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Not to be confused with a torte, which only harms your waistline.

Now when the bricks had fallen from the barrel to the floor

I then outweighed the barrel and I started down once more

I clung on tightly to the rope, and sped toward the ground --

And landed on the broken bricks a-lying all around.

I lay there groaning on the ground and thought I'd passed the worst

When the barrel hit the pulley wheel, and then the bottom burst

A shower of bricks came down on me, 'twas then I gave up hope

And lying there upon the ground, I let go the bloody rope.

[...]


Manpages are both good and awful. If you already know how to use the command and you just need a refresher on how to enable the diagnostic option for wolves, they're fine. OTOH if you don't know how to use the command they're terrible, just an endless catalogue of incomprehensible options scrolling past. Problem is that that's what Dennis and Ken created in 1929 for use on ASR-33s and it hasn't been updated since. 99% of the time when I need to use some new unfamiliar command I go to whatever DDG pops up, usually StackOverflow, for a guide on usage.

  The period with highest production is the period of lowest consumption.
Not in Australia it isn't.

How similar is the climate of Australia with northern Europe? Countries which spend more energy on AC than heating has a much better utilization of solar.

I’m in New Zealand and the high production period covers peak usage too.

That wasn't necessarily Bush personally, who was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his strategists. The Republicans had convinced themselves that surpluses encouraged government spending so by wiping them out and "starving the beast" as they put it the resulting financial crunch would create a need to slash spending, cut social welfare, and reduce the size of government.

Actually now that it's set out like that, the strategists were just as much in la-la land as Bush was.


But they never did starve anything. Even DOGE didn't cut a significant fraction of the budget. They just eliminated a bunch of ideological enemies and quit early.

They didn't even pretend to reduce the entitlement programs that they claim to hate, but are fiercely defended by the elderly, who overwhelmingly vote for them.


That George Bush the 2nd is a doofus is a finely crafted PR image.

He knew exactly what he was doing.


RISC-V truly is the RyanAir of processors: Oh, you want FP maths? That's an optional extra, did you check that when you booked? And was that single or double-precision, all optional extras at an extra charge. Atomic instructions, that's an extra too, have your credit card details handy. Multiply and divide? Yeah, extras. Now, let me tell you about our high-end customer options, packed SIMD and user-level interrupts, only for business class users. And then there's our first-class benefits, hypervisor extensions for big spenders, and even more, all optional extras.

So it's modular. This is normally considered a good thing. It means you don't have to pay for features you don't need.

The ISA is open so there's no greedy corporation trying to upsell you. I mean there's an implementation and die area cost for each extension but it's not being set at an artificial level by a monopolist.


But that means a port of Linux can’t be to RISC-V, it has to be to a specific implementation of RISC-V, or if sufficient (which seems still debatable) to a specific common RISC-V profile.

You can target the minimum instruction set and it'll run everywhere. Albeit very slowly. Perhaps you use a fat binary to get reasonable performance in most cases.

This isn't easy but it can be done (and it is being done on x86, despite constantly evolving variations of AVX).


It's a good thing in many cases but not if you're going to be running applications distributed as binaries. Maybe if we go the Gentoo route of everybody always recompiling everything for their own system?

Then you stick to RVA23, which is comparable to ARMv9 and x86-64v4.

RVA23 is, finally, the belated admission that maybe we shouldn't have everything as optional extras. Hopefully it'll take off, I can't imagine what sort of a headache it is for maintainers of repos who have to track a dozen different variants of binaries depending on which flavour of RISC-V the apt-get is coming from.

RVA23 (and RVA20 before it) aren't an admission that Risc-V got it wrong. It's a necessary step to make Risc-V competetive in the desktop space as opposed to micro-controllers where the flexibility is hugely valuable.

There's a good chance you're actually paying more for the features you don't need. Preparing an EUV mask set costs something like 30 million dollars (that figure may be out of date, i.e. it could be more now). So instead of a single mask set with everything on the device, whether you need it or not, you're paying $30 million for each special-snowflake variant. This is why vendors do a one-size-fits-all version of many of their products and then disable the extra functionality for the cheaper market segments, because it's much, much cheaper than making separate reduced-functionality devices.

Then x86_64 is the cable television service of processors. "Oh, you want channel 5? Then you have to buy this bundle with 40 other channels you will never watch, including 7 channels in languages you do not speak."

>Multiply and divide

And where it actually mattered they did not introduce a separate extension. Integer division is significantly more complex than multiplication, so it may make sense for low-end microcontrollers to implement in hardware only the latter.


There is Zmmul for multiplication-but-not-divide.

Yes, adding instructions to your ISA has a cost

I believe the appropriate technical term is "bollocks" rather than "crap", see https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf.

That slide deck is complaining that correct work on quantum attacks should be seen as negligible priority or as distractions. TFA is complaining that JVG isn't even correct. They are pretty different concerns.

To be clear, I think that slide deck will be looked back upon as naive. In particular, it makes the classic mistake of assuming the size of number factored should be growing smoothly. That's naive because 15 is such a huge cost outlier and because quantum error correction has frontloaded costs. See [1] and [2] for details.

[1]: https://algassert.com/post/2500

[2]: https://algassert.com/post/2503


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

They could cover some of the costs by running selfie trips to the Wadi Jizz.


This has always been the US way of doing things, going back to at least WWII: Get to Berlin, kill Hitler if required, and after that, uh, yeah, we'll get back to you on that. This is why things mostly kept going under continuous carpet bombing but fell apart completely once the bombing stopped and the administration was decapitated with noting to replace it.

The US then repeated the mistake in Iraq, take a population of 45 million, with most males having military training and a large percentage of the population dependent on government jobs and/or handouts, then remove the government. Who could possibly have predicted what would happen next?

And now they're doing it again in Iran.


Your example of failed US nation-building is postwar Germany??

Is anybody giving credit to the US for post-war germany? Hilarious example nonetheless. I think the US gets more credit for nation building the case of Japan. South Korea. Phillippines is a questionable success story. But yeah, south america and the middle east have consistently been a mess.

Let me answer that for you: No, no, and yes (to the second part). Anything else?

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