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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • Oh neat, the Don’tVote crowd finally got done researching Kamala for their agitprop, coolcool.

    Overall, she’s still not a perfect candidate - still miles better than Biden for just being younger and more coherent. There actually feels like a chance now that Dems can actually get an election win now.

    Still - don’t forget your local elections and movements, that you can actually have a significant effect on.







  • I understand some instruction expansions today are used to good effect in x86, but that there are also a sizeable number of instructions that are rarely utilized by compilers and are mostly only continuing to exist for backwards compatibility. That does not really make me think “more instructions are usually better”. It makes me think “CISC ISAs are usually bloated with unused instructions”.

    My whole understanding is that while more specific instruction options do provide benefits, the use-cases of these instructions make up a small amount of code and often sacrifice single-cycle completion. The most commonly cited benefit for RISC is that RISC can complete more work (measured in ‘clockcycles per program’ over ‘clockrate’) in a shorter cyclecount, and it’s often argued that it does so at a lower energy cost.

    I imagine that RISC-V will introduce other standards in the future (hopefully after it’s finalized the ones already waiting), hopefully with thoroughly thought out instructions that will actually find regular use.

    I do see RISC-V proponents running simulated benchmarks showing RISC-V is more effective. I have not seen anything similar from x86 proponents, who usually either make general arguments, or worse , just point at the modern x86 chips that have decades of research, funding, and design behind them.

    Overall, I see alot of doubt that ISAs even matter to performance in any significant fashion, and I believe it for performance at the GHz/s level of speed.



  • I’ve got alot of people I’ve promised that I won’t off myself. Those promises were mainly what got me through the dark times.

    I set up a plan a while back now. Once I hit an age where I feel pain all the time, I’ll start evaluating whether I’m getting enough enjoyment out of life to continue. If I decide it’s time, I start getting my affairs in order. Getting closure with folks, having some good final talks with folks, giving the advice I can, documenting that I know that I haven’t documented yet, distributing my things, etc.

    At the end of it, if I still feel like going, I’ll get my N2 tank and respirator and find a nice place to sit.

    I’ve given myself 30 years for my first raincheck. Might push it up if things get real bad, but it’s pretty alright ATM so I don’t think I will RN.




  • Saw the aftermath of a pretty bad motorcycle accident, with the rider receiving CPR. It was confirmed later by the news that they didn’t make it. I was stuck at a light and able to see the scene for a few solid minutes, but it really didn’t impact me heavily. Honestly it felt even less relevant than footage I’d seen before since I was having to actually drive and my attention couldn’t be put entirely on the accident.

    In contrast, I was there for a friend putting their dog down. The amount of emotion everyone was going through was much more pronounced - you could physically feel the sadness around you.

    Seeing death always has an uneasy aspect to it, but I think the real impact comes from social ceremony. We choose to feel pain over it as a way to heal, I think.