They’ve definitely done that before, dunno if it was deliberately. They must have somewhat of an idea how long it takes for nocebo to kick in with the local village idiots, if it’s short enough it could actually be a rather good idea to make waiting a bit a general policy. Tank some mild capital and opportunity cost to prevent having to battle in court and the town newspaper? Sounds like a win to me.

Simlocks have completely vanished from the market at least here in Germany, mostly because carriers don’t care if you use your subsidised bonus phone with a different card – you’re still locked into a contract with two years or such minimum duration. Even those contracts have gotten rare though I think most people right-out own their phones and then make a separate contract.

A massive population correction is inevitable.

The world population is going to stop growing, naturally, within the next decades as the last populous countries finish their demographic transition. It’s even going to see a reduction in many places unless steered against due to way below placement rate fertility. Long story short human fertility is intimately tied to child mortality: The fewer children die, the fewer kids we have, investing in quality over quantity.

The earth can easily sustain that population, even in a more fucked up state.

For a lorry, no. For a private vehicle, yes. Standard driving licenses only allow for up to 3.5t combined permissible weight (that is, vehicle and trailer plus maximum load), 750kg of those for trailer and load. If you want to drive a combination of vehicle and trailer individually up to 3.5t (so total 7t) you need a trailer license, anything above that you need a lorry license with all bells and whistles such as regular medical checkups.

Or, differently put: A standard VW Golf can pull almost thrice as much as most drivers are allowed to pull.

A small load for a private vehicle would be a small empty caravan, or a light trailer with some bikes. A Smart Fourtwo can pull 550kg which will definitely look silly but is otherwise perfectly reasonable, that’s enough for both applications.

My kitchen scales have a USB-C port. While I certainly would like it to have the capability to stream GB/s worth of measuring data over it fact of the matter is I paid like ten bucks for it, all it knows is how to charge the CR2032 cell inside. I also don’t expect it to support displayport alt mode, it has a seven-segment display I don’t really think it’s suitable as a computer monitor.

What’s true though is that it’d be nice to have proper labelling standards for cables. It should stand to reason that the cable that came with the scales doesn’t support high performance modes, heck it doesn’t even have data lines literally the only thing it’s capable of is low-power charging, nothing wrong with that but it’d be nice to be able to tell that it can only do that at a semi-quick glance when fishing for a cable in the spaghetti bin.

A and B are the original, used for host and device sides, respectively. C is the same on both ends of the cable because figures there’s device classes which can sensibly act as both, in particular phones. It’s also the most modern of the bunch supporting higher data transfer and power delivery rates because back in the days where A and B where designed people were thinking about connecting mice and keyboards, not 8k monitors or kWhs worth of lithium batteries.

The whole mini/micro shennanigans are alternative B types and quite deeply flawed, mechanically speaking.

Forks are derivative works (quite obviously) so yes you can forbid them via license terms. Whether or not that’s still open source, take it up with OSI. I vaguely recall that at least once upon a time there was some project that required modification to the code to be published as separate patches and it was generally accepted to be open source don’t ask me which.

anyone can host an email service

Eh, no. You could in the 2000s, nowadays spam protection is so tight, and necessarily that tight, that you need at least a full-time position actively managing the server or you’re getting blacklisted for some reason or the other. Other servers will simply not accept emails sent by you if you don’t look legit and professional.

Definitely possible for a company with IT department, as a small company you want to outsource it (emails being on your domain doesn’t mean you’re managing the server), as a hobbyist, well you might be really into it but generally also no. Send protonmail or posteo or whoever a buck or something a month.

That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension

It most likely is on the technical level, just shipped by default and integrated into standard settings instead of the add-on ones. And it’s going to be opt-in, so you won’t have to go into about:config to disable it. Speaking of: You’re looking for extensions.pocket.enabled, it should be false. And before you say “muh diskspace” it’s probably like 5k of js and css or such.

They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun

Well they don’t strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don’t happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn’t exactly easy.

Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn’t actually that bad if it doesn’t make the reactor otherwise more expensive.

What’s much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don’t care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, “do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often”: That’s an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They’re planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they’ve won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can’t exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.

Azov has gotten completely diluted by a gigantic influx of ordinary people, its hardcore Nazi times were over before they were even rolled into Ukraine’s overall command structure which came along with some more denazification. The Wolfsangel isn’t recognised as a far-right symbol in Ukraine by the general public so they kept it. It’s also not a clear-cut Nazi symbol even in Germany, you see it on plenty of coat of arms, it also has plenty of use in forestry which is its original source: You hang it with bait onto a branch to kill wolves in a rather gruesome manner. That’s outlawed nowadays but you still see it on border forestry border stones, to mark wood, etc. The heraldic use derives from that, it symbolises presence or importance of forestry in the area the coat of arm represents. Not much forest around the Azov sea, though.

Those are not the Nazis you’re looking for. If you want to see, well not exactly nazis but the hot-bed of ultranationalists in the Ukrainian army have a look at the right sector regiment. Dylan Burns did an interview.

Next up: Someone’s going to claim that the Ukrainian army uses the “Iron Cross”. First off, the Bundeswehr still uses it, secondly, no the Ukrainians don’t use it you’re looking at the Cossack Cross, derived independently from the Templar Cross, unlike the Iron Cross not via the Teutonic Order. They’ve been using that thing for centuries.

EDIT: Oh wait I just remembered I’m completely banned from lemmygrad they won’t see this. Well, whatever.

So then, you think Nazi Swastikas without context should be allowed without any repercussions.

That’s incoherent. “Nazi swastika” and “without context” doesn’t mesh because “Nazi” is a context for “swastika”.

