colanderman

As @mmastrac points out in a related comment, Google has chosen, at the behest of no law, to place the US on its "sensitive countries" list, which is the mechanism it uses to show users from certain countries incorrect names which it is legally obliged to.

But, Google is not legally obliged to in this case. Google is obeying in advance.

The US does not control the majority of the Gulf of Mexico. It cannot "change the name" of it any more than it can change the name of the Moon.

The executive branch has decided to call it something different than its internationally accepted name as a political stunt. Google could just ignore this, but instead they chose to obey in advance.

Every other nation on Earth calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it some other nonsense name (it's not even majority in US territorial waters) does users a disservice.

"The review process is tedious" is a non-excuse. It's the largest geographic feature in this quadrant of the globe to receive a name "change" in my memory, and it's highly politicized.

Excuses. No-one else in the world uses that name, and the U.S. doesn't control the majority of those waters.

Google is kotowing to authoritarian nonsense. There's no reason they need to follow the executive branch's naming scheme. We're not a fascist state (yet). They can use whatever name they want, they can use the name that's internationally agreed upon.

Colloquially they were always just referred to as Oggs, which wasn't too weird to my ears.

To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).

By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.

But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.

Dolby Atmos is literally that, I think there are several physical formats that can support it.

Ambisonics, especially higher-order ambisonics, also is capable of spatial panning, though it encodes the 3D soundfield rather than individual sound sources. Again, there are a few physical formats.

It's actually more like "distant gay" (and would be pronounced with a hard "g") because it's a (presumably deliberate) misspelling of forĝejo.

Google Photos "consent" is one of the worst dark patterns I regularly encounter.

About weekly it prompts me with a huge popup whether I want to continue without backup, with "enable backup" selected by default. If I deselect this I'm prompted with another popup asking me to back up specific selected photos. If I misclick either of these (which is easy, since they pop up after briefly showing my photos which I'm actively trying to tap on), then Google will start hoovering up all my photos without confirmation.

Their "consent" form is user-hostile and it's disingenuous to hold it as an example of Google protecting privacy.

Pro tip: install Google Gallery which (ironically) is effectively a de-Googled Photos. Unfortunately it's also stripped down in other ways but it suffices for simply viewing photos on your own device.

SRAM is actually very architecturally similar to some adiabatic circuit topologies.

No, and yes, so long as you don't delete information.

Think of a marble-based computer, whose inner workings are frictionless and massless. The marbles roll freely without losing energy unless they are forced to stop somehow, but computation is nonetheless performed.

The trick is not to have a voltage across the channel while it's transitioning states. For this reason, adiabatic circuits are typically "phased" such that any given adiabatic logic gate is either having its gates charged or discharged (by the previous logic gate), or current is passing through its channels to charge/discharge the next logic gate.

PFAL has both a fully adiabatic and quasi-adiabatic configuration. (Essentially, the "reverse" half of a PFAL gate can just be tied to the outputs for quasi-adiabatic mode.) I've focused my own research on PFAL because it is (to my knowledge) one of the few fully adiabatic families, and of those, I found it easy to understand.

I'll have to check out 2LAL. I haven't heard of it before.

No, even with a fully adiabatic switched-capacitance driver I don't think those figures are possible. The maximum efficiency I believe is 1-1/n, n being the number of steps (and requiring n-1 capacitors). But the capacitors themselves must each be an order of magnitude larger than the adiabatic circuit itself. So it's a reasonable performance match for an adiabatic circuit running at "max" frequency, with e.g. 8 steps/7 capacitors, but 100x power reduction necessary to match a "slowed" adiabatic circuit would require 99 capacitors... which quickly becomes infeasible!

Thanks for the reply, was actually hoping you'd pop over here.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything. Yes, without reverse circuits you are limited to quasi-adiabatic operaton. But, at least in the architectures I'm familiar with (mainly PFAL), most of the losses are unarguably resistive. As I understand PFAL, it's only when the operating voltage of a given gate drops below Vth that the (macro) information gets lost and reversibility provides benefit, which is only a fraction of the switching cycle. At least for PFAL the figure is somewhere in the 20% range IIRC. (I say "macro" because of course the true energy of information is much smaller than the amounts we're talking about.)

The "20%" in my comment I meant in the multiplicative sense, not additive. I.e. going from 79% savings to 83.2%, not 99%. (I realize that wasn't clear.)

