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A similar note that gave me pause. (I eventually pulled the trigger and bought a model 3 but it took me a looong time.)

- I want to be able to hook up a small, efficient generator, maybe as a back-mounted module. But Teslas can't be charged while in motion.

(I don't want to _own_ such a generator. I want to rent one for long distance trips. Preferably one that uses 100% Ethanol or some other carbon neutral fuel. You get the point.)

soundson Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209117119

soundson HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silicon Macs

I replied to this post: "Apple diverges from standard 64-bit ARM architecture in specific ways"

I know about Apple Silicon's total store ordering mode and other matrix extensions.

When the poster wrote "Apple diverges from standard 64-bit ARM architecture in specific ways" I expected the link to have more information on the Apple Silicon, but found it was just ABI information.

See for yourself -

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm6...

soundson HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silicon Macs

I replied to this post: "Apple diverges from standard 64-bit ARM architecture in specific ways"

I know about Apple Silicon's total store ordering mode and other matrix extensions.

When the poster wrote "Apple diverges from standard 64-bit ARM architecture in specific ways" I expected the link to have more information on the Apple Silicon, but found it was just ABI information.

See for yourself -

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm6...

soundson HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silicon Macs

I mean, that page only describes ABI differences. I was thinking I would find ARM architecture differences in the silicon. I understand that the ABI is considered part of the specification for 64-bit ARM silicon.

soundson iPhone 14 Pro faced 'unprecedented' setback leading to removal of new GPU

Piling on the speculation, the dynamic power draw when raytracing was enabled, especially the memory access patterns - and the poor performance in spite of the increased power draw - might have been the final blow.

But if an entire h/w project is punted to "the next release" there's more than just one feature that contributed. So maybe the halo feature, raytracing, plus the other new Metal 3 features all contributed?

soundson Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

Reduction in e-waste and reduction in forced obsolescence: the more open this secure element is, the more it sets a standard. Then that creates a robust ecosystem around it.

(For example, see the Raspberry Pi which helped spur an ecosystem. Also, even the original Pi 1 can still be useful today.)

Those secure elements in credit cards (Java Card platform) and cell phones (SIM) have an open standard. This is natural growth in that standard.

soundson Nuclear power is too slow

Perhaps there's the possibility of nuclear power by direct conversion to electricity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion#Trave...

soundson The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point

Blender gets a small shout out at the end, for completeness.

In my opinion Godot and Blender are symptomatic of the future, and also need healthy competitors.

soundson Update on Vulkan video decoding vith open-source AMD driver RADV

Vulkan adds new features by first adding an extension for the feature.

Then a later version of "mainline Vulkan" will upgrade those optional extensions to include them in the non-optional API. Even then, the feature underneath it is often optional, but the API to support it is built in, leaving it up to the app to check some feature bits before using it.

Specifically the vulkan extensions that Dave Airlie has implemented for AMD GPUs from TONGA to NAVI2x are:

   VK_KHR_video_queue
   VK_KHR_video_decode_queue
   VK_EXT_video_decode_h264
   VK_EXT_video_decode_h265

But he notes that the implementation work isn't done. It's just getting started.

soundson Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

Our solution has been to uninstall Chrome. Firefox, and when unavoidable, DuckDuckGo's private browser, are doing fine.

soundson Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux

How would Apple corporate priorities shift from their current strategy of removing all GPL code? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990

soundson Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps

Serious and thoughtful question here, since this may sound flippant -

Could the Apple ecosystem of devices be the factor that enables the distribution of market caps? (Very interesting point, by the way)

I wonder if it explains the somewhat odd gap in the middle of the China market cap distribution, since Android absolutely dominates the China market at the tail end and Apple dominates at the high end.

Apple conflates their walled garden with the high perceived value of their devices, which I'm intentionally ignoring for the purpose of this question.

soundson FTC restores rigorous enforcement of law banning unfair methods of competition

"It is under the word government, that the subtle danger lurks. Understood as a central consolidated power, managing and directing the various general interests of the society, all government is evil, and the parent of evil."

"A strong and active democratic government, in the common sense of the term, is an evil, differing only in degree and mode of operation, and not in nature, from a strong despotism."

This past century, common thought may have shifted to a more "dangerous evil" definition versus the original sense of "unenlightened, capricious will," nevertheless it is indeed a pleasant surprise that the FTC would act in a more "enlightened" (my opinion) or "long overdue" response to corporate misbehavior.

soundson Seeing through hardware counters: a journey to threefold performance increase

JDK-8180450 is probably affecting my performance as well. https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8180450

Hopefully with a client as large as this, it gets addressed.

soundson For its big comeback, Intel needs to spend money, and it's making less and less

I model it like a sovereign default risk, only the sovereign is a corporation.

soundson I have come to bury the BIOS, not to open it [video]

I see the sibling comment, so here's my two cents -

I wonder if there's some confusion because LinuxBoot is being talked about relative to Oxide. LinuxBoot isn't trying to do that.

It was originally a project called "LinuxBIOS" at Los Alamos National Labs to get their supercomputer to boot up in a reasonable amount of time. Once the team started down the path of "rip out the legacy BIOS" they discovered that a lot of things become simpler.

LinuxBoot was written with the goal of booting up the machine to GRUB, like this:

(CPU Reset) > LinuxBIOS > GRUB > Linux

See the description of this video (though the video is worth the watch): https://vimeo.com/724454408 "Why Linux? Because firmware always evolves to become an operating system. Rather than wait for evolution to take its course, LANL decided to save some time and use Linux as the BIOS: hence LinuxBIOS."

