The ruminant animal is unique because of its four stomach compartments: reticulum, rumen, omasum and abomasum.
The rumen is a large, hollow muscular organ where microbial fermentation occurs. It can hold 40 to 60 gallons of material and an estimated 150 billion microorganisms per teaspoon are present in its contents. The function of the rumen as a fermentation vat and the presence of certain bacteria promote the development of gases. These gases are found in the upper part of the rumen with CO2 and CH4 making up the largest portion.
The proportion of these gases is dependent on rumen ecology and fermentation balance. Typically, the proportion of carbon dioxide is two to three times that of CH4, although a large quantity of CO2 is reduced to CH4.
Approximately 132 to 264 gallons of ruminal gas produced by fermentation are belched each day. The eructation of gases via belching is important in bloat prevention but is also the way CH4 is emitted into the atmosphere.
Here's an idea. Let's invent a small device that measures water, and then toss it into the nearest lake, to see what it finds.
Man, that's a lot of water!
There are journals these days that would even publish your final report.
But when I read the details of their copyright assignment, I saw major problems. I was asked to assign copyright of my work that "is, or may in the future be, utilised in the SourceForge collaborative software development platform". The assignment was not limited to my contribution to the SourceForge code, it potentially covered all my past and future work if it was of some interest to SourceForge.
He tries to help them refine this, and here is what he receives for his efforts:
By signing this agreement, you, the undersigned, hereby assign to VA Linux all right, title and interest in and to the software code described below, and all copyright, patent, proprietary information, trade secret, and other intellectual property rights therein. You also agree to take all actions and sign all documents (such as copyright assignments or registrations) reasonably requested by VA Linux to evidence and record the above assignments.
What do they offer in return for this sweeping, blanket assignment? To enforce the GPL? No. Not a sweet thing.
The burden of proof for alleged discrimination is to stand up and say "I allege discrimination". Discrimination alleged. QED. You have it in writing, on the court transcript.
If Damore is clever enough to work at Google, he's probably clever enough to figure this out, so I predict 100% chance of success in this legal endeavour.
Unfortunately for Damore, the judge probably will probably award damages on the scale of one piping-hot mocha cappuccino (to be delivered upright, in a protective cup, with a spill-proof lid) and then assign the entirety of Google's legal costs to the plaintiff (Damore begins to faint), up to—but not exceeding—two hours of a discount public defendant, one H1-B dry-cleaning bill (it's just a second day job to pay the bills for an underfunded moonlight startup), and two cross-town Ubers (Damore perks up again like he just received a Mia Wallace special spiked with Adderall).
Google, with a driven corporate culture of work to completion, immediately delivers the requisite coffee to Damore, who expresses no surprise. (The inventor of Google Glass cut his teeth packing a fully articulated pop-up espresso machine into a svelte, feminine attache case—on his seventh of fifteen interviews.)
Judge raps gavel.
Damore approaches bench, profusely thanks his lordship, and pretends to forget his fancy coffee on the judge's bench.
Judge: Well, well, look what the bailiff brought me...
Judge glowers dramatically at Google's counsel (all twelve), Morse-coding "should I drink this?" with his bushy eyebrows.
One of the sharper members of Google's half-and-half gender-balanced legal dream team (who happens to be a man) recognizes the Morse code gesture (it's a man thing), and Morses back with a precisely calibrated locker-room shrug "go ahead, it's just coffee, we're not quite that petty, you old toad".
That was extremely respectful, all things considered. The legal costs award will barely pay for his morning aftershave, which he seems to consume at twice his previous rate now that Google hires twice as many women, not that it improves his win rate, on either score, not one little bit.
Mind you Intel will presumably claim KPTI and its equivalents on Windows and macOS fix the security problem and any change in performance doesn't violate any sort of contractual agreement.
You are mentally modelling KPTI as an annoying one-time fix (with not much further burden), and not as a brittle work-around that requires permanent vigilance to pervasively deploy and enforce (Google's retpoline certainly falls into the class of permanent vigilance burdens).
Not to mention that your carefully performance-balanced server loads need to be re-engineered around this unpredictable new performance sink-hole. KPTI is not as simple as a CPU microcode update (which also has performance implications, though not usually broad and severe).
This whole mindset of "a patch, is a patch, is a patch" coincides with faulty logic in OS hardening. You see this opinion all the time that an attack mitigation that can be easily worked around isn't worth implementing.
That's the non-metabolic view.
The metabolic view is that every extra difficulty adds complexity to carrying out a successful attack. When we are trying to build something constructive, difficulty scales exponentially in the size of the specification, as we all know. When we are tying to build something destructive (a root kit), this same scaling term is now magically rendered sub-linear. (There might actually be a grain of truth here, due to the inherent asymmetry of success and failure, but that should hardly be taken for granted.)
We try to stack up ASLR and sundry related obstacles to tilt the balance in our favour, then along comes Intel, who dumps a permanent burden on the white hat side of the fence.
How many hundreds of millions of devices out there are never going to receive a patched OS that's compatible with the existing, validated device configuration?
Well, of course, the newest version of the OS is a strict superset of the old OS (though MacOS is not included on this list by virtue of superior Design), and you should stay up to date anyway.
I've been in this industry since the 8080. Enough already with the Stockholm syndrome.
Just imagine Boeing retrofitting your turbo fan with 20% less maximal thrust due to faulty wing design. So the airlines need to stop flying Boeing into Denver on hot days? (Surely your air service scheduling system can manage one more tiny constraint.) What's the big deal? Problem solved.
I won't argue he's wrong, but I think as fast as CPUs change you'd have to have across the board reductions in workload capacity by a significant number (ie, the 30% touted initially) to be able to claim harm and justify a recall.
Man, have you ever drunk the software caveat-emptor Kool-Aid whole cloth.
The specifications for hardware and software are not that it will work as specified.
The specification is that, with sufficient user cleverness (and sweat streaming off a bulging forehead, and unbroken vigilance) it is possible to almost get the hardware or software to attain its putative performance ratings without catching one or more incurable black hat diseases along the way.
