gary_0

The Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage and routes around it[0]. Instead, it is interpreted it as an opportunity to raise the barrier of entry for competitors, and embraced.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activi...

If all you're interested in is which extensions have been infected:

Compromised OpenVSX Extensions:

    codejoy.codejoy-vscode-extension@1.8.3
    codejoy.codejoy-vscode-extension@1.8.4
    l-igh-t.vscode-theme-seti-folder@1.2.3
    kleinesfilmroellchen.serenity-dsl-syntaxhighlight@0.3.2
    JScearcy.rust-doc-viewer@4.2.1
    SIRILMP.dark-theme-sm@3.11.4
    CodeInKlingon.git-worktree-menu@1.0.9
    CodeInKlingon.git-worktree-menu@1.0.91
    ginfuru.better-nunjucks@0.3.2
    ellacrity.recoil@0.7.4
    grrrck.positron-plus-1-e@0.0.71
    jeronimoekerdt.color-picker-universal@2.8.91
    srcery-colors.srcery-colors@0.3.9
    sissel.shopify-liquid@4.0.1
    TretinV3.forts-api-extention@0.3.1

Compromised Microsoft VSCode Extensions:

    cline-ai-main.cline-ai-agent@3.1.3

Some of SSE is required as part of the x86_64 ABI, and also new versions of Windows (infamously, now) add required CPU extensions so software will often base its requirements on that. And SSE4x is ubiquitous enough (99% of PCs) that some software/games will just require it and simply crash if it can't use those instructions.

Oh man, I forgot about doing vector math using OpenGL textures as "hardware acceleration". And it would be many more years before it was reasonable to require a GPU with programmable shaders; having to support fixed-function was a fact of life for most of the 2000's.

Yes. The earliest consumer PC 3D graphics cards just rasterized pre-transformed triangles and that's it; the CPU had to do pretty much all the math (but drawing the pixels was considered the hard part). Later, "Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L)" was introduced circa 2000 by cards like the GeForce 256.

A good explanation of branch prediction: https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/

The article is talking about OoO which is why I mentioned it. My point is that branch prediction and speculative execution are different things. You can do speculative execution without a branch predictor (run both branches and throw out the one that's wrong).

> This is called branch prediction, it has been the source of many fun security issues...

No, that's speculative execution you just described. Branch prediction was implemented long before out-of-order CPUs were a thing, as you need branch prediction to make the most of pipelining (eg. fetching and decoding a new instruction while you're still executing the previous one--if you predict branches, you're more likely to keep the pipeline full).

OpenGL doesn't really have "2D stuff" (at least not in any version from the last 20 years). It's all a programmable 3D pipeline, which you can do 2D in by just not using the Z coordinate in the shader. However, doing 2D graphics like this tends to be simple enough code that you're less likely to trigger any driver or performance issues.

Oh yeah, the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" Slashdot meme! I miss those days. At least the "can it run Doom?" meme is still alive and kicking.

Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.

Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.

The problem is that the standard library function is specified to be blocking (and it's in userspace, so io_uring is not relevant). It's quite possible to do a non-blocking DNS lookup but you have to use a separate non-standard library (like c-ares).

[deleted]

A better headline might be "OpenAI research suggests reducing hallucinations is possible but may not be economical".

`apt search libgtk` on Linux Mint 21.2 doesn't show it. Only versions 2, 3 and 4.

Searching https://pkgs.org says that most distros don't have a gtk 1 package... except for Slackware!

Of course not, expert systems were abandoned decades ago for good reason. But LLMs are only one kind of ANN. Unfortunately, when all you have is a hammer...

Determining a statement's truth (or if it's outside the system's knowledge) is an old problem in machine intelligence, with whole subfields like knowledge graphs and such, and it's NOT a problem LLMs were originally meant to address at all.

LLMs are text generators that are very good at writing a book report based on a prompt and the patterns learned from the training corpus, but it's an entirely separate problem to go through that book report statement by statement and determine if each one is true/false/unknown. And that problem is one that the AI field has already spent 60 years on, so there's a lot of hubris in assuming you can just solve that and bolt it onto the side of GPT-5 by next quarter.

The existence of SIMD has knock-on effects on the design of the execution unit and the FPUs, though, since it's usually the only way to fully utilize them for float/arithmetic workloads. And newer SIMD features like AVX/AVX2 have a pretty big effect on the whole CPU design; it was widely reported that Intel and AMD went to a lot of trouble to make it viable, even though most software probably isn't even compiled with AVX support enabled.

Also SIMD is just one example. Modern DMA controllers are probably another good example but I know less about them (although I did try some weird things with the one in the Raspberry Pi). Or niche OS features like shared memory--pipes are usually all you need, and don't break the multitasking paradigm, but in the few cases where shared memory is needed it speeds things up tremendously.

> device physics for cheaper, smaller

And lower power usage. Datacenters and mobile devices will always want that.

> Only a small portion of software is going to be able to be properly annotated to take advantage of this

The same could be said for, say, SIMD/vectorization, which 99% of ordinary application code has no use for, but it quietly provides big performance benefits whenever you resample an image, or use a media codec, or display 3D graphics, or run a small AI model on the CPU, etc. There are lots of performance microfeatures like this that may or may not be worth it to include in a system, but just because they are only useful in certain very specific cases does not mean they should be dismissed out of hand. Sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze (and sometimes not, but you can't know for sure unless you put it out into the world and see if people use it).

I can't think of a C++ project I've worked on that didn't rely on being able to include C headers and have things usually just work. Are there ways of banning C macros from "modular" C++ without breaking that? (Many would find it unacceptable if you had to go through every C dependency and write/generate some sort of wrapper.)

It was a pretty huge disruption, though, even though the damage wasn't fatal.

I meant "quick buck" like flooding the place with ads, tracking, dark patterns, closing the API/protocol, or doing some sort of crypto scam, with no regard for the platform's long-term health. It's been funded for a few years? That's not really that long for such a small team. But I have no idea how their investors think it might make "Facebook money", and isn't that always the goal?

Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother).

Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.

There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. I do think the geeks currently running Bluesky are sincere in keeping it decentralized, but the money people will someday probably force them out and squeeze the user base for a quick buck. A hardcore nerd minority will splinter off, though, and keep the decentralized version running, so whatever. History repeats. Frog swims, scorpion stings.

It can't access most Microsoft online services including Copilot, which happens to disable most of the features I don't want. (I understand this is both by design, as well as because Microsoft forbids unofficial forks from doing so.)

I couldn't get it to properly syntax highlight and autosuggest even after spending over an hour hunting through all sorts of terrible documentation for kate, clangd, etc. It also completely hides all project files that aren't in source control, and the only way to stop it is to disable the git plugin. What a nightmare. Maybe I'll try VSCodium next.

I would love more keyboard options! If I could have a laptop with a keyboard more like a standard tenkeyless, I would be over the moon. In the meantime, I'll have to see about hacking the standard keyboard somehow, although there's no fixing those arrow keys.

Unmatched by Intel, who have been failing for a decade, so there was no competition? They mostly won by default. And Apple's chips are giving them a run for their money. If Apple sold plain CPUs that weren't locked to their software (they never will, but hypothetically) then AMD would let themselves slide into 2nd place again.

That really makes three companies that are happy to concede to nVidia, because Apple could definitely challenge nVidia if they wanted to.

Note: I'm not saying that AMD sucks, just that their corporate culture prevents them from being very ambitious.