xirbeosbwo1234

That's not quite accurate. Every core has access to the entire L3, including the L3 on an entirely different socket. CPUs communicate through caches, so if a core just plain couldn't talk to another core's cache then cache coherency algorithms wouldn't work. Though a core can access the entire cache, the latency is higher when going off-die. It is really high when going to another socket.

The first generation of Epyc had a complicated hierarchy that made latency quite hard to predict, but the new architecture is simpler. A CPU can talk to a cache in the same package but on a different die with reasonably low latency.

(I don't have numbers. Still reading.)

First off, it's not a direct comparison. The Epyc has one L3 cache per chiplet. This means that latency is not uniform across the entire L3 cache. This was a serious concern on the first generation of Epyc, where accessing L3 could take anywhere from zero to three hops across an internal network. AMD has greatly improved the problem on the more recent generations by switching to a star topology with more predictable latency.

That said, there are two major reasons:

1. Epyc is on a chiplet architecture. Large chips are harder to make than small ones. Building two 200mm^2 chips is cheaper than building one 400mm^2 chip. Since Epyc has a chiplet architecture, this means they can put more silicon into a chip for the same price. This means that Epyc can be just plain bigger than the competition. This comes with some complexity and inefficiency but has, so far, paid off in spades for them.

2. Epyc is on a newer process. This means AMD can fit more transistors even with the same area. Intel has had serious problems with their newer processes, so this is not an advantage AMD expected to have when designing the part. The use of a cutting-edge process was, in part, enabled by the chiplet architecture. It is possible to fabricate several small chips on a 7nm process even though one large chip would be prohibitively expensive, and AMD has been able to use a 14nm process in parts of the CPU that wouldn't benefit from a 7nm process to cut costs.

The first point is serious cleverness on the part of AMD. The second point is mostly that Intel dropped the ball.

>Tesla is leagues ahead if I’m not mistaken

You are. Pretty much every other manufacturer offers adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, and the like. They're just honest about their capabilities.

It's a shame that the necessary work of criticizing our media is so often undertaken dishonestly.

>When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties

This is not what happened.

Donald Trump denied that the Saudi royalty was known to be behind the murder of Khashoggi despite the conclusions of U.S. intelligence. He was part of the coverup, obscuring the known facts to preserve his relationship with bin Salman. Joe Biden, on the other hand, said bin Salman was responsible for his murder but decided not to penalize him.

Both of those decisions are unacceptable to me. That does not make them the same.

Say what you will about the New York Times, but they rarely tell lies as brazenly as Mr. Taibbi.

I certainly question the orthodox view that software should be fault-tolerant and horizontally-scalable. If programmer time is more valuable than machine time, then why can't my team get a single server with a few TiB of RAM and a few hundred cores and forget all the gnarly problems of distributed computing? Why do we accept that our hardware is unrelaible and then spend so much effort making our software tolerate failure?

I do not know whether or not mainframes are the right solution, though. I don't really know anything about them. I don't know whether or not the architecture is the correct approach.

>IBM has grown usage as measured by MIPS, a method of calculating the raw speed used, by 350% over the past ten years.

That's an awful metric. MIPS isn't even a good way of measuring aggregate performance and aggregate performance is a terrible way of measuring adoption.

This does not, by the way, imply that the machines are working correctly and human drivers are the problem. These cars are rear-ended more often than human drivers, which suggests they stop more suddenly or at times humans don't expect.

Slamming on the brakes is a flaw. Even if every car on the road had the ability to respond instantly to the car ahead, being forced to brake hard still risks loss of control especially in bad conditions.

Also, having automatic emergency braking on all vehicles is at least decades out. It will never work on motorcycles or scooters or bicycles, period. It cannot be retrofitted onto existing cars. Requiring it for all new cars would require pretty hamfisted regulations. I expect human drivers to be widespread for at least the rest of my life.

The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents.

OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip over the numbers during the game.

Well, Gates is a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world's leading expert on everything. He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization, yet he seems to actually believe he's a Great Scientist Using Evidence-Based Approaches to Save the World. He lives in a $200 million house yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous.