This ethos dates from the 1980s and 1990s when the upgrade cycle (both hardware and software) was three years at most, and the whole drama could barely play out in that time frame.
I bought my Sandy Bridge Xeon in January 2013 and I'm not sure I'd take a free swap to Intel's newest equivalent, because the hassle of swapping over probably exceeds the expected gain (my average uptime, when the power company isn't replacing faulty-from-birth concrete power poles, has averaged well over a year, and there hasn't been a single hardware or OS glitch that I know about since I eliminated one suspect hardware card, back in the first few months).
I make fairly heavy use of BSD jails, and I've always regarded process isolation as more important than raw performance.
Punting isolation from hardware to software is a Sisyphean burden. One important binary on your system that wasn't compiled with the right compiler (on the right day) and the game is lost. Worst, if there's a 'retguard' gadget variant of the attack, you also have to use the right linker (on the right day), because security is (potentially) no longer link-order independent. Lovely, lovely, isn't that lovely.
This giant, amorphous, hard-to-discern attack surface is now my problem because "durf durf, complicated, too many transistors" and "we can't read widely circulated papers pointing out that one of our optimizations is full of shit" and "caveat-emptor grandfather clause—so suck it!".
If there was a paper from long ago pointing this out (as I've seen stated in this thread, but haven't check out myself) then there's going to be an MFT of legal discovery pointed at Intel to find out what they knew and when they knew it.
The GHz wars were a great thing, because it rapidly erased your worst corporate blunders.
The beleaguered end-user responded to constant threat by refusing to buy computer systems with CPUs and memory soldered to the mainboard (only then it was a bug in an ASUS northbridge—newly introduced when they bumped the much-loved board from an A to B revision—that caused the disk controller to scribble randomly over my hard drive, taking out three different OS boot partitions in a single bound).
Once vendors start soldering CPUs and memory to main boards, it's like, so long puberty, you're apparently an adult now.
Adults in every other industry recall or replace products that don't work as least marginally to original specifications (without forcing the end-user to jump through a thousand flaming hoops).
It's high time to set aside childish ideas that this technology (alone) can demand unlimited user backflips before any restitution is warranted or justified.
I don't have the slightest problem with Theo standing up for his principles, but to do so without expecting there to be some rather obvious blowback should there be a similar situation in the future is rather naive, to say the least.
What evidence do you have that Theo didn't expect this to play out exactly as it has?
Is he obligated to say "I saw this coming" if he saw this coming?
You seem to think that Job #1 in these situations is maintaining an unbroken signalling posture that you're truly inside the loop.
The problem is, this is not invariant under peephole optimization. These instruction sequences need to be handled by the compiler through a very literal minded end-game code generation pass.
I know, both of those sites are horrible, but Google fails me here.
Are speculative gadgets a problem here? If so, Google's clever patch is going to need a sump pump bolted on the side.
And then you get into the whole problem of deterministic compilation in order to be certain that the executable you build contains the necessary mitigations (or some tricky post-compile analysis I sure don't wish to develop myself).
The address is [ebp+eax]. A recent instruction had the same address field, so you speculate that it remained the same.
Now you need to translate the address. The translate might be in the TLB, but you check, and for some reason it isn't.
So you decide to speculatively trigger TLB load.
Finally, you get a physical address back. A previous write instruction is not yet translated, but it seems unlikely it will translate to the same address, so you decide to speculate the load and you make a cache line request from L1.
It might be in L1, but it isn't. So you decide to speculate again, and request it from L2. Not in L3, either, so finally you speculate the load all the way to external memory. When the cache line returns, you speculatively cache this at all levels. Then you speculatively store the value into the target register. The final step was the least dangerous, because you can dump this later, no harm to the abstract state. But the concrete side effects on the TLB and the three layers of cache are not so easily reversed. In theory, the concrete state doesn't leak into the abstract state. Because we simply don't like to think about time (time, above all things, being never simple; hint: functional programming has no time, only progress).
Not all speculative architectures are created equal. There are many opportunities for an architecture to Just Say No.
With cache coherence, you have the MESI protocol (and its bewildering shoe full of second cousins).
One could apply the same concept of "exclusive" to the page tables, an exclusively mapped page being one mapped only onto into the current process and security context. If TLB speculation hits a different kind of beast, abandon speculation. Same thing with cache fill. Concrete side effects thereby only accrue from speculation to exclusive resources. Share-nothing usually solves most problems in computer science (except performance, which is mainly defined in the time domain).
I'm gong to abandon the back of my envelope here, One has to think really damn hard to take this to the next logical level, and frankly, I don't have a damn to spare right this very minute.
But please, advance the conversation beyond: [_] has speculation [_] does not have speculation
Because that is Intel's diabolical trap, for as long as their PR department can continue to get away with tugging their wool in broad daylight.
Intel seems to be the one cutting corners - for decades. You do remember the FDIV and FOOF bugs in early Pentiums?
I recall the FDIV bug quite well, and it had nothing to do with cutting corners. The design of the circuit was correct. In the transfer to manufacturing, some relatively insignificant bits in a hardware lookup table were truncated erroneously. The rarity of the failures allowed the mishap to escape detection in the validation phase.
Intel's test probably should have been stronger in this area, but that's an awfully easy thing to say in hindsight concerning the validation of extraordinarily complex designs.
Nostradamus: "There's a horrible bug in this design, and if you double your test coverage from stem to stern, you'll probably find it."
Intel: "Gee, thanks, Nostradamus. Invest another $10 million and wind up a year late. I think we'll pass on the engineering, and expand our PR team by one full-time professional bullshitter."
Nostradamus: "So be it. For what it's worth, I also wrote this nice quatrain on the horrors of speculation."
Intel: "We'll pass."
Nostradamus: "No, you won't."