-----

And the answer to your question: "could you start booting up userland directly?" I think if the LinuxBoot authors were around they would mention something about how constrained the on-board flash chip is (SPI Flash). There's room for LinuxBoot and maybe GRUB, but there is not room for all the drivers needed to get to userland.

soundson Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

The swarm eventually gets abandoned as new users can't reach 100% completion?

soundson AMD Ryzen 7000 Series performs better with Spectre V2 Mitigations enabled

I would guess it's probably physics. Specifically the complexity of the signal path routing for the predictor core must be pretty heavily optimized, and probably are where AMD (and Intel) have invested heavily in advanced design software - their secret sauce - to push the chip right to the edge of what semiconductor physics can achieve.

The branch predictor is one of the most highly optimized pieces of the CPU core. Lots of discussion has been had about how the arm architecture's frontend is simpler, so for example Apple's chips have way more execution units. Intel and AMD's latest designs have also expanded the number of execution units, but the frontend instruction decode and dispatch is the "serial" part of the process, reading the incoming instruction stream. And the x86 instruction set is hard to decode, with a lot of variation in the number of bytes per instruction. So for the instruction decoder to even know there's a branch coming up is a "hard problem," and then it predicts which way the branch will go.

soundson You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now

In all fairness, a forum thread would collect a bunch of anecdata but is not an official way to request a sale.

If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.

soundson John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)

Just hypothetical 3D curved spaces here, not saying this has any physical reality -

If the X axis curves into Y (i.e. wraps around the Z axis) and also has a slight negative Z component (i.e. to move in a helical fashioin) each of those curvatures would mean a line segment eventually intersected itself.

It's the nature of the curvature: the space is not sheared (like a rhombus), it is curved (like latitude and longitude), which is why the line segment eventually intersects itself.

soundson John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)

> Does the author essentially mean that the smaller universe still had only a part of it observable?

No, I think John C. Mather there is focused wholly on the concept of infinity. So even if the whole observable universe (30 billion light-years across) got squished to the size of a golf ball, the whole universe (infinity light-years across) would still be infinite, because multiplying infinity by some small constant still equals infinity.

soundson John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)

> if I understand the whole comment right, a curved universe is guaranteed to have an edge, but with a non-curved one it's a toss-up because no one knows what it would look like.

A curved universe doesn't "have an edge," I'm referring to Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry [1]. As in, if the curvature is truly and perfectly zero, then the space-time we live in goes on forever. If it has even the tiniest curvature, then it curves back onto itself and is non-Euclidean.

If it is truly and perfectly zero, then all I'm trying to say is that it goes on forever like an "ideal" 2D plane or 3D space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(geometry)

soundson John C. Mather: “There is no first moment of time” (2017)

I'm going to skip the more philosophical part of your question. Or in other words, if you're asking, "is there any observable evidence of something outside the observable universe?" My answer is: no comment at this time.

If you're asking, "what did John C. Mather mean in talking about the edge of the universe?" I'm not John C. Mather, but here's my guess --

The curvature of the universe [1] has been computed from distortion of the Cosmic Micrwave Background and independently using other measurements.

The current consensus is that the universe is indistinguishable from a flat universe. [2]

A curved universe would have an edge, meaning there's a limit to how much could be observed. If it's x light-years until you wrap around the universe, then plant an observer into this universe at a time greater than x years and that observer (if lucky) could observe the same things in two directions by seeing "all the way around the universe."

A curved universe might lead to a "big crunch" since the curvature of space-time is caused by the quantity of matter, or not. Depends on if the matter is tightly packed enough.

A flat universe has no limit -- no matter how far in the future you plant an observer, the speed of light is not fast enough for them to observe the entire observable universe.

There's a relationship between the curvature of the universe, how dense the universe is (how densely packed the matter is), and how fast the universe is expanding (the Hubble Constant). It's likely the universe is flat, implying that the Hubble Constant is on the high end of possible values.

[1] http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/beginners/curvature.html

[2] https://astrobites.org/2020/12/03/cosmic-clocks/

soundson Mesh Shading for Vulkan

Nah, nobody writes raw Vulkan for every new implementation.

It'll show up somewhere and then everyone will copy/paste it. Or github copilot it - which is the same thing...

soundson Mesh Shading for Vulkan

I'm pretty excited as well. This is another big step away from legacy hardware that implemented the OpenGL 1.0 API in the hardware. In case that sounds judgmental, it was awesome back in the 3dfx Voodoo days to have this kind of hardware.

What's really great here is that DirectX 12 (and now Vulkan too) allow the engine to access the underlying GPU hardware without this legacy baggage.

Apple Metal 3.0 will also support mesh shaders.

soundson Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds

Pretty much overheating something, leading to a relatively boring shutdown and a long, potentially costly repair.

soundson SpaceX, T-Mobile to connect satellites to cellphones in remote areas

I think it's a long bet that eventually cell phones will replace the dish (user terminal).

soundson Tell HN: Godaddy canceled my domain, gave me 2h to respond, then charged €150

Nearlyfreespeech.net is a potential choice (not for everyone, but the HN audience seems apt)

soundson The hacking of Starlink terminals has begun

At 40km to 100km altitude the debris will fall out of the sky in short order (under a year).