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vzidex commented on Brand New Model F Keyboards   modelfkeyboards.com/... · Posted by u/tambourine_man
onemoresoop · 4 years ago
Starting at 350? Isn't that a bit steep for a mechanical keyboard? I got a Leopold that I'm really happy with for nearly 1/3 of that.
vzidex · 4 years ago
I'm very happy with my Leopold with Cherry MX Clears, having come from a Model M as my first board. Alternatively, at this price point one could put together a very decent custom from a kit + switches + keycaps.
vzidex commented on Brand New Model F Keyboards   modelfkeyboards.com/... · Posted by u/tambourine_man
vzidex · 4 years ago
I have an original production Model M and don't think I would ever go back to it. It's extremely loud (friends would always complain if we were gaming together), keypresses are very heavy, and it takes up a ton of deskspace.

If the Model M or F are appealing to you, at this price point you should also consider some more modern production keyboards or even building your own from a kit + switches + keycaps. If you're after the heavy & tactile keypresses of buckling springs a board with Cherry MX Clear (common) or Green (less common) will probably satisfy you - I can highly recommend any of Leopold's boards with Clears in them.

vzidex commented on Names of Canada truck convoy donors leaked after reported hack   reuters.com/world/us/leak... · Posted by u/arkadiyt
dade_ · 4 years ago
It appears this was the result of terrible security at GiveSendGo. I'd agree it could be state sponsored, but I am certain there are enough people with the skills to do this on their own downtown Ottawa (even if it turned out they work for the gov't).

That said, I am thoroughly disappointed the Federal gov't and much of the media coverage. They have done nothing but make the situation worse. I think it is intentional (I assume some political end game), but their actions are fueling even more outlandish conspiracy theories.

The most insane was that all layers of government did nothing to stop the noise (truck horns), but it ended when a 21 year old who simply filed a court injunction and the protesters complied.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/injunction-ottawa-granted-1...

I've watched the Toronto Police Service play their A game through this entire debacle. They shut down the protests hard and were clearly visible throughout the city with heavy trucks and busses to block roads and maintain control of the situation.

https://www.cp24.com/video?clipId=2376560

The idea that Justin Trudeau needs martial law to deal with parked trucks is outrageous. This isn't an insurrection (reference to an MOU was removed from their website and I agree with the assertion that it was a poorly thought out idea, not a threat), there is no violence, and no obvious danger. The last person to use martial law was Trudeau's father (Pierre) for an actual terrorist attack and kidnapping (the diplomat was later murdered). Get some proper police on the job and drop mandates for ineffective measures and let's move on with our lives.

vzidex · 4 years ago
Definition, martial law: Martial law is the temporary imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency where civil forces are overwhelmed, or in an occupied territory. [1]

The key phrases are "imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions" and "suspension of civil law by a government".

The Canadian Emergencies Act, which was invoked by the Liberal government today, specifically states the following: "For greater certainty, nothing in this Act derogates from the authority of the Government of Canada to deal with emergencies on any property, territory or area in respect of which the Parliament of Canada has jurisdiction" [2].

I'd do a deeper reading but I'm a bit lazy, but my understanding is that the EA does not allow, in any way, a shift in governance that could be described as "martial law" - where the military is in control of civil functions and can create or remove laws as military leadership desires. Even with the EA invoked, the federal government still controls the Canadian military (but can be assisted in enforcing civil law _by_ the military).

I'm no fan of Trudeau either, but we should seek to be precise when discussing hot situations like this. People can get very inflamed off of internet posts and the idea that we're under "martial law" is riling people up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law

[2] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/page-1.html

vzidex commented on AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx   amd.com/en/press-releases... · Posted by u/transpute
throwmeawaysoon · 4 years ago
>come up with a "better" (performant, cheaper, easier to use, etc.) solution than GPUs for ML applications

you probably are aware but Xilinx themselves is attempting this with their versal aie boards which (in spirit) similar to GPUs, in that they group together a programmable fabric of programmable SIMD type compute cores.

https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/architecture-ma...

i have not played with one but i've been told (by a xilinx person, so grain of salt) the flow from high-level representation to that arch is more open

https://github.com/Xilinx/mlir-aie

vzidex · 4 years ago
Fascinating, thank you! Admittedly I don't keep the closest tabs on what Xilinx is doing.
vzidex commented on AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx   amd.com/en/press-releases... · Posted by u/transpute
hcrisp · 4 years ago
You don't seem bullish on the prospects of using Vitis [0] to deploy a machine learning model to a Xilinx FPGA?