What I find interesting is reversibility isn't actually necessary for true adiabatic operation. All that matters is the information of where charge needs to be recovered from can be derived somehow. This could come from information available elsewhere in the circuit, not necessarily the subsequent computations reversed. (Thankfully, quantum non-duplication does not apply here!)

I agree that energy per operation is often more meaningful, BUT one must not lose sight of the lower bounds on clock speed imposed by a particular workload.

Ah thanks for the insight into the resonator/switched-cap tradeoff. Yes, capacitative switching designs which are themselves adiabatic I know is a bit of a research topic. In my experience the losses aren't comparable to the resistive losses of the adiabatic circuitry itself though. (I've done SPICE simulations using the sky130 process.)

Possibly, that's an interesting thought. The main benefit of adiabatics as I see them is that, all else being equal, a process improvement of the RC figure can be used to enable either an increase in operating frequency or a decrease in power usage (this is reflected as the additional factor of fRC in the power equation). With traditional CMOS, this only can benefit operating frequency -- power usage is independent of the RC product per se. Supercondition (or near-superconduction) is essentially a huge improvement in RC which wouldn't be able to be realized as an increase in operating frequency due to speed of light limitations, so adiabatics would see an outsize benefit in that case.

Yes a similar analysis is where the above expression f²RC²V² comes from.

Essentially -- (and I'm probably missing a factor of 2 or 3 somewhere as I'm on my phone and don't have reference materials) -- in an adiabatic circuit the unavoidable power loss for any individual transistor stems from current (I) flowing through that transistor's channel (a resistor R) on its way to and from another transistor's gate (a capacitor C). So that's I²R unavoidable power dissipation.

I must be sufficient to fill and then discharge the capacitor to/from operating voltage (V) in the time of one cycle (1/f). So I=2fCV. Substituting this gives 4f²RC²V².

Compare to traditional CMOS, wherein the gate capacitance C is charged through R from a voltage source V. It can be shown that this dissipates ½CV² of energy though the resistor in the process, and the capacitor is filled with an equal amount of energy. Discharging then dissipates this energy through the same resistor. Repeat this every cycle for a total power usage of fCV².

Divide these two figures and we find that adiabatic circuits use 4fRC times as much energy as traditional CMOS. However, f must be less than about 1/(5RC) for a CMOS circuit to function at all (else the capacitors don't charge sufficiently during a cycle) so this is always power savings in favor of adiabatics. And notably, decreasing f of an adiabatic circuit from the maximum permissible for CMOS on the same process increases the efficiency gain proportionally.

(N.B., I feel like I missed a factor of 2 somewhere as this analysis differs slightly from my memory. I'll return with corrections if I find an error.)

The reverse computing is independent of the energy storage mechanism. It's used to "remember" how to route the energy for recovery.

Nice, these ideas have been around for a long time but never commercialized to my knowledge. I've done some experiments in this area with simulations and am currently designing some test circuitry to be fabbed via Tiny Tapeout.

Reversibility isn't actually necessary for most of the energy savings. It saves you an extra maybe 20% beyond what adiabatic techniques can do on their own. Reason being, the energy of the information itself pales in comparison to the resistive losses which dominate the losses in adiabatic circuits, and it's actually a (device-dependent) portion of these resistive losses which the reversible aspect helps to recover, not the energy of information itself.

I'm curious why Frank chose to go with a resonance-based power-clock, instead of a switched-capacitor design. In my experience the latter are nearly as efficient (losses are still dominated by resistive losses in the powered circuit itself), and are more flexible as they don't need to be tuned to the resonance of the device. (Not to mention they don't need an inductor.) My guess would be that, despite requiring an on-die inductor, the overall chip area required is much less than that of a switched-capacitor design. (You only need one circuit's worth of capacitance, vs. 3 or more for a switched design, which quadruples your die size....)

I'm actually somewhat skeptical of the 4000x claim though. Adiabatic circuits can typically only provide about a single order of magnitude power savings over traditional CMOS -- they still have resistive losses, they just follow a slightly different equation (f²RC²V², vs. fCV²). But RC and C are figures of merit for a given silicon process, and fRC (a dimensionless figure) is constrained by the operational principles of digital logic to the order of 0.1, which in turn constrains the power savings to that order of magnitude regardless of process. Where you can find excess savings though is simply by reducing operating frequency. Adiabatic circuits benefit more from this than traditional CMOS. Which is great if you're building something like a GPU which can trade clock frequency for core count.

