing it actually leads to any kind of success given the costs involved. The key question is what the basis is for competition going forward, and what Intel's strengths are in that context.

To paraphrase, Intel has to go of the notion that for Intel to win AMD and TSMC have to lose. The strategy that follows from that might involve some painful choices.