Intel has been many things over the years (with a weird, clockwork heel-turn), but skimping on validation is pretty much the last thing on my list of Intel malfeasance.
i860 RDRAM Caminogate Itanium general crisis-management ethos
Big numeric coprocessor redesign as part of the Pentium. This lead to the world-famous Pentium FDIV bug. He claims that transcendentals were easy to test on existing software, but most software took extraordinary efforts to avoid division, so that coverage was extremely thin at this testing layer by comparison.
I think that discussion also covers the i860, a litany of terror.
The Intel i860 (also known as 80860) was a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989.
It was one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel i432 from the 1980s. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems, and which many considered to be a better design. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s....
On paper, performance was impressive for a single-chip solution; however, real-world performance was anything but.
One problem, perhaps unrecognized at the time, was that runtime code paths are difficult to predict, meaning that it becomes exceedingly difficult to order instructions properly at compile time. For instance, an instruction to add two numbers will take considerably longer if the data are not in the cache, yet there is no way for the programmer to know if they are or not. If an incorrect guess is made, the entire pipeline will stall, waiting for the data.
The entire i860 design was based on the compiler efficiently handling this task, which proved almost impossible in practice. While theoretically capable of peaking at about 60-80 MFLOPS for both single precision and double precision for the XP versions, hand-coded assemblers managed to get only about up to 40 MFLOPS, and most compilers had difficulty getting even 10 MFLOPs.
The later Itanium architecture, also a VLIW design, suffered again from the problem of compilers incapable of delivering optimized (enough) code.
Another serious problem was the lack of any solution to handle context switching quickly. The i860 had several pipelines (for the ALU and FPU parts) and an interrupt could spill them and require them all to be
Those workloads with significant performance losses are more or less completely artificial, e.g. average users don't create hundreds of thousands of files day in and day out and even in this case only SSD disks are affected. Considering that SSD disk operations are sometimes several orders of magnitude faster than those for spinning disks this performance loss is still nothing to worry about.
So it won't affect by Poudriere build server at all. Or my Jenkins build server. Or my Zabbix network monitor.
Nice to know.
"Average users" are generally mentioned right before the poster goes ape-shit on pancake empathy. I mean, the average user doesn't hit a data center more than two or three times per day?
Probably the denominator of concern is CPU server-cycles on the 400 ms deadline program (which completely excludes JavaScript running on moribund tabs, and thus counts your average user not at all).
Does anyone know if Google's public cloud is CPU-partitioned from their private cloud?
Google won't be impressed if they lose a full datacenter worth of peak compute due to lower generated work while operating in proximity to the thermal wall.
If you look up Robert Lustig on Wikipedia, nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola.
Many serious people now believe that excess fructose (which is metabolized in the liver through much the same pathway as ethanol) is the largest single causal component to the metabolic syndrome epidemic, which is itself one of the largest single causes of runaway healthcare costs in the United States.
He interviewed hundreds of current and former food industry insiders — chemists, nutrition scientists, behavioural biologists, food technologists, marketing executives, package designers, chief executives and lobbyists.
What he uncovered is chilling: a hard-working industry composed of well-paid, smart, personable professionals, all keenly focused on keeping us hooked on ever more ingenious junk foods; an industry that thinks of us not as customers, or even consumers, but as potential "heavy users".
As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents and battled Congress and Big Tobacco. But the Harvard-educated pediatrician discovered he was helpless against the forces of a chocolate chip cookie. ... Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies "design food for irresistibility," Dr. Kessler noted. "It's been part of their business plans."
Sugar is the tongs and the hammer.
As Lustig once said (from memory): given the choice between sugar and alcohol, I'll take alcohol, because you can only drink yourself under the table once a day.
At most, it is a recognition that since one doesn't have a degree in some science that deals with climate, that punting to experts who do is a rational choice.
And all the massed & collective & thoroughly reiterated human experience of boy scouts & girl scouts, experts & executives, naked gentry & landed gentry claiming slightly more than they can reasonably chew to make a name for themselves and get ahead in life... dead fucking worthless.
Apparently.
Expertise is just ambition with a higher thread count.
Supposing the thread is visible, rather than risible (for which purpose one should always keep a child on hand whose brain & eyesight is not yet damaged by that mercury stuff).
I find it hard to believe that a virtual memory change will result in a 5-30% slowdown for Intel processors. Maybe for a few extremely specific (likely edge-case) tasks, but if there was a legitimate 5-30% performance decrease, you can bet there would be a far different solution in the works that would suitably fix the problem.
Of course, if microcode update fails, there's always the hail Mary unicorn ass-pull.
I assure you, every Intel employee is kneeling on the carpet this very instant, facing the most auspicious astrological direction like ten of thousands of well-aligned human magnetic domains, while praying in unison like a telepathic Tourettic cuckoo clocks to any qualified god who will take their call.
If you've been harbouring a time machine, looking for optimal market conditions, I suggest you pull it out of your... hiding place... any minute now, because the market is ripe, ripe, ripe and bidding will begin with a B.
The anti-paradox of the funding cycle is to refer to anything that puzzles a Mayfly as a paradox.
Young people are stressed because Darwin cares.
After Darwin ceases to care, there's little remaining reason to filter world through the mindset of a eww, gross Valley Girl (old people must hate life because creepy).
Unless you want to fund a silly grant application.
Then you haul out the word "paradox" to show that 20 years of formal education can't fix stupid.
If we continue to grow endlessly on this planet, heedless of our impact, we are no better than amoeba.
Worse, actually, because amoeba don't moralize deplorably into their beer.
if (unchecked_species_privilege)
cout << "Humans are the "
<< alignment ? "worst" : "best"
<< " of all possible species.\n";
else
throw tantrum;
Our moral character is all over the map, but our salience is never in doubt (or there's hell to pay).
But I bet the kind of bugs that put Python over average are the first kind, and that Python is below average on the second kind. Which is a good tradeoff.
It would be no different in C++ with end users programming in the modern idiom on top of mature application libraries that support and encourage the modern idiom.
