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Comment by BeeOnRope | Hacker News Reader

Author here, happy for any feedback!

Just a note that the title should be:

Your CPU May Have Slowed Down on Wednesday

Vaguely relatedly: I used to design graphics accelerators for Macs (back in the 90s) we got our best performance by spending time making writing 0s (or rather solid fills) really really fast (1.5Gb/s which was lot back then) - why? because as always whatever you'd do in hardware, the software guys would piss away - for example sometimes excel would erase the background 8 times before it ever wrote a black pixel - there was little point in speeding up those black (interesting, useful) pixels when speeding up the background white ones being written over and over on top of themselves was such a win

In a similar vein, all non-tiled GPUs do some form of lossless framebuffer compression purely as a bandwidth optimization (it doesn't save on DRAM footprint because that would mess too much on the fly with the memory layout and you'd need to allocate for the worst case anyway). The simplest case is indeed fast clears (to any color/depth/stencil value) but it also works at a finer grain. It's essential for MSAA where a single pixel on your display is resolved from up to 16 subpixel samples which most of the time are strongly correlated. E.g. 1 constant color, or 2 constant colors separated by a line (from a triangle edge). And not just color but depth: with a 16x MSAA pixel covered by a single triangle you have 16 distinct depth values but they are all coplanar, so you can compress them losslessly by just storing the plane equation's coefficients.

Well that's sort of a different point - what I was more generally trying to point out is that sometimes you need to optimise for stupid stuff (and win bigly) ... because people actually do stupid things

It was "Your..." when I submitted it. No idea how that changed. Regardless, fixed now.

Most likely an Arc feature.

bug*

feature*

(bug*)

HN does various title mangling: capitalising things, removing words like “your” and numbers from the start, that kind of thing. I strongly dislike it because it harms titles far too often. Fortunately it allows you to second-guess it by going back and editing the title after submission.

How did that idea pass five minutes of contemplation?

I imagine that it looks more reasonable when you see all the submitted titles; there may be many that it improves—I don’t know. (I still think it should be reviewed and probably curbed or discarded, but I’m confident that there’s a reason it’s there; dang knows that it regularly does harm to titles.)

It desensationalises/de-clickbaitises/de-Buzzfeedises a lot of stuff. The submitter can edit it, and the edit doesn't go through the same sanitisation. Also if it's popular enough for a moderator to notice/they happen to, they often fix them too (or sanitise further in other cases).

I'm glad you are here. I came into comments on the off-chance to specifically say that I loved your writing style. Refreshing, witty, clear. Keep up the good work.

Here's my feedback: ditch your intel gear and get a recent AMD processor.

See, we can also play that bait game

It doesn't have to be either/or!

I have a Zen 2 box which I'm just starting to learn about.

Way ahead of you, I had an 1800X at work years ago which was a beast, current PC is a 2700X (wanted the 5950X but well can't buy one and the 5900X isn't really what I want but I digress) - love them.

Last laptop I bought the missus at xmas was a Ryzen 4000 and that thing screams performance wise, incredible for 800 quid.

I've got two 3700x because 3900x and 3950x were unavailable for quite a while here in the dark parts of Europe. Wife has a really slick 1.1kg aluminium Lenovo with a 2500u, which we plan to replace with a couple of 5800u machines

The title is a click-bait. Please don't do this.

Do you think that click-bait titles are ineffective, or effective but unethical, or something else?

They are unnecessarily vague/mysterious.

Instead, the title should just state what is the case: "Intel CPU-update causes slowdown" or something like that.

I think the "on Wednesday" bit is also significant since it tells us that this was a recent change (and one we probably weren't aware of).

On the whole I'd say that the original title is much better than most.

Should've said "... this Wednesday" then.

The way it's phrased implies a periodic event, which is what makes the title clickbaity.

I specifically tried to avoid implying that (periodic). I think it would have to say "on Wednesdays" (note the s) to have that meaning.

The title originally said "last Wednesday" but I waited too long to publish it and was actually two Wednesdays ago...

you didn't ask me, but I feel strongly about the question asked.

Effective but unethical, but unethical in the sense that marketing psychology is unethical.

Unethical because it uses well known human psychological weaknesses to help nudge a target towards an action that they themselves may not have chosen to perform without the nudge.

If I was asked, i'd wager that most motivated persuasion is unethical to some degree.

They are misleading.

Imply one thing, deliver another and this leaves an aftertaste even the actual content is good (like in your case).

Ignore them. Nice work as usual, Travis.

Wikipedia on clickbait <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait>:

> Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, with a defining characteristic of being deceptive, typically sensationalized or misleading. A "teaser" aims to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make readers of news websites curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content. Click-bait headlines add an element of dishonesty, using enticements that do not accurately reflect the content being delivered.

I don’t feel this applies in this case because it fails to be deceptive, misleading or dishonest. (Parts of the definition certainly apply, but not enough.)

Sure, you could have a title like “Intel just slowed down their CPUs with a microcode update” (and I do prefer explicit titles like this—you should see the titles I write myself, 70- and 80-character limits severely cramp my style), but the article’s title isn’t particularly bad.

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