I laugh at Elon Musk when he thinks getting fired from Paypal means he knows how to run a car company. I also laugh at Bill Gates when he thinks stealing the worst desktop operating system makes him a doctor.

We can't overthrow our masters. At least let us make fun of them.

The misinformation about Prop. 47 is stunning to me. It did not change anything relating to violent crime, nor did it make petty theft legal. Petty theft is still punishable by jail time. Robbery is still a felony.

What it actually did is raise the line between misdemeanor and felony theft from $450 to $950.

And the market agrees with you! Spending $1.5 billion on Bitcoin during the middle of a massive speculative bubble is just the sort of responsible leadership investors want to see in these uncertain times. That's why Tesla's stock has been as rock-solid as Bitcoin since they announced their purchase.

I don't think anyone sensible would claim they would never have made this mistake. It's not even surprising that it made it to production. What is surprising is that it lead to a massive and easily-diagnosable slowdown that no one bothered to fix for several years.

>Only for rational numbers. Doesn't work for real and complex numbers.

Complex numbers aren't really relevant, in my opinion, because they are usually introduced as an extension of the rules for reals and polynomials. To multiply two complex numbers, you can totally forget that i is imaginary, do the multiplication as if it's just an ordinary variable, then substitute "i" back in. But that relies on being able to multiply polynomials, which would be difficult to define in terms of repeated multiplication.

To some extent all of mathematics is a lie. We can do multiplication on the reals because we have decided that it's allowed. It is reasonable to define multiplication at first as repeated addition and then define a way to extend that to the reals that is consistent with the first definition.

It suffers from all the same problems. The only advantage it has is that they chose a slightly larger arbitrary constant. It still does not and can not scale. One order of magnitude makes little difference when we're dealing with something that is four orders of magnitude slower and four orders of magnitude more power-hungry than the competition.

100 maximum transactions per second is still orders of magnitude too low to be useful on a daily basis outside of niche uses (read: drugs). Ten minutes confirmation time is still orders of magnitude worse than credit cards or cash.

Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV.

The browser can (and should) totally disregard what the webpage says if the user tells it to. The default should never be "break websites without asking the user".

Because we have people pretending it's new so they can drum up outrage and gain power. Because we have people playing the victim after being fired for being intolerable to work with.

Most importantly, we have politicians adopting authoritarian attitudes as a reaction to it. Private companies have a right to "cancel" whomever they want, whether that takes the form of banning someone from a website or of canceling a contract. Yet certain politicians want to interfere in private websites or publishers by limiting their ability to exercise editorial control.

I don't know the situation across the pond. I'm writing from an American perspective, where the term "cancel culture" has been entirely co-opted by cynical politicians.

It is amazing to me that people have fallen for the propaganda that Tesla is a battery company. They buy their batteries from the same companies as everyone else.

Tesla doesn't make its own batteries. That is the fact. Anything else is bluster.

What sort of engineer ignores inefficiency on the order of six to eight orders of magnitude? Being a hacker is about creativity and innovation, sure, but it's also about knowing when something is total junk and should be discarded. If you heard people lambasting COBOL or CORBA or Windows 95 when they were new, would you criticize them for their "lack of vision"?

Even if I were optimistic about cryptocurrency, I would be opposed to places like Coinbase. The whole point is supposedly to get rid of banks and replace them with cryptography. Coinbase is building the same old banking system all over again, but with slower databases and regulation set back to the 1930s.

I would be much happier if there were no innovation. Instead of just wasting electricity, we are wasting lives and minds. We have teams designing custom silicon to print Bitcoin. At least it's better than them working for Google, I suppose.

A "mine" is just a big warehouse full of jerry-rigged infrastructure. It will employ maybe two people and will pack up shop in an afternoon if the owners find cheaper electricity elsewhere. It doesn't provide any value to the local economy.

Surprise, surprise: it's full of child porn.

I very much like these sorts of P2P projects. I hate the fact that all of them come with a pointless cryptocurrency bolted on. Bittorrent has worked beautifully for pirates for going on twenty years without one.

