𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

  • 20 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Oh wow, so we are in kinda similar places but from vastly different paths and capabilities. Back before I was disabled I was a rather extreme outlier of a car enthusiast, like I painted (owned) ported and machined professionally. I was really good with carburetors, but had a chance to get some specially made direct injection race heads with mechanical injector ports in the combustion chamber… I knew some of the Hilborn guys… real edgy race stuff. I was looking at building a supercharged motor with a mini blower and a very custom open source Megasquirt fuel injection setup using a bunch of hacked parts from some junkyard Mercedes direct injection Bosch diesel cars. I had no idea how complex computing and microcontrollers are, but I figured it couldn’t be much worse than how I had figured out all automotive systems and mechanics. After I was disabled 11 years ago riding a bicycle to work while the heads were off of my Camaro, I got into Arduino and just trying to figure out how to build sensors and gauges. I never fully recovered from the broken neck and back, but am still chipping away at compute. Naturally, I started with a mix of digital functionality and interfacing with analog.

    From this perspective, I don’t really like API like interfaces. I often have trouble wrapping my head around them. I want to know what is actually happening under the hood. I have a ton of discrete logic for breadboards and have built stuff like Ben Eater’s breadboard computer. At one point I played with CPLDs in Quartus. I have an ICE40 around but have only barely gotten the open source toolchain running before losing interest and moving on to other stuff. I prefer something like Flash Forth or Micropython running on a microcontroller so that I am independent of some proprietary IDE nonsense. But I am primarily a Maker and prefer fabrication or CAD over programming. I struggle to manage complexity and the advanced algorithms I would know if I had a formal CS background.

    So from that perspective, what I find baffling about RISC under CISC is specifically the timing involved. Your API mindset is likely handwaving this as black box, but I am in this box. Like, I understand how there should be a pipeline of steps involved for the complex instruction to happen. What I do not understand is the reason or mechanisms that separate CISC from RISC in this pipeline. If my goal is to do A…E, and A-B and C-D are RISC instructions, I have a ton of questions. Like why is there still any divide at all for x86 if direct emulation is a translation and subdivision of two instructions? Or how is the timing of this RISC compilation as efficient as if the logic is built as an integrated monolith? How could that ever be more efficient? Is this incompetent cost cutting, backwards compatibility constrained, or some fundamental issue with the topology like RLC issues with the required real estate on the die?

    As far as the Chips and Cheese article, if I recall correctly, that was saved once upon a time in Infinity on my last phone, but Infinity got locked by the dev. The reddit post link would have been a month or two before June of 2023, but your search is as good as mine. I’m pretty good at reading and remembering the abstract bits of info I found useful, but I’m not great about saving citations, so take it as water cooler hearsay if you like. It was said in good faith with no attempt to intentionally mislead.


  • You caught me. I meant this, but was thinking backwards from the bottom up. Like building the logic and registers required to satisfy the CISC instruction.

    This mental space is my thar be dragons and wizards space on the edge of my comprehension and curiosity. The pipelines involved to execute a complex instruction like AVX loading a 512 bit word, while two logical cores are multi threading with cache prediction, along with the DRAM bus width limitations, to run tensor maths – are baffling to me.

    I barely understood the Chips and Cheese article explaining how the primary bottleneck for running LLMs on a CPU is the L2 to L1 cache bus throughput. Conceptually that makes sense, but thinking in terms of the actual hardware, I can’t answer, “why aren’t AI models packaged and processed in blocks specifically sized for this cache bus limitation”. If my cache bus is the limiting factor, duel threading for logical cores seems like asinine stupidity that poisons the cache. Or why an OS CPU scheduler is not equip to automatically detect or flag tensor math and isolate threads from kernel interrupts is beyond me.

