kimixa (u/kimixa) - Readit News

kimixa commented on Show HN: Deterministic PCIe Diagnostics for GPUs on Linux github.com/parallelArchit... · Posted by u/gpu_systems

wtallis · a day ago

Is this entirely NVIDIA-specific, or can it do any diagnostics for other GPUs?

kimixa · a day ago

It's very much nvidia specific, not just using CUDA but the backing nvidia-specific management libraries.

Though I don't think there's anything particularly device-specific they're measuring, they're using the private nvidia interfaces to do so.

kimixa commented on Opus 1.6 Released – Interactive Audio Codec opus-codec.org/demo/opus-... · Posted by u/ledoge

Kirby64 · a day ago

I agree with you, I’m just noting that this argument doesn’t hold because pirates (who listen, they don’t do mastering) basically only care about flac or mp3s. And mp3s are limited to 48k.

kimixa · a day ago

Arguably most MP3s are limited lower than 48k, depending on the implementation.

Like LAME uses a low pass filter unless you explicitly disable it, even on the "insane" preset it cuts off about 20khz.

But I can still understand why mp3 is still used, if only because of compatibility and intertia of keeping a collection in a consistent format. I see the worries about file size becoming less important over time, so many people I don't don't really see an advantage to a more modern codec like Opus.

And piracy has always been more about "branding" that people seem to like to admit - many video rips were labelled DivX for years after they had already moved to other mp4 encoders. And over the years the "brand power" of various pirate groups was surprisingly large.

And I suspect that mp3 and flac were the last "big" changes that made a significant difference to many end users, so newer formats just don't have quite the same improvement to promote their own branding.

kimixa commented on Opus 1.6 Released – Interactive Audio Codec opus-codec.org/demo/opus-... · Posted by u/ledoge

Kirby64 · a day ago

> I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates either, and MP3s are if anything more popular among that community.

kimixa · a day ago

> MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates

Neither does the human ear.

While there may benefits for intermediate representations during mastering/modification, for playback higher frequencies can only ever make things worse as it increases the chance of unintentional frequencies causing distortion etc.

And for those intermediate steps any lossy compression is probably a bad idea.

kimixa commented on The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void suggger.substack.com/p/th... · Posted by u/Suggger

sph · 6 days ago

"How are you?" "Not too bad" always makes me smile. Such a British answer.

kimixa · 6 days ago

"Can't complain"

kimixa commented on The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void suggger.substack.com/p/th... · Posted by u/Suggger

kimixa · 6 days ago

As a Brit, I'm not quite sure this article is right in it's declaration it's a universal "English" thing and not more "American English".

kimixa commented on Using LLMs at Oxide rfd.shared.oxide.computer... · Posted by u/steveklabnik

NobodyNada · 11 days ago

LLMs also generally don't put spaces around em dashes — but a lot of human writers do.

kimixa · 11 days ago

I think you're thinking of british-style "en-dashes" – which is often used for something that could have been separated by brackets but do have a space either side – rather than "em" dashes. They can also be used in a similar place as a colon – that is to separate two parts of a single sentence.

British users regularly use that sort of construct with "-" hyphens, simply because they're pretty much the same and a whole lot easier to type on a keyboard.

kimixa commented on Extra Instructions Of The 65XX Series CPU (1996) ffd2.com/fridge/docs/6502... · Posted by u/embedding-shape

embedding-shape · 12 days ago

Aah, that's much better and more realistic than my previous assumption that they were "government instructions", something used in the military and similar more secretive contexts, but I suppose they didn't use off-the-shelves components perhaps like today.

kimixa · 12 days ago

I don't think they were "intended" for anything - it's just that was the state of the control lines after it decoded that instruction byte, and combination might do something somewhat sane.

Wiring all the "illegal" instructions to a NOP would have taken a fair bit of extra logic, and that would have been a noticeable chunk of the transistor budget at the time.

kimixa commented on BebboSSH: SSH2 implementation for Amiga systems (68000, GPLv3) franke.ms/git/bebbo/bebbo... · Posted by u/snvzz

gspr · 22 days ago

> At 40kbps I don't think the latency can be great. Having done SSH over 64kbps when I overran my mobile data subscription, my experience is that modern SSH clients expect more than that to run smoothly.

What do these bandwidth numbers have to do with latency?

kimixa · 22 days ago

If the round trip time is dominated by the time taken to encrypt and decrypt packets locally, as seems here, then the speed at which it can complete that is absolutely important for measuring "latency".

kimixa commented on US issues security NOTAM for Venezuelan airspace flightradar24.com/blog/av... · Posted by u/8ig8

labcomputer · 24 days ago

For the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that may have had more to do with Ukraine’s budget and economy of the time: Ukraine had a massive trade deficit with Russia in the 2000’s and early 2010’s, and the government was running a huge deficit.

Faced with cuts to state pensions, Ukraine started using gas from the pipeline which connects Russia to Western Europe, without paying for it. That understandably annoyed Russia (that’s not a justification for war!), who couldn’t turn off gas to Ukraine without also turning it off for their main customers in Western Europe.

These events seemed to have kicked off the norstream pipeline (legal) and invasion of Crimea (illegal).

Here is a contemporary article less than a year before the Crimean invasion: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/russia-ukraine...

kimixa · 24 days ago

My belief was that many analysts at the time considered that the justification rather than the cause, as alluded to by the Ukraine counter claims in the guardian article.

Similarly, Trump isn't saying he wants to invade Venezuela to distract from domestic issues, but it's all about the "drug boats".

kimixa commented on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs lalitm.com/fixits-are-goo... · Posted by u/lalitmaganti

triyambakam · 24 days ago

I just find it so oversimplified that I can't believe you're sincere. Like you have entirely no internal heuristic for even a coarse estimation of a few minutes, hours, or days? I would say you're not being very introspective or are just exaggerating.

kimixa · 24 days ago

I think it's very sector dependent.

Working on drivers, a relatively recent example is when we started looking at a "small" image corruption issue in some really specific cases, that slowly spidered out to what was fundamentally a hardware bug affecting an entire class of possible situations, it was just this one case happened to be noticed first.

There was even talk about a hardware ECO at points during this, though an acceptable workaround was eventually found.

I could never have predicted that when I started working on it, and it seemed every time we thought we'd got a decent idea about what was happening even more was revealed.

And then there's been many other issues when you fall onto the cause pretty much instantly and a trivial fix can be completed and in testing faster than updating the bugtracker with an estimate.

True there's probably a decent amount, maybe even 50%, where you can probably have a decent guess after putting in some length of time and be correct within a factor of 2 or so, but I always felt the "long tail" was large enough to make that pretty damn inaccurate.