slashtom (u/slashtom)

slashtom commented on Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020) gpfault.net/posts/asm-tut... · Posted by u/90s_dev

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/computer-organization-and-de...

It's currently 50% off and not only will you learn ARM, and some history about ISAs in general, but you'll learn more about how the computer itself works.

And if ARM isn't a hard requirement, an older edition that uses RISCV as the core ISA is a free download.

https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS295/assets/books/H...

Highly recommended.

slashtom · 6 months ago

I learned on the MIPS processor, computer organization / architecture one of the most challenging CS courses for me. I don't remember much but I definitely remember the mips pipeline...

slashtom commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

umanwizard · a year ago

> If this is what America wants, then it is what America deserves.

It's not really "what America wants". You are drastically overestimating how democratic the US system is if you think the fact that a very narrow majority picked one of the preselected candidates means that candidate has any kind of broad popular mandate.

It's probably what a double-digit percentage of Americans want, but certainly not the majority, and only barely the majority preferred it over the other extremely unpopular candidate.

slashtom · a year ago

I think you're double speaking here, the majority of the population who were eligible to vote, voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

slashtom commented on New Covid Shots Recommended for Americans 6 Months and Older This Fall nytimes.com/2024/06/27/he... · Posted by u/whack

slashtom · 2 years ago

People become statisticians and scientists overnight when it comes to COVID-19 Vaccines.

The science is very simple, get the shot and you reduce the likelihood of hospitalization or death. It's more effective for those with co-morbidities or those older in the age brackets.

I am not sure why this was politicized to death the way it has been. The mandates early on were to curb the hospitalizations / deaths that was occurring. Really the mandate should have been for people with co-morbidities or in the upper age bracket but you know what, people are stupid and everyone thinks they're healthy, so instead of being nuanced they applied it to everyone.

slashtom commented on Microsoft Chose Profit over Security, Whistleblower Says propublica.org/article/mi... · Posted by u/tyleroconnell

ChrisMarshallNY · 2 years ago

I think that when companies sell to the government, there is so much money to be made, and such a huge PR boost, that they are incentivized to cover up the naughty bits (a certain airframe manufacturer, comes to mind).

It can mean anything from concealing slightly embarrassing stuff, to massive, systemic, deliberate, fraud; sometimes, the whole spectrum, over time.

It often seems to encourage a basic corrosion of Integrity and Ethics, at a fundamental cultural level.

When leaders say "Make Security|Quality a priority," but don't actually incentivize it, they set the stage.

For example, routinely (as in what is done every day) rewarding or punishing, based on monetary targets, vs. punishing one or two low-level people, every now and then (when caught), says it all. They are serious about money, and not serious at all, about Security|Quality.

If you want to meet a goal, you need to incentivize it. Carrots work better than sticks. Sales people get a lot of stress, and can get fired easily, but they can also make a great deal of money, if they succeed. Security people don't get fired, if they succeed, and get fired, if they don't. Often, the result of good work is ... nothing ... No breaches, no disasters, no drama. Hard to measure, as well. How to quantify an absence?

Sales: Lots of carrot, and the same stick as everyone else gets. Easy to measure, too.

Security: No carrot. All stick. The stick can be a really big stick, too; with nails driven through it.

I'm really not sure what the answer is, but it's cultural, and cultural change is always the most difficult thing to change.

slashtom · 2 years ago

I think this is sort of it but I don't think it's the carrot that's the problem here. I believe it's the process and yeah ultimately the culture.

I don't think you want sales concerned about security, their focus should and only be on growth. The problem is if you don't give jurisdiction and power to the other side to actually say no this priority (security fix) goes in before work is done on this new feature, then you have an imbalanced system.

If the project manager who is incentivized toward growth is the decision-maker for deciding what is prioritized, well of course naturally you'll have the PM choosing growth over security.

Process needs fixing, give more agency and jurisdiction to the other side to effect change. It's not like security doesn't see what the issues are, it's just the fixes are not prioritized and the culture and process isn't balanced between both.

slashtom commented on Wegovy and Ozempic (semaglutide) associated with reduction in alcohol addiction recursiveadaptation.com/p... · Posted by u/henryaj

hnburnsy · 2 years ago

A study says these drugs could prevent 1.5 million cardiac events over 10 years, add in a reduction in alcoholism and the governments should be giving away these drugs to save on healthcare costs...

----- We identified 3999 US adults weighted to an estimated population size of 93.0 million [M] (38% of US adults) who fit STEP 1 eligibility criteria. Applying STEP 1 treatment effects on weight loss resulted in an estimated 69.1% (64.3 M) and 50.5% (47.0 M) showing ≥ 10% and ≥ 15% weight reductions, respectively, translating to a 46.1% (43.0 M) reduction in obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2) prevalence. Among those without CVD, estimated 10-year CVD risks were 10.15% “before” and 8.34% “after” semaglutide “treatment” reflecting a 1.81% absolute (and 17.8% relative) risk reduction translating to 1.50 million preventable CVD events over 10 years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37166206

slashtom · 2 years ago

Except it's not meant as a drug you take for life, as it will require higher and higher dosages in order to get the body to respond.