In the Boston area at least, the role Starbucks used to play has been fully supplanted by Caffè Nero. In my town the two are right next to each other and the difference is stark. The Caffè Nero feels like a cozy study with comfortable seating, dim lighting, and pleasant decor. The Starbucks has full-on highway rest stop vibes.

Yes, I might naturally say "It's no longer going to run as smoothly." But, to me, phrasing it as "It's going to run much less smoothly" adds to the humor by suggesting that it will to _some_ degree still run "smoothly" (when in fact it won't run at all).

All four sound fine to my native ears. "It's going to run ..." is most natural when talking about a vehicle. (French if I recall does not distinguish "working" from "running" for machines generally.)

The Apple //e version absolutely saved and loaded the tree. I played it just last month with my niece and nephew and it loaded the same ridiculous questions my sister and I had inputted as children 30 years ago.

Rebalancing is not possible not due to code restrictions but due to the nature of the game. How could the program know what new labels to invent for the inner nodes of the rebalanced tree? Unlike integers, animals are not totally ordered.

Seconding this. It's entirely likely the registrar is this petty and boneheaded. It's less likely that their boss is though, this is a really bad look for the university.

Personally I would find a way to contact the president of the university (possibly through university PR, who also care about public image) and simply state,

"The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I develop software for them in exchange to restore my ability to register for classes."

and include a screenshot of that communication.

Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes, then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no valid reason that you should be barred from registering for courses, and also buys you some time.

Please don't use the word "autistic" as a slur.

Then what is the purpose of the diatomaceous earth?

The GP's post implies some sort of causal relationship between placing the cover on the mattress and the bugs then being forced to crawl over the DE. I still do not see what the relationship is.

I'm very confused, if the bed bugs are in/on the mattress, and you enclose the mattress in a cover, how do the bed bugs get out of the cover?

Yes, mathematically telephoto is exactly just cropped wide angle. The same light field is falling on the front element of either lens so, modulo focus effects and distortion, it could not be otherwise.

(Differing projections/distortions such as fisheye are likewise exactly equivalent to mathematical transforms for the same reason.)

You can see that this is true when using a (physical) zoom lens. When zooming, there is no change in the projected image of any sort other than it simply grows larger.

The effect you are referring to is complementary to parallax and is likewise due exactly to physical proximity to or distance from the subject being photographed. (Telephoto lenses require the subject to be further away to remain in the frame; in doing so, they move relatively closer to the background, thus longitudinally compressing the scene.)

Note also that the modern "UTC epoch" is January 1, 1972. Before this date, UTC used a different second than TAI: [1]

> As an intermediate step at the end of 1971, there was a final irregular jump of exactly 0.107758 TAI seconds, making the total of all the small time steps and frequency shifts in UTC or TAI during 1958–1971 exactly ten seconds, so that 1 January 1972 00:00:00 UTC was 1 January 1972 00:00:10 TAI exactly, and a whole number of seconds thereafter. At the same time, the tick rate of UTC was changed to exactly match TAI. UTC also started to track UT1 rather than UT2.

So Unix times in the years 1970 and 1971 do not actually match UTC times from that period. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#His...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#UTC_basis

Maybe (I was raised Catholic), but I also attended a wake of a teacher of mine who was Jewish (culturally if not religiously). Thinking more now, where I'm from (northeast US), "wake" and "calling hours" are synonymous, whereas they might not be in other parts of the world. So I may be perpetuating some confusion of terms.

Oh interesting! My background is northeast US; the wake (a.k.a. calling hours) precedes the funeral, typically the evening prior. There's no food, it's not religious (held at the funeral home), and well-wishers stop by for the reasons you mentioned. There's a sign-up sheet for those who will be attending the funeral.

There is also a reception at a restaurant immediately after the funeral; this is almost strictly for close friends and family though.

I'm surprised in all this discussion not to see the distinction between a wake and a funeral.

The advice I've heard is, go to a wake to support those who are grieving, go to a funeral to grieve yourself.

(For this reason, the wake is held at more "convenient" hours.)

Do others make this distinction? Is the practice of holding a separate wake a regional/cultural thing?