[0] https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vitis/vitis-pla...

vzidex · 4 years ago
Disclaimer: I work in this space (not at Xilinx), comments are strictly my own opinions and do not reflect any positions of my employer, etc.

Broadly speaking, FPGA-based ML model accelerators are in an interesting space right now, where they aren't particularly compelling from a performance (or perf / Watt, perf / $, etc.) perspective. If you just need performance, then a GPU or ASIC-based accelerator will serve you better - the GPU will be easier to program, and ASIC-based accelerators from the various startups are performing pretty well. Where an FPGA accelerator makes a lot of sense is if you otherwise need an FPGA anyways, or the other benefits of FPGAs (e.g. lots of easily-controlled IO) - but then you're just back to square 1 of "there's some cases where an FPGA makes sense and many where it doesn't". Besides that, a few niche cases where a mid-range FPGA might beat a mid-range GPU on perf / Watt or whatever metric is important for you.

Again, opinions are my own and all that. As someone in the space, I am very much hoping that someone - whether an ASIC startup or Xilinx / Intel come up with a "better" (performant, cheaper, easier to use, etc.) solution than GPUs for ML applications. If the winner ends up being FPGAs, that would be really really cool! Just at the moment it's not too compelling, and I'm trying to be realistic.

All that said, FPGAs and their related supports (software, boards, etc.) are an $Xb / Y market - nothing to shake a stick at, and there are many cases where an FPGA makes sense. Just doesn't currently make sense for every dev to buy an FPGA card to drop in their desktop to play with.

vzidex commented on AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx   amd.com/en/press-releases... · Posted by u/transpute
gjsman-1000 · 4 years ago
If I have one wish for AMD, I wish that they would make FPGAs (and Xilinx) a more open and diverse platform like the PC. Not that the PC is perfect (there's still closed-source firmware), but any improvement to the current state of FPGAs would be welcomed.
vzidex · 4 years ago
You've struck on the fundamental problem that the FPGA industry has been trying to solve for 30+ years - how to get an FPGA into the hands of every developer, like how GPUs have propagated to be essential tools.

Nobody has come up with a good answer yet. Developing for an FPGA still requires domain-specific knowledge, and because place & route (the "compile" for an FPGA) is a couple of intertwined NP-hard problems development cycles are necessarily long. Small designs might take an hour to compile, the largest designs deployed these days ~24H.

All this to say is that while they are neat, nobody has found the magic bullet use case that will make everyone want one enough to put up with the pain of developing for them (a la machine learning for GPUs). Simultaneously, nobody has found the magic bullet to make developing for them any easier, whether by reducing the knowledge required or improving the tooling.

Effort has been made in places like High-Level Synthesis (HLS, compiling C/C++ code down to an FPGA), open-source tooling, and (everyone's favorite) simulation, but they all still kinda suck compared to developing software, or even the ecosystem that exists around GPUs these days. You'll often hear FPGA people saying stuff like "just simulate your design during development, compiling to hardware is just a last step to check everything works" - but simulation still takes a long time (large designs can take hours) and tracking down a bug in waveforms is akin to Neo learning to see the Matrix.

vzidex commented on Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)   vinepair.com/wine-blog/ho... · Posted by u/harambae
jerrysievert · 4 years ago
thankfully, here, we have Trader Joe's and their "3 buck chuck". the local Kroger store (Fred Meyer) also has $3 wine, but I think of that as "emergency wine" - the 3 buck chuck is much, much better.