The problem isn't the results, the problem is the factors that caused the obesity. I'm for it as long as it comes with healthy lifestyle changes as that's the only true way to have a long-term impact.

slashtom commented on Wegovy and Ozempic (semaglutide) associated with reduction in alcohol addiction recursiveadaptation.com/p... · Posted by u/henryaj

slashtom · 2 years ago

How much of this is just the fact that alcohol is typically 'banned' from patients taking this drug?

Sorry didn't read too much into it but are they testing the reduction specifically for alcohol addiction or was alcohol addiction measured from people currently taking it for weight-loss/diabetes?

slashtom commented on Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date ign.com/articles/star-cit... · Posted by u/keploy

slashtom · 2 years ago

3.23 is smooth, performance is great, a lot of gameplay loops are in. 4.0 is around the corner. It's disappointing that they split the development between Squadron 42 (single player) and Star Citizen, but now that SQ42 is feature complete, the pace at which Star Citizen is being developed has been very nice. A lot of the features from SQ42 is being released/polished for the MMO and has already seen many features ported/implemented.

4.0 is going to be by end of year which will have server meshing, at which point, all of the difficult tech behind the scenes will be finished.

I think CIG is going to license the engine once this is completed.

slashtom commented on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet daylightcomputer.com/prod... · Posted by u/asadm

boochiboo12 · 2 years ago

Hi yall, founder of Daylight here.

Happy to answer any questions you have. Long time lurker, so this is pretty cool to finally take part :)

I made this because I wanted the eye-strain free and minimalist qualities of my kindle/Eink applied to so much more of what I do on a computer.

Lack of speed and ghosting felt like it made traditional Eink impossible to do most computing tasks. So we focused on making the most Paperlike epaper display that has no ghosting and high refresh rate - 60 to 120fps. We started working on this in 2018.

We developed our own custom epaper display tech we call LivePaper. We focused on solving the tradeoffs RLCDs traditionally have - around reflectance %, metallic-look / not Paperlike enough, viewing angle, white state, rainbow mura, parallax, resolution, size, lack of quality backlight, etc.

First proof of concept in late 2021, and then it took us 2.5 years to get it into production.

And we built a whole android tablet around it.

It’s essentially our attempt at making a remarkable tablet on steroids / kindle on steroids. Definitely some trade offs, but on the whole we think it’s worth it. (& on twitter a bunch of early customers seem to think so too)

Note: it’s 60fps epaper, not off the shelf Eink. We spent years developing what we think is the best epaper display in the world and it’s exclusively manufactured by our display factory in Japan.

There’s still many cases where traditional Eink is going to be better (bistability, viewing angle, white state color, etc), but we feel for more general purpose computers you can code on and do google docs on and do fast multitouch amongst a thousand other things, the speed and lack of ghosting totally makes it worth it.

Think of it as a Godzilla sized pebble watch with a decade of improvement

Or think of it as a gameboy advanced, advanced

slashtom · 2 years ago

Concerned a little bit about the lower DPI (190), how does aliasing compare to lets say Remarkable 2 (224). I find the Kindle Scribe is at 300 DPI.

Handwriting with the Scribe is amazing to me, hoping to see or understand how it compares.

slashtom commented on BenQ RD280UA: a 3:2 aspect ratio "programming monitor" benq.com/en-us/monitor/pr... · Posted by u/LorenDB

jsheard · 2 years ago

60hz :( There's no going back once you're used to high refresh rates. Especially with a monitor like this which you might want to use in either orientation, 60hz panels are prone to jelly scrolling* when rotated 90 degrees from their native upright position due to the way that LCDs scan the image out line-by-line.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKb_khoFzw

slashtom · 2 years ago

Depends, I have the 32 inch 6k dell and the lg ergo, both are 60hz and have no issues. Mind you, I specifically use these two monitors for work whereas I do have a 240hz 4k Oled connected to my gaming pc next to it.

The initial 60hz feel is jarring but you quickly get used to it. At least that's the case for me.

slashtom commented on Llama.cpp: Full CUDA GPU Acceleration github.com/ggerganov/llam... · Posted by u/gzer0

nmfisher · 3 years ago

It's a great project and an impressive achievement, but I'm also struggling to understand what people use it for that PyTorch wasn't offering. Easy deployment on iOS I guess? I would have thought that's a pretty small use case though.

Given the author hand-rolled his own FFT, I'm also guessing it's not as performant?

slashtom · 3 years ago

llama cpp is just cpp inference on the llama model. PyTorch is a library to train neural networks. I'm not sure why people are conflating these two totally different projects..