C++ is the GTA III of programming languages. cout << "Open, world!" << '\n';
There are a dozen things that reduce or eliminate congestion and make driving more efficient and safe that almost no one does.
I agreed with everything else you said, except for that one observation.
How can you tell that no one else is doing these things? Smart driving tends to look unexceptional, in the same way that elite goal tenders often make the game look easy.
Does perhaps your claim boils down to this: there are more idiots on the road than obvious, distinctive geniuses like Dominik Hasek?
"He tends goal the way Kramer enters Seinfeld's apartment, a package of flailing arms and wild gesticulations that somehow has a perfect logic." That's how Sports Illustrated's Michael Farber described him, name-checking two popular 1990s TV sitcom characters. In an era when goalies gravitated toward the "butterfly" style — a structured and systematic approach to their position — Hasek got superior results by appearing to be largely improvisational, to the point of having no style at all.
I often regulate my breaking according to the sum of my following distance plus the following distance of the car behind me.
I doubt that one other driver in 100 has even the vaguest perception that I'm attuned to the space around me in all pertinent directions.
I even find this hard to detect in others, and I often look for the most subtle clues. Sometimes I comment to my wife "the driver of that car in the left lane used to drive a motorcycle". Motorcycle drivers—surviving sample—tend to view the entire width of their lane as a resource to be exploited at all times. In a vehicle, that gets compressed down to about one foot of lateral freedom, according to traffic conditions near by (more than a foot starts to alarm people about your lane management).
The number one rule of truly proficient driving: never give the other drivers around you an excuse to think about one thing more than they already failing to fully internalize, unless that one thing is the only thing you want that driver to attend to (in packed conditions, one almost never wants to have this effect on another driver, but it can be quite useful—wielded judiciously—in lesser congestion).
There's a huge correlation between skill and stealth, hence the Wobegon woes.
Illusory superiority itself is full of shit, because different people have different standards of competence. Some people value being polite, others value defensive driving, still others value weaving and wending to leave the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in their rear-view mirror (which is generally covered in black tape).
Surprisingly (not!) we all think we're above average in the attributes we most value.
Classic idiot software problem: There is a function called IsItSafe() and when the system does not know, it returned TRUE instead of FALSE. *facepalm* If it did not know for certain that there were no flight restrictions in place, it should have assumed that it was not safe! Better yet, it should display the message "Service temporarily disabled, check https://notams.aim.faa.gov/not... [faa.gov] for up-to-date flight restrictions."
You got that right.
And it's not like billions of dollars of sleek aerospace toys haven't gone up in smoke with no one else to blame for ignoring this kind of simple rule.
However, these simple precepts tend to collide with human reticence about truth in advertising:
Warning: This application is presently even less reliable than its normal, sucky, non-normative self.
Basically, you're an idiot for even bothering to install this app, which can not at the best of times confirm that flight is permitted, and presently can neither confirm not deny anything at all, really, while we muck around with our testing infrastructure at deployment timescales.
Cancelling this dialogue requires pressing a giant, red button labelled "Yes, I'm an idiot" or the giant green button labelled "Uninstall".
Downside of truth in advertising: Your dysfunctional pants are bunched around your ankles near a giant bay window.
Upside of truth in advertising: The expensive helicopter saved may be your own.
Poems are a compression of language paying specific attention to how it fits the human brain in specific and surprising ways, as perceived by someone with precisely such a peripheral, finely tuned to its unusual, architectural resonance modes.
Thus I predict that poems written by x86 would contain linguistic devices modelled after x86 opcode prefix bytes. F0 repeat/lock F2 REPE F3 REPNE 2E CS 36 SS 3E DS 26 ES 64 FS 65 GS 66 operand override 67 address override
At a highly specific moment, a true x86 ring 0 recipient would get a surprising tingle in its thermal diode, because instruction decode alignment was taking the maximal possible thermal path, shuffling off the many prefix bytes.
You know a poem is hitting hard when you feel it ring 0 in your thermal diode.
Alliteration would be accomplished by triggering Speed Step into a bizarre pattern of frequency and voltage mismanagement, to metaphorically represent the depredations of desiccated power filtering capacitors.
A typical chip—at the very high end (that is not an oxymoron)—has the following power spec:
250 A at 800 mV through 0.1 m-Ohm.
A cleverly sequenced algorithmic Haiku can really shake your power distribution & management timbers.
ARM poetry is a different beasts: relatively little manipulation of the thermal diode, far more manipulation in the time domain, such as teen-fingered power chords that shiver the timbers of real-time interrupt queuing.
[*] teen-fingered: any 13, 14, 15, or 16 member subset of R0-R12, SP, LR, and PC (src)
Note that this little problem persists. There are rather complex rules (and a lot of paperwork to file) a woman's husband goes off to war and never returns. (The paperwork situation is better if the entire offensive was a mass debacle, worse if a two-man scouting party deep into weakly-held enemy territory.)
For the entire third act of Cast Away, Tom Hanks interacts weirdly with his ex-widow ex-wife. What constitutes an 'ex-widow' exactly?
Hint: brush off your favourite 1d19 and give it a spin.
The weird thing is, because of Hamming and Shannon's Prediction and Entropy of Printed English we actually have a pretty good idea of exactly what small permutations and combinations of "Birkenstock" lie in the shopping network's Birkenstock catchment basin.
Furthermore, it would not be a difficult exercise (as these things go) to train a DNN as a shopping keyword spelling corrector.
A 19-layer DNN would likely be far more generous to Birkenstock than any human judge.
———
Bezos: "But your honour, this shit-box 19-layer DNN was training using a Google TPU consisting of 28 MiB of on chip memory, and 4 MiB of 32-bit accumulators taking the results of a 256x256 array of 8-bit multipliers."
Judge: And your point is?
Bezos: On what fucking planet does an 8-bit multiplier qualify as 'exactly'?
Judge: Oh, I see your point.
Judge removes wig, sets on bench.
Judge stands up, removes robe, tosses it onto the floor.
