I was paranoid for a long time about things like SIP and SecureBoot but think of it this way. What is the likelihood that you are infected by a bootkit versus some 0day that affects your browser? My main beef w/ rootless/SIP/Gatekeeper and these types of technology is that you no longer own your hardware, you are a slave to the HW manufacturer.
Yet at the same time you get roasted on here if you run things as root. It’s pure bs.. Apple has top notch engineering and architecture. Others always follow.. in terms of hardware, but also software
nVidia is on its last legs, honestly. If this is the best they can come up with, forget it. What is the real world application/use case for this GPU? I doubt it would be used for autonomous driving - you could buy some cheap used Tesla P100s and toss them on a rack for a better price point IMO.
wow...
uh science? for one.Smaller outfits and research groups that want to do rapidly iterate through modeling and simulation but don't have a datacenter.
the A100 is about 11 times more performant than a p100 in HPC benchmarks.
You can get a dgx station a100 with 4 A100s in it and run it on mains power and have the equivalent of 44 p100s under your desk (for these applications).
Yeah, I was surprised there is no mention of drift and technical debt. These are the things that make software engineering hard. Someone new will always suggest a rewrite, which is tempting but is almost always a trap and massive timesink.
The neoluddite take is kind of like beating a dead horse. Smartphones are a tool; how you use this tool is entirely dependent on how disciplined your mind is. Not everyone who has their first sip of alcohol will become an alcoholic. It is the same for smartphones.
The article’s take on China is weird too; do they not have smartphones? The author probably wrote the article on a Huawei phone that the vast majority of Chinese people use every day.
> And she took on another heart—no longer minded toward earthly things—but ecstatically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the style of the angels. And as she spoke ecstatically, she allowed “The Spirit” to be on her garment.
It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.
When angels are described in the Bible, it's often in strange and abstract terms, beings with multiple faces, legs made of burning bronze, eyes where eyes shouldn't be, etc. As if the writer was having difficulty comprehending what they were seeing,much less finding language for it. And the first thing angels do when they encounter humans is tell them not to be afraid, because of course the logical and proper reaction to skyscraper-sized interlocking, burning, eye-covered wheels with multi-faced, multi-winged beings in the middle is bowel evacuating terror.
And of course, many of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors were simply aliens that were so alien that the mere sight of them broke human minds, and that were no more concerned for humanity than humanity is for a particular anthill.
That's probably what an actual encounter with an alien is going to be like for us. We'll try to understand why a living infinite-dimensional hypersphere made of flesh made of time whose eyes are our eyes all at once just showed up and "unfolded" our sun into a non-Euclidean shape we can't even describe mathematically without being driven slowly to madness, while it won't even know we were there.
Consider this: China can close their economy tomorrow and most of the world’s economies would crumble almost overnight. The supply chain of most developed and developing nations is primarily based in China. It would take decades in a developed country to build manufacturing capabilities at the scale China has currently.
Despite being the second largest economy of the world, only 4.3% of international trade happens in in the Yuan [1]. People do not want give their oil and wheat in exchange for Yuans! Countries do not see the Yuan as a valuable reserve currency, which reflects their trust in the Chinese system. Since the majority if international trade happens in US Dollars, China needs to trade with the US to get Dollars.
The US on the other hand produces much more food and energy it needs.
For now. The yuan is still a new currency in the world trade. The Chinese are just starting to push it as a global currency. This will take some time, but I imagine that 20 years from now the yuan will be a second, if not the first international currency.
What's your point? The only reason to point what would happen if China did close would be to show that they have leverage over the rest of the world. But if they can't or won't close, and everyone knows it, then they don't have leverage.
China would be severely affected by such a measure as well. This is WTO's doing, and is a big reason why there has been no world war 3. It's easy to wage war if your economy is truly sovereign, but with a nation your economy is intertwined with, it's hard to wage with. Trump's anti-China policy, while it is sensible in many ways, could have the ill effect of enabling a major war in a few years.
The difference is that mutual defense pacts (WW1 alliances) are very different from trade agreements (modern alliances).
If you have a 1-year stockpile of food, produce only enough food for 50% of your population to not go hungry, and depend on imports to make up the slack, that is a dampening force on the decision to go to war.
These agreements are now negotiated at the national level in trade agreements, and at the international level by the WTO. It's a very different system from the one that existed prior to WWI.
...
Although, that's not to say that trade did not play a role in WWI!
Incidentally, the German pre-WWI german economy was dependent on migrant labor from Poland and Russia to exercise successful harvests in Prussia. When WWI broke out, they were not able to replace these migrant laborers in the fields, and experienced crop failures.
This led to significant food shortages during the war, signaled by large increases in the price of bread, in particular.
The military elites (Luddendort, Hindenburg) of the country must have known why prices were rising (because there was a gaping hole in supply), but successfully spun the narrative for the common folk that it was merchants (price-setters) who were to blame for the war.
Needless to say, price being a function of supply and demand, and the post-zollvereini/unification interdependence of the German commodities economy was not as popularly-understood of a concept as antisemitism.
The reality was that the war was poorly-planned and poorly-executed, but this was an unconscionable admission for the Prussian elites.
This was one of the load-bearing columns for the dolchstoss myth that was weaponized to develop German anti-semitism in the interwar years.
In fairness, no country in a pact attacked another country in its pact. The issue was there were 2 competing and independent alliance groups rather than 1 (World) trade group.
Take something as simple as boots. In war, soldiers are usually doing a lot of walking and good boots prevent many injuries and improve effectivity of troops. So suddenly you decide to send millions of conscripts into war. Sadly you have outsourced the boots manufacturing industry to the country you are waging war with. Had the industry been in your country, you could have told them to retrofit their lines to manufacture your boots, but sadly all the knowledge, together with the population that is used to the repetitive nature of factory work is in a different country now.
Remember how much struggle there was distributing even simple things like masks and PPE during the COVID pandemic?
Of course you can solve the boots problem, but you'll have the same variant of problem for a lot of things. Solving all these problems all at once is an insurmountable task.
Even building a single Photolitography plant takes hundreds of millions of USD and years from start of planning to conclusion, with the involvement of a large number of companies from around the globe, each specialized to their own part of the process, and world leader in that part. So where will you manufacture your chips needed for your autonomous robot army?
My manager mentioned Hacktoberfest a while back. Honestly I’d never heard of it. When I went to check it out, I was greeted with millions of commits of whitespace. Now I dream of the whitespace. I’ve learned to embrace the whitespace. And it’s fellow companions, the humble carriage return and line feed.