>I wonder why that is?

Because it tops out at four transactions per second while consuming as much power as Argentina. It's not rocket science.

>I wonder what will change the opinion of the skeptics?

All of the following are necessary but not sufficient:

1. Bitcoin users must panic when Bitcoin experiences deflation rather than celebrating it going TO THE MOOOOOON!

2. Someone has to find a way to make it scale.

3. Tether must be audited.

"And <your name> criticized the Reason article, accused its author of dissembling, and called monarchists and race realists names."

The NYT article is perfectly fair. It states that Scott Alexander has sharply criticized neoreactionaries, which is true. It states that he has been a frequent critic of so-called SJWs and has written about possible genetic causes of some of the racial and sexual inequities we see in society, which is also true. Those things are part of the story. You are the one trying to leave them out.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but there actually isn't anything to see. Plug-in hybrids blow any EV out of the water and will do so the foreseeable future. They're cheaper, lighter, just as efficient on short trips, and much more practical on long trips.

Hybrid vehicles are the practical option today. Pure gasoline vehicles are outmoded and EVs are all hype.

>If your view is that you and Cade Metz do not use pejorative language

I use pejorative language and make no apology for it. You seem to dislike pejorative language but seem to make an exception for the pejoratives in the Reason article.

Cade Metz did not use any pejoratives. Everything he wrote was correct and presented in context. His coverage of SSC varied between measured and glowing. I do even vaguely understand how someone could take it as an attack. It is fair in its coverage of Scott Alexander and far kinder to the Rationalists than they deserve.

Oh, cut the crap. The whole Reason article is accusing Metz of acting in bad faith, calling his writing a "lazy hit piece that actively misleads readers", etc.

I called the Reason article a misrepresentation and I called Eliezer Yudkowsky a crackpot. If you're going to criticize me for saying that, then why are you leaving the Reason article alone? Cade Metz did not engage in name-calling and didn't use any pejorative language, so why are you criticizing him?

Am I ineffective for saying that? Maybe. But I'm also right. I don't particularly mind if you dislike my tone.

Also, "monarchist" isn't an insult. It's the word we use for people who think we should have a king. People like the neoreactionaries who have a strange tendency to pop up in rationalist circles.

I am a long-time reader of Slate Star Codex and was a self-described Rationalist in my teenage years. I am still active in effective altruism circles.

I consider the article entirely fair. In fact, you will see that pretty much all I am doing in this thread is telling people to read the original article. Its treatment of SSC is evenhanded and, at times, downright glowing. It says everything I want to say more eloquently than I am able.

The only problem I have with it is the title.

Here ya go:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...

What did I write that's untrue?

Not everyone in Silicon Valley is a rationalist, but pretty much all Rationalists are in Silicon Valley. Some big names in Silicon Valley are central figures in the movement.

EDIT: To be clear, I don't know what the geographic distribution of Rationalists is. I also don't care. The fact of the matter is that the movement is irrelevant everywhere except Silicon Valley, and within Silicon Valley it is fairly powerful with several prominent adherents. This is spelled out in the New York Times article and its citations.

>"Aligned with race realists and monarchists (?)" Definitely not.

Definitely yes. Ever heard of Moldbug? The dude who claimed the rule of Leopold II (yes, that Leopold II) would be better than our current government?

I am not claiming that they are the same movement, but the Dark Enlightenment is closely related to the Rationalist movement. There is a great deal of cross-pollination.

The New York Times article is a great jumping-off point to read about this connection! It has several relevant links, including this one that explicitly discusses the monarchists:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/

Yuck! What a ridiculous misrepresentation of the New York Times article.

Go read it yourself. I think most people here are familiar enough with the "Rationalist" movement to be able to judge it on its own merits.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...

The Rationalist movement is deeply weird. It has curious connections with "race realists" and monarchists. It is deeply insular and rarely survives contact with mainstream scholarship. Eliezer Yudkowsky and other central figures are total crackpots. Any discussion of the movement that leaves those parts out is dishonest.

The title is stupid. I'll give 'em that.