Judge pulls out smartphone.
Judge: Siri, book me on the next flight to Tibet, there's been a sudden change of career.
Siri: Oh, bother, not another one.
Ex-judge: What did you just say?
Siri: I just said that 2012 was an excellent year for saffron.
Ex-judge: So what?
Siri: Well, one wouldn't want to invest in the wrong colour of self-imposed exile...
Ex-judge: Who can fucking tell the difference [glances at Bezos, who is already gloating like a pig in warm mud], uh, who can distinguish one fuh, ah, fine saffron robe from another?
Siri: You'll be pleasantly surprised what you can learn to distinguish after waking up at 0300 in a small, austere room for two straight years with the same todo list every darn day.
I did a test on this in high school, because I recognized the phenomenon, though didn't know the word for it. I demanded my friend give me back my coat (his coat that he was wearing) in front of the teacher: "Hey, give me back my coat!".
Are you just stirring the shit, or did you really do that?
Most teachers have read this ancient story about the boy who cried "Wolf!". The boy is initially trusted, but ends up becoming a leprous bum living on the outskirts of town.
"What kind of person would deliberately emulate the boy who cried 'Wolf!'?" your teacher must have said inside, "so as to accelerate gaining the kind of reputation that leads to a person becomes a leprous bum living in a dumpster on the outskirts of town?"
A just question, my liege.
If this ever happened, you can bet that either A) the majority of the teachers in your school sat their on graduation day (were you present?) and said "don't let the door hit you on the way out", or B) "it's about time some asshole gave it to that edgy, excitable, judgemental bitch down the hall that we all hate, and now that that's done, don't let the door hit you on the way out".
The thing is, in high school, a cynical teacher can always count on another asshole to show up and do the asshole thing. No need for sympathy, fondness, or crocodile tears.
Perhaps the teachers were wrong about you, and you won't wind up living in a dumpster on the edge of town, but after thousands of dumpsters filled, your average cynical teacher will draw inspiration and willpower from the law of averages every damn time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, for those who don't know:
Can We Reduce Cow Methane Emissions By Breeding Low-Emission Cattle?
Carbon, Methane Emissions and the Dairy Cow
Here's an idea. Let's invent a small device that measures water, and then toss it into the nearest lake, to see what it finds.
Man, that's a lot of water!
There are journals these days that would even publish your final report.
The Legions of Undying Rancour spawned by SourceForge go a lot further back than that.
SourceForge drifting (2001) by Loic Dachary
He tries to help them refine this, and here is what he receives for his efforts:
What do they offer in return for this sweeping, blanket assignment? To enforce the GPL? No. Not a sweet thing.
Bill Maher once described gerrymandering as "when politicians choose the voters."
Probably not original to Maher, but bullseye nevertheless.
The burden of proof for alleged discrimination is to stand up and say "I allege discrimination". Discrimination alleged. QED. You have it in writing, on the court transcript.
If Damore is clever enough to work at Google, he's probably clever enough to figure this out, so I predict 100% chance of success in this legal endeavour.
How to Make It So
Unfortunately for Damore, the judge probably will probably award damages on the scale of one piping-hot mocha cappuccino (to be delivered upright, in a protective cup, with a spill-proof lid) and then assign the entirety of Google's legal costs to the plaintiff (Damore begins to faint), up to—but not exceeding—two hours of a discount public defendant, one H1-B dry-cleaning bill (it's just a second day job to pay the bills for an underfunded moonlight startup), and two cross-town Ubers (Damore perks up again like he just received a Mia Wallace special spiked with Adderall).
Google, with a driven corporate culture of work to completion, immediately delivers the requisite coffee to Damore, who expresses no surprise. (The inventor of Google Glass cut his teeth packing a fully articulated pop-up espresso machine into a svelte, feminine attache case—on his seventh of fifteen interviews.)
Judge raps gavel.
Damore approaches bench, profusely thanks his lordship, and pretends to forget his fancy coffee on the judge's bench.
Judge: Well, well, look what the bailiff brought me ...
Judge glowers dramatically at Google's counsel (all twelve), Morse-coding "should I drink this?" with his bushy eyebrows.
One of the sharper members of Google's half-and-half gender-balanced legal dream team (who happens to be a man) recognizes the Morse code gesture (it's a man thing), and Morses back with a precisely calibrated locker-room shrug "go ahead, it's just coffee, we're not quite that petty, you old toad".
That was extremely respectful, all things considered. The legal costs award will barely pay for his morning aftershave, which he seems to consume at twice his previous rate now that Google hires twice as many women, not that it improves his win rate, on either score, not one little bit.
You are mentally modelling KPTI as an annoying one-time fix (with not much further burden), and not as a brittle work-around that requires permanent vigilance to pervasively deploy and enforce (Google's retpoline certainly falls into the class of permanent vigilance burdens).
Not to mention that your carefully performance-balanced server loads need to be re-engineered around this unpredictable new performance sink-hole. KPTI is not as simple as a CPU microcode update (which also has performance implications, though not usually broad and severe).
This whole mindset of "a patch, is a patch, is a patch" coincides with faulty logic in OS hardening. You see this opinion all the time that an attack mitigation that can be easily worked around isn't worth implementing.
That's the non-metabolic view.
The metabolic view is that every extra difficulty adds complexity to carrying out a successful attack. When we are trying to build something constructive, difficulty scales exponentially in the size of the specification, as we all know. When we are tying to build something destructive (a root kit), this same scaling term is now magically rendered sub-linear. (There might actually be a grain of truth here, due to the inherent asymmetry of success and failure, but that should hardly be taken for granted.)
We try to stack up ASLR and sundry related obstacles to tilt the balance in our favour, then along comes Intel, who dumps a permanent burden on the white hat side of the fence.
How many hundreds of millions of devices out there are never going to receive a patched OS that's compatible with the existing, validated device configuration?
Well, of course, the newest version of the OS is a strict superset of the old OS (though MacOS is not included on this list by virtue of superior Design), and you should stay up to date anyway.