I have some questions though:

1. do they teach you about sanitization and airlocks, or is it simply "toss some yeast in this bottle"

2. I'm guessing no aging? it would be awesome if they allowed you to pop some in a barrel for aging

3. (not really a question) but wow, $20/gallon is still kind of spendy!

vzidex · 4 years ago
I've done it as well with my parents, who love wine. At the shops I've been to, you buy the grape concentrate up front and they handle to process of making it up until bottling. Once the juice has fermented, you go in and they walk you through cleaning and sanitizing the bottles, filling them, corking them, and usually shrink-wrapping the tops. They provide all the supplies except the bottles themselves - customers bring their own, saved from buying wine the "normal" way.

Never seen a shop do ageing, so the wine will be noticeably "young". My parents like dryer and sharper white wines anyways (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, etc.) so it doesn't bother them. Also note that due to taxes and such, the cheapest wine you'll find commercially is C$11 a bottle, so even at C$20 / gallon you're getting a great deal if you like the resulting wines.

Personally, I quite like the wines my folks get through these shops - properly chilled they make a wonderfully refreshing beverage in the summer, and we'll often drink a few bottles on the back deck together when I go to see them.

vzidex commented on Is old music killing new music?   tedgioia.substack.com/p/i... · Posted by u/tysone
PaulDavisThe1st · 4 years ago
> a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs)

Alas, this is BS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-UGPXpqJ4

vzidex · 4 years ago
It might very well be the DAC doing the work then, or maybe the placebo effect is just making me pay more attention to music I first heard years ago and I'm picking up more :)

Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.

vzidex commented on Is old music killing new music?   tedgioia.substack.com/p/i... · Posted by u/tysone
rootusrootus · 4 years ago
I'm not sure how big a factor it is, but I have for a long time wondered if music produced in the 70s (perhaps late 60s) and later would have more staying power than earlier music. That was about the time that really high quality masters could be made which sound good even today. Used to be that old music sounded as old as it was, but now you can listen to music from the 70s with the same quality as if it were recorded today.
vzidex · 4 years ago
Anecdotally, recently my dad got me a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) and an entry-level DAC. The two put together have blown me away and I've been having a blast the last couple of weeks re-listening to all my favourite records from as far back as the 70s.

I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.

vzidex commented on Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer    · Posted by u/Fattestmoron
evercast · 4 years ago
I don't see this mentioned by other commenters so let me provide another perspective. Namely, I think OP is doing it wrong.

OP claims to have done 400+ LC problems over a couple of months. Let me say it out loud here: this is simply crazy. It strikes me as an attempt to not learn how to tackle these challenges, but to actually brute-force through them. To anyone preparing for an interview: don't do this! Grab a book like Elements of Programming Interviews (EPI), maybe follow some online courses on programming puzzle patterns, and then start grinding LC. Maybe interleave grinding with learning? Your end goal should be to develop deep understanding of what you are doing, not memorise the solutions.

Also, while going through LeetCode, it is very important to realise that the problem classification there is a bit wild at times. Don't stress that you cannot solve a medium sometimes as they are mislabeled. I did mediums that could be hards, hards that could be mediums, and hards that were just impossibly hard. Typically a very hard problem is not something you should expect in an interview setting as most interviers* don't expect you to implement KMP on the spot. Doesn't hurt to know it and impress the interviewer with knowledge, but if you think memorising KMP is the way, you're mistaken.

* - there is still luck involved and you can have a crazy interviewer. It can happen, so just accept it and move on. Don't treat it as a personal defeat.

Source: I grinded and I had offers from most of FAANG letters.

vzidex · 4 years ago
Adding to the comment about difficulty, the number and ratio of likes : dislikes on a problem is a good measure of difficulty. A Medium with 5K likes and 300 dislikes is probably quite a good (well-written, constrained, fair) problem. A Medium with 300 likes and 800 dislikes I'd steer clear of.

u/vzidex

KarmaCake day447July 5, 2019
About
Junior computer engineer, currently working in the space of machine learning-related hardware. Always excited about performance-focused projects, especially those close to the metal.

All comments are strictly my own opinion and do not in any way reflect the opinions or views of my past or present employers.

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