    Adding a layer to that and saying all of this is RISC cosplaying as CISC is my mental party clown cum serial killer… “but… but… it is 1 instruction…”


  • ARM is an older Reduced Instruction Set Computing out of Berkeley too. There are not a lot of differences here. x86 could even be better. American companies are mostly run by incompetent misers that extract value through exploitation instead of innovation on the edge and future. Intel has crashed and burned because it failed to keep pace with competition. Like much of the newer x86 stuff is RISC-like wrappers on CISC instructions under the hood, to loosely quote others at places like Linux Plumbers conference talks.

    ARM costs a fortune in royalties. RISC-V removes those royalties and creates an entire ecosystem for companies to independently sell their own IP blocks instead of places like Intel using this space for manipulative exploitation through vendor lock in. If China invests in RISC-V, it will antiquate the entire West within 5-10 years time, similar to what they did with electric vehicles and western privateer pirate capitalist incompetence.














  • De facto can’t. Physically disabled in social isolation and too easily harmed by such physical interaction. Like right now I wake up after only sleeping 5 hours. My spine feels like a twisted towel. I can barely move. I write a few words at a time with long pauses you can never see between the words as I try and twist and turn against the pain until I can get up through the tears. And this is a good day. One of my best. I am haunted by the knowledge of how fast I am degrading and what that will mean.

    I come here to escape that reality. Here is the only place I can exist as me; as some simulacrum of who I was because in the real world I am a hollow shell in extreme pain, ridiculously fragile. I don’t want to make anyone watch me fall apart. I have nothing to offer anyone but burden. I can’t be fixed. I can’t get anyone to even fully diagnose the problem. Such is life after barely surviving a broken neck and back. Sex would be suicidally inducing levels of frustrating and I could never sleep with someone else in a bed with how I must move around constantly to keep from locking up entirely and losing my remaining mobility. So while there may be some element I am drawing on from such an emotional place that rings true to your accusation, there is nothing I have that can back that up. Reminding me of this is a little hurtful. Like telling me I can’t exist and oppressing the last outlet of humanness that remains a thread of me that did not die at the hands of a terrible driver while riding a bicycle to work 2/26/14


  • I do not have to wear glasses, although I have some reading glasses with a hacked prescription I made.

    I find the psychology of glasses somewhat fascinating. I can fake my actual visual limitations in almost every instance using peripheral awareness. I have no clue what it is like for others with worse vision than my own. When I put on glasses adjusted to my vision, it feels like relaxing, like my mind shifts to other interests and awarenesses. But I kinda like my normal visual focus, even if it limits me in some way that could be improved.

    I also have a pair of ultra magnification hacked reading glasses I use for soldering very tiny things. I adjust and relax with them just the same.

    So really, when I see you in your big thick glasses, first off, I see someone aware of their needs and both willing and able to address them. Looking different is actually looking interesting to me. Secondly, I am curious how my vision measures up and the psychology. I really want to probe and explore self awareness from many angles. Finally, I find nerdiness super attractive although the glasses and look are only a hint at the possibility of what I actually find attractive.

    I am a jack of all trades type of person. I am very aware of my limitations. I have no ego or narcissism. I can be very unintentionally intimidating in the broad spectrum of what I am interested in and know. Hidden in this aspect of life, I need someone that can correct me, can tell me no, but also has their own curiosities independent of my own. And this is key to what I really see; when I see someone that looks a little different, I see the potential for an independent mind. I see someone that might have hobbies, and interests. Someone that may not be totally absorbed in simple friends or fixated on some fantasy future expectations. I see the life catalyst that pushes a person to explore within themselves incrementally across their years of existence. I see the potential for someone I can respect and someone that can tell me no with substance and understanding. That is what is truly attractive. Looks fade, but friends first and forever.

    So you see, glasses say a lot more than one might imagine. It infers much about a person before we’ve even met. I pick up on the details and it is the implied meaning behind them that I value. These are not some judgmental expectations or anything like that. I am only perceptively aware of the potential and it is the potential that I explore with an open mind. That is what I actually find attractive. It has nothing to do with the aesthetics of those cute glasses. Conformity is ugly and boring in almost all instances. Differents are who make life interesting; so much potential is hidden just under the surface of different.