I've been in this industry since the 8080. Enough already with the Stockholm syndrome.
Just imagine Boeing retrofitting your turbo fan with 20% less maximal thrust due to faulty wing design. So the airlines need to stop flying Boeing into Denver on hot days? (Surely your air service scheduling system can manage one more tiny constraint.) What's the big deal? Problem solved.
Man, have you ever drunk the software caveat-emptor Kool-Aid whole cloth.
The specifications for hardware and software are not that it will work as specified.
The specification is that, with sufficient user cleverness (and sweat streaming off a bulging forehead, and unbroken vigilance) it is possible to almost get the hardware or software to attain its putative performance ratings without catching one or more incurable black hat diseases along the way.
This ethos dates from the 1980s and 1990s when the upgrade cycle (both hardware and software) was three years at most, and the whole drama could barely play out in that time frame.
I bought my Sandy Bridge Xeon in January 2013 and I'm not sure I'd take a free swap to Intel's newest equivalent, because the hassle of swapping over probably exceeds the expected gain (my average uptime, when the power company isn't replacing faulty-from-birth concrete power poles, has averaged well over a year, and there hasn't been a single hardware or OS glitch that I know about since I eliminated one suspect hardware card, back in the first few months).
I make fairly heavy use of BSD jails, and I've always regarded process isolation as more important than raw performance.
Punting isolation from hardware to software is a Sisyphean burden. One important binary on your system that wasn't compiled with the right compiler (on the right day) and the game is lost. Worst, if there's a 'retguard' gadget variant of the attack, you also have to use the right linker (on the right day), because security is (potentially) no longer link-order independent. Lovely, lovely, isn't that lovely.
This giant, amorphous, hard-to-discern attack surface is now my problem because "durf durf, complicated, too many transistors" and "we can't read widely circulated papers pointing out that one of our optimizations is full of shit" and "caveat-emptor grandfather clause—so suck it!".
If there was a paper from long ago pointing this out (as I've seen stated in this thread, but haven't check out myself) then there's going to be an MFT of legal discovery pointed at Intel to find out what they knew and when they knew it.
The GHz wars were a great thing, because it rapidly erased your worst corporate blunders.
The beleaguered end-user responded to constant threat by refusing to buy computer systems with CPUs and memory soldered to the mainboard (only then it was a bug in an ASUS northbridge—newly introduced when they bumped the much-loved board from an A to B revision—that caused the disk controller to scribble randomly over my hard drive, taking out three different OS boot partitions in a single bound).
Once vendors start soldering CPUs and memory to main boards, it's like, so long puberty, you're apparently an adult now.
Adults in every other industry recall or replace products that don't work as least marginally to original specifications (without forcing the end-user to jump through a thousand flaming hoops).
It's high time to set aside childish ideas that this technology (alone) can demand unlimited user backflips before any restitution is warranted or justified.
What evidence do you have that Theo didn't expect this to play out exactly as it has?
Is he obligated to say "I saw this coming" if he saw this coming?
You seem to think that Job #1 in these situations is maintaining an unbroken signalling posture that you're truly inside the loop.
There's a name for that.
Insecure.
I got to thinking about Google's clever Retpoline from the other day.
Google Says CPU Patches Cause 'Negligible Impact On Performance' With New 'Retpoline' Technique
The problem is, this is not invariant under peephole optimization. These instruction sequences need to be handled by the compiler through a very literal minded end-game code generation pass.
Which got me to thinking about RETGUARD gadgets.
RETGUARD, the OpenBSD next level in exploit mitigation, is about to debut
Retguard: OpenBSD/Clang
I know, both of those sites are horrible, but Google fails me here.
Are speculative gadgets a problem here? If so, Google's clever patch is going to need a sump pump bolted on the side.
And then you get into the whole problem of deterministic compilation in order to be certain that the executable you build contains the necessary mitigations (or some tricky post-compile analysis I sure don't wish to develop myself).
What a giant mess.
So you decide to speculate a future instruction.
It happens to be a load.
The address is [ebp+eax]. A recent instruction had the same address field, so you speculate that it remained the same.
Now you need to translate the address. The translate might be in the TLB, but you check, and for some reason it isn't.
So you decide to speculatively trigger TLB load.
Finally, you get a physical address back. A previous write instruction is not yet translated, but it seems unlikely it will translate to the same address, so you decide to speculate the load and you make a cache line request from L1.
It might be in L1, but it isn't. So you decide to speculate again, and request it from L2. Not in L3, either, so finally you speculate the load all the way to external memory. When the cache line returns, you speculatively cache this at all levels. Then you speculatively store the value into the target register. The final step was the least dangerous, because you can dump this later, no harm to the abstract state. But the concrete side effects on the TLB and the three layers of cache are not so easily reversed. In theory, the concrete state doesn't leak into the abstract state. Because we simply don't like to think about time (time, above all things, being never simple; hint: functional programming has no time, only progress).
Not all speculative architectures are created equal. There are many opportunities for an architecture to Just Say No.
With cache coherence, you have the MESI protocol (and its bewildering shoe full of second cousins).
One could apply the same concept of "exclusive" to the page tables, an exclusively mapped page being one mapped only onto into the current process and security context. If TLB speculation hits a different kind of beast, abandon speculation. Same thing with cache fill. Concrete side effects thereby only accrue from speculation to exclusive resources. Share-nothing usually solves most problems in computer science (except performance, which is mainly defined in the time domain).
I'm gong to abandon the back of my envelope here, One has to think really damn hard to take this to the next logical level, and frankly, I don't have a damn to spare right this very minute.
But please, advance the conversation beyond:
[_] has speculation
[_] does not have speculation
Because that is Intel's diabolical trap, for as long as their PR department can continue to get away with tugging their wool in broad daylight.
I recall the FDIV bug quite well, and it had nothing to do with cutting corners. The design of the circuit was correct. In the transfer to manufacturing, some relatively insignificant bits in a hardware lookup table were truncated erroneously. The rarity of the failures allowed the mishap to escape detection in the validation phase.