That aside, I’m going to take German law as an example: No, non-nazi swastikas are very much not outlawed. You can see them on stray Hindu temples or shrines in the country, for example. “Without” context they’re generally assumed to be Nazi ones over here because historical context, also, only Nazis draw random swastikas over here. You also see ones broken in pieces getting thrown in the trash or in a crossed-out circle, those come from the Antifa side.

Both the Hindu and Antifa uses are legal, the Nazi ones aren’t. That’s because German law doesn’t outlaw the swastika as such, it outlaws “using symbols of unconstitutional or outlawed organisations in a manner suitable to further their aims”. A Nazi painting a Swastika on a Jewish gravestone is considered furthering the aims of the NSDAP, which had the swastika as their logo. A Hindu chiselling a swastika into their gravestone is a completely different matter. (Do Hindus use gravestones? Anyway doesn’t matter it’s a hypothetical example).

In another country, where the historical context is different, those “without” context swastikas won’t be interpreted the same as in Germany. So even under German law those would arguably be legal, there.

Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly,

Kinda… yes and no? At least with x86 there’s still things like encoding selection going on, there’s not a 1:1 mapping between assembly syntax and opcodes.

Also assemblers, at least those meant for human consumption (mostly nasm nowadays) tend to have powerful macro systems. That’s not assembly as such, of course.

But I think your “a compiler changes the structure of the code” thing is spot-on, an assembler will not reorder instructions, it won’t do dead code elimination, but I think it’s not really out of scope of an assembler to be able to do those things – compilers weren’t doing them for the longest time, either.

I think a clearer division would be that compilers deal with two sets of semantics: That of the source language, and that of the CPU. The CPU semantics don’t say things like “result after overflow is undefined”, that’s C speaking, and compilers can use those differences to do all kind of shennanigans. With assemblers there’s no such translation between different language semantics, it’s always the CPU semantics.

The ISA does include sse2 though which is 128 bit, already more than the pointer width. They also doubled the number of xmm registers compared to 32-bit sse2.

Back in the days using those instructions often gained you nothing as the CPUs didn’t come with enough APUs to actually do operations on the whole vector in parallel.

32 is ASCII space, the highest number you need is 114 for r (or 122 for z if you want to be generic), that’s a range of 82 or 90 values.

The target string has 13 characters, a long long has 8 bytes or 16 nibbles – 13 fits into 16 so nibbles (the (x >>= 4) & 15) it is. Also the initial x happens to have 13 nibbles in it so that makes sense. But a nibble only has 16 values, not 82, so you need some kind of compression and that’s the rest of the math, no idea how it was derived.

If I were to write that thing I’d throw PAQ at it it can probably spit out an arithmetic coding that works, and look even more arcane as you wouldn’t have the obvious nibble steps. Or, wait, throw NEAT at it: Train it to, given a specific initial seed, produce a second seed and a character, score by edit distance. The problem space is small enough for the approach to be feasible even though it’s actually a terrible use of the technique, but using evolution will produce something that’s utterly, utterly inscrutable.

graphics, video, neural-net acceleration.

All three are kinda at least half-covered by the vector instructions which absolutely and utterly kills any BLAS workload dead. 3d workloads use fancy indexing schemes for texture mapping that aren’t included, video I guess you’d want some special APU sauce for wavelets or whatever (don’t know the first thing about codecs), neural nets should run fine as they are provided you have a GPU-like memory architecture, the vector extension certainly has gather/scatter opcodes. Oh, you’d want reduced precision but that’s in the pipeline.

Especially with stuff like NNs though the microarch is going to matter a lot. Even if a say convolution kernel from one manufacturers uses instructions a chip from another manufacturer understands, it’s probably not going to perform at an optimal level.

VPUs AFAIU are usually architected like DSPs: A bunch of APUs stitched together with a VLIW insn encoder very much not intended to run code that is in any way general-purpose, because the only thing it’ll ever run is hand-written assembly, anyway. Can’t find the numbers right now but IIRC my rk3399 comes with a VPU that out-flops both the six arm cores and the Mali GPU, combined, but it’s also hopeless to use for anything that can’t be streamed linearly from and to memory.

Graphics is the by far most interesting one in my view. That is, it’s a lot general purpose stuff (for GPGPU values of “general purpose”) with only a couple of bits and pieces domain-specific.

Hooking up a BananaPi to a keyboard+monitor is going to be quite a bit cheaper, and unlike with the framework laptop you can’t re-use case, monitor, etc. with an upgraded board.

You can develop using it as an SBC, then put it into the laptop when you go to a conference to present your stuff. Or if you really want to code in the park it’s not like it’d be a microcontroller, it is fast enough to run an editor and compiler.

But granted it’s a hassle to switch out the mainboard. OTOH you can also use the x86 board as an SBC so when you’re at home it doesn’t really matter which board happens to be inside.

I guess from framework’s POV there’s not much of an argument, it’s less “do people want potato laptops” but “do we want to get our feet wet with RISC-V and the SBC market”. Nobody actually needs to use it in a laptop for the whole thing to make sense to them.

You don’t need a laptop to use a framework mainboard, they run without battery and display and everything. So if you have a Framework 13 or are in the market for one this might actually be a very nice thing, especially if the price is comparable to other boards.

ARM prominently has an instruction to deal with Javascript. And RISC-V will have those kinds of instructions, too, they’re too useful, saving a massive amount of instructions and cycles and the CPU itself doesn’t really need any logic added, the insn decoder just has to be taught a bit pattern and which microops to emit, the APUs already can do it.

What that instruction will never do in a RISC CPU though is read from memory.

On the flipside, some RISC-V macroops are CISC, fusing memory access and arithmetic. That’s an architecture detail, though, only affecting code to the degree of "if you want to do this stuff, and want it to run faster on some cores, put those instructions in this exact sequence so the core can spot and fuse them).