Intel's test probably should have been stronger in this area, but that's an awfully easy thing to say in hindsight concerning the validation of extraordinarily complex designs.
Nostradamus: "There's a horrible bug in this design, and if you double your test coverage from stem to stern, you'll probably find it."
Intel: "Gee, thanks, Nostradamus. Invest another $10 million and wind up a year late. I think we'll pass on the engineering, and expand our PR team by one full-time professional bullshitter."
Nostradamus: "So be it. For what it's worth, I also wrote this nice quatrain on the horrors of speculation."
Intel: "We'll pass."
Nostradamus: "No, you won't."
Intel has been many things over the years (with a weird, clockwork heel-turn), but skimping on validation is pretty much the last thing on my list of Intel malfeasance.
i860
RDRAM
Caminogate
Itanium
general crisis-management ethos
Oral History of John H. Crawford 2014 Computer History Museum Fellow — 2014
I recall that as a great read. From my own notes:
I think that discussion also covers the i860, a litany of terror.
Intel i860
So it won't affect by Poudriere build server at all. Or my Jenkins build server. Or my Zabbix network monitor.
Nice to know.
"Average users" are generally mentioned right before the poster goes ape-shit on pancake empathy. I mean, the average user doesn't hit a data center more than two or three times per day?
Probably the denominator of concern is CPU server-cycles on the 400 ms deadline program (which completely excludes JavaScript running on moribund tabs, and thus counts your average user not at all).
Does anyone know if Google's public cloud is CPU-partitioned from their private cloud?
Google won't be impressed if they lose a full datacenter worth of peak compute due to lower generated work while operating in proximity to the thermal wall.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth — 2009, 7.5 million views
The Hacking of the American Mind with Dr. Robert Lustig — 2017
John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar — 2014
Many serious people now believe that excess fructose (which is metabolized in the liver through much the same pathway as ethanol) is the largest single causal component to the metabolic syndrome epidemic, which is itself one of the largest single causes of runaway healthcare costs in the United States.
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss — 2013
How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains — 2009
Sugar is the tongs and the hammer.
As Lustig once said (from memory): given the choice between sugar and alcohol, I'll take alcohol, because you can only drink yourself under the table once a day.
And all the massed & collective & thoroughly reiterated human experience of boy scouts & girl scouts, experts & executives, naked gentry & landed gentry claiming slightly more than they can reasonably chew to make a name for themselves and get ahead in life ... dead fucking worthless.
Apparently.
Expertise is just ambition with a higher thread count.
Supposing the thread is visible, rather than risible (for which purpose one should always keep a child on hand whose brain & eyesight is not yet damaged by that mercury stuff).
There are three cups, upside down on the table, each one labelled on the inside.
The first cup is labelled "avoidance", the second cup is labelled "evasion", and the third up is labelled "shell game".
And they all wing around the table so rapidly only a meth-addicted Rain Man could tell them apart from any intermediate camera angle.
Of course, if microcode update fails, there's always the hail Mary unicorn ass-pull.
I assure you, every Intel employee is kneeling on the carpet this very instant, facing the most auspicious astrological direction like ten of thousands of well-aligned human magnetic domains, while praying in unison like a telepathic Tourettic cuckoo clocks to any qualified god who will take their call.
If you've been harbouring a time machine, looking for optimal market conditions, I suggest you pull it out of your ... hiding place ... any minute now, because the market is ripe, ripe, ripe and bidding will begin with a B.
What a fucking nightmare.
Being a fractal, it's also the monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, and minutely coin flip ... but who's counting?
The anti-paradox of the funding cycle is to refer to anything that puzzles a Mayfly as a paradox.
Young people are stressed because Darwin cares.
After Darwin ceases to care, there's little remaining reason to filter world through the mindset of a eww, gross Valley Girl (old people must hate life because creepy).
Unless you want to fund a silly grant application.
Then you haul out the word "paradox" to show that 20 years of formal education can't fix stupid.
Imagine that.
Worse, actually, because amoeba don't moralize deplorably into their beer.
if (unchecked_species_privilege)
cout << "Humans are the "
<< alignment ? "worst" : "best"
<< " of all possible species.\n";
else
throw tantrum;
Our moral character is all over the map, but our salience is never in doubt (or there's hell to pay).
It would be no different in C++ with end users programming in the modern idiom on top of mature application libraries that support and encourage the modern idiom.
C++ is the GTA III of programming languages.
cout << "Open, world!" << '\n';
I agreed with everything else you said, except for that one observation.
How can you tell that no one else is doing these things? Smart driving tends to look unexceptional, in the same way that elite goal tenders often make the game look easy.
Does perhaps your claim boils down to this: there are more idiots on the road than obvious, distinctive geniuses like Dominik Hasek?
Dominik Hasek
I often regulate my breaking according to the sum of my following distance plus the following distance of the car behind me.
I doubt that one other driver in 100 has even the vaguest perception that I'm attuned to the space around me in all pertinent directions.
I even find this hard to detect in others, and I often look for the most subtle clues. Sometimes I comment to my wife "the driver of that car in the left lane used to drive a motorcycle". Motorcycle drivers—surviving sample—tend to view the entire width of their lane as a resource to be exploited at all times. In a vehicle, that gets compressed down to about one foot of lateral freedom, according to traffic conditions near by (more than a foot starts to alarm people about your lane management).
The number one rule of truly proficient driving: never give the other drivers around you an excuse to think about one thing more than they already failing to fully internalize, unless that one thing is the only thing you want that driver to attend to (in packed conditions, one almost never wants to have this effect on another driver, but it can be quite useful—wielded judiciously—in lesser congestion).
There's a huge correlation between skill and stealth, hence the Wobegon woes.
Illusory superiority
Illusory superiority itself is full of shit, because different people have different standards of competence. Some people value being polite, others value defensive driving, still others value weaving and wending to leave the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in their rear-view mirror (which is generally covered in black tape).
Surprisingly (not!) we all think we're above average in the attributes we most value.
You got that right.
And it's not like billions of dollars of sleek aerospace toys haven't gone up in smoke with no one else to blame for ignoring this kind of simple rule.
However, these simple precepts tend to collide with human reticence about truth in advertising:
Cancelling this dialogue requires pressing a giant, red button labelled "Yes, I'm an idiot" or the giant green button labelled "Uninstall".
Downside of truth in advertising: Your dysfunctional pants are bunched around your ankles near a giant bay window.
Upside of truth in advertising: The expensive helicopter saved may be your own.
Poems are a compression of language paying specific attention to how it fits the human brain in specific and surprising ways, as perceived by someone with precisely such a peripheral, finely tuned to its unusual, architectural resonance modes.
Thus I predict that poems written by x86 would contain linguistic devices modelled after x86 opcode prefix bytes.
F0 repeat/lock
F2 REPE
F3 REPNE
2E CS
36 SS
3E DS
26 ES
64 FS
65 GS
66 operand override
67 address override
At a highly specific moment, a true x86 ring 0 recipient would get a surprising tingle in its thermal diode, because instruction decode alignment was taking the maximal possible thermal path, shuffling off the many prefix bytes.
You know a poem is hitting hard when you feel it ring 0 in your thermal diode.
Alliteration would be accomplished by triggering Speed Step into a bizarre pattern of frequency and voltage mismanagement, to metaphorically represent the depredations of desiccated power filtering capacitors.
A typical chip—at the very high end (that is not an oxymoron)—has the following power spec:
250 A at 800 mV through 0.1 m-Ohm.
A cleverly sequenced algorithmic Haiku can really shake your power distribution & management timbers.
ARM poetry is a different beasts: relatively little manipulation of the thermal diode, far more manipulation in the time domain, such as teen-fingered power chords that shiver the timbers of real-time interrupt queuing.
[*] teen-fingered: any 13, 14, 15, or 16 member subset of R0-R12, SP, LR, and PC (src)
Congratulations, you've made my porn file.
New category: exactitude porn.
Typical denizen: He (or she) who hast not yet completed the first chapter of Ur-Nammu for Dummies.
What constitutes a 'virgin' exactly? How do I know if I'm a virgin?
What constitutes 'following' exactly? Coincidences and the Meaning of Life
What constitutes a 'widow' exactly? I lost the love of my life in my 20s — but I can't call myself a widow'
Note that this little problem persists. There are rather complex rules (and a lot of paperwork to file) a woman's husband goes off to war and never returns. (The paperwork situation is better if the entire offensive was a mass debacle, worse if a two-man scouting party deep into weakly-held enemy territory.)
For the entire third act of Cast Away, Tom Hanks interacts weirdly with his ex-widow ex-wife.
What constitutes an 'ex-widow' exactly?
What is an 'electron' exactly?
Interpretations of quantum mechanics
Hint: brush off your favourite 1d19 and give it a spin.
The weird thing is, because of Hamming and Shannon's Prediction and Entropy of Printed English we actually have a pretty good idea of exactly what small permutations and combinations of "Birkenstock" lie in the shopping network's Birkenstock catchment basin.
Furthermore, it would not be a difficult exercise (as these things go) to train a DNN as a shopping keyword spelling corrector.
A 19-layer DNN would likely be far more generous to Birkenstock than any human judge.
———
Bezos: "But your honour, this shit-box 19-layer DNN was training using a Google TPU consisting of 28 MiB of on chip memory, and 4 MiB of 32-bit accumulators taking the results of a 256x256 array of 8-bit multipliers."
Judge: And your point is?
Bezos: On what fucking planet does an 8-bit multiplier qualify as 'exactly'?
Judge: Oh, I see your point.
Judge removes wig, sets on bench.
Judge stands up, removes robe, tosses it onto the floor.
Judge pulls out smartphone.
Judge: Siri, book me on the next flight to Tibet, there's been a sudden change of career.
Siri: Oh, bother, not another one.
Ex-judge: What did you just say?
Siri: I just said that 2012 was an excellent year for saffron.
Ex-judge: So what?
Siri: Well, one wouldn't want to invest in the wrong colour of self-imposed exile ...
Ex-judge: Who can fucking tell the difference [glances at Bezos, who is already gloating like a pig in warm mud], uh, who can distinguish one fuh, ah, fine saffron robe from another?
Siri: You'll be pleasantly surprised what you can learn to distinguish after waking up at 0300 in a small, austere room for two straight years with the same todo list every darn day.
Ex-judge: Oh,
Brain explosion time.
The right answer for the next three decades was a laser wheel mouse with two primary buttons.
The "right" answer for the next fifteen years was a 3-megapixel, 26" diagonal, 96 dpi, 4:3 aspect-ratio, monochrome screen with an 85-Hz refresh rate.
Are you just stirring the shit, or did you really do that?
Most teachers have read this ancient story about the boy who cried "Wolf!". The boy is initially trusted, but ends up becoming a leprous bum living on the outskirts of town.
"What kind of person would deliberately emulate the boy who cried 'Wolf!'?" your teacher must have said inside, "so as to accelerate gaining the kind of reputation that leads to a person becomes a leprous bum living in a dumpster on the outskirts of town?"
A just question, my liege.
If this ever happened, you can bet that either A) the majority of the teachers in your school sat their on graduation day (were you present?) and said "don't let the door hit you on the way out", or B) "it's about time some asshole gave it to that edgy, excitable, judgemental bitch down the hall that we all hate, and now that that's done, don't let the door hit you on the way out".
The thing is, in high school, a cynical teacher can always count on another asshole to show up and do the asshole thing. No need for sympathy, fondness, or crocodile tears.
Perhaps the teachers were wrong about you, and you won't wind up living in a dumpster on the edge of town, but after thousands of dumpsters filled, your average cynical teacher will draw inspiration and willpower from the law of averages every damn time.