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South Korea: Exploding lithium batteries spark deadly factory fire
  • In other news. A factory fire in Hull, England received nothing more than local news coverage this week. Their product? Hand sanitizer. Turns out that 99% alcohol is really flamible.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/fire-breaks-out-at-hull-factory-and-spreads-to-area-holding-1000-litres-of-hand-sanitiser/ar-BB1oyRi8

    I wonder why there's such a huge disparity in news coverage between these two stories. I guess it's because the building was evacuated successfully, right?

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • So "instruction encoding length".

    I don't think that works though. For something like RISC-V, RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding. For x86-64 those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

  • Reform UK candidates' offensive remarks uncovered by BBC
  • Trouble is that people pointing at this as evidence to show that Reform can't be given power fail to realise that it doesn't play as a negative to those that vote for them. Some Reform voters see this and think "they're not afraid to be honest". Trump's comment played positively to a large number, as awful as that is.

    Digging up a little bit of misogyny on these people isn't worth the effort.

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • Even then, at what point do you measure it? DDR interface is likely very much narrower than the interfaces between cache levels. Where does the core end and the memory begin?

  • World’s 1st high-temperature superconducting tokamak built in China
  • We've proved we can do fusion, but we're still at the stage of just having singular reactions. None of these are power stations with a continuous flow of output, and they're not even close to being so.

  • Social care: The crisis Britain’s politicians are too scared to discuss
  • Voters may want social care to be on the ballot at the UK general election, but no one seems to be listening.

    Yes they are. You just need to be talking to a Liberal Democrat. It's part of the manifesto.

  • Corporate Media Blackout as Jeremy Corbyn Drops Bombshell About Israel
  • Israel clothes itself in the garments of the Jewish people and uses them to defend it's actions. It claims that any action against it is an action against the Jewish people.

    Now I know that there are Jewish people around the world saying "not in my name", but it's also why so many supporters of Israel exist. You can't divorce the religious aspect from this war. If it wasn't there this wouldn't be allowed to happen.

  • Girl, 15, speaks out after classmate made deepfake nudes of her and posted online
  • Yeah I mean it's just a more easy to use Photoshop basically.

    Photoshop has the same technology baked into it now. Sure, it has "safeguards" so it may not generate nudes, but it would have no trouble depicting someone "having dinner with Bill Cosby" or whatever you feel is reputation destroying.

  • Girl, 15, speaks out after classmate made deepfake nudes of her and posted online
  • Technically and legally the photos would be considered child porn

    I don't think that has been tested in court. It would be a reasonable legal argument to say that the image isn't a photo of anyone. It doesn't depict reality, so it can't depict anyone.

    I think at best you can argue it's a form of photo manipulation, and the intent is to create a false impression about someone. A form of image based libel, but I don't think that's currently a legal concept. It's also a concept where you would have to protect works of fiction otherwise you've just made the visual effects industry illegal if you're not careful.

    In fact, that raises an interesting simily. We do not allow animals to be abused, but we allow images of animal abuse in films as long as they are faked. We allow images of human physical abuse as long as they are faked. Children are often in horror films, and creating the images we see is very strictly managed so that the child actor is not exposed to anything that could distress them. The resulting "works of art" are not under such limitations as far as I'm aware.

    What's the line here? Parental consent? I think that could lead to some very concerning outcomes. We all know abusive parents exist.

    I say all of this, not because I want to defend anyone, but because I think we're about to set some really bad legal precidents if we're not careful. Ones that will potentially do a lot of harm. Personally, I don't think the concept of any image, or any other piece of data, being illegal holds water. Police people's actions, not data.

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • We do, depending on how you count it.

    There's two major widths in a processor. The data register width and the address bus width, but even that is not the whole story. If you go back to a processor like the 68000, the classic 16-bit processor, it has:

    • 32-bit data registers
    • 16- bit ALU
    • 16-bit data bus
    • 32-bit address registers
    • 24-bit address bus

    Some people called it a 16/32 bit processor, but really it was the 16-bit ALU that classified it as 16-bits.

    If you look at a Zen 4 core it has:

    • 64-bit data registers
    • 512-bit AVX data registers
    • 6 x 64-bit integer ALUs
    • 4 x 256-bit AVX ALUs
    • 2 x 128-bit data bus to DDR5 (dual edge 64-bit)
    • ~40-bits of addressable physical RAM

    So, what do you want to call this processor?

    64-bit (integer width), 128-bit (physical data bus width), 256-bit (widest ALU) or 512-bit (widest register width)? Do you want to multiply those numbers up by the number of ALUs in a core? ...by the number of cores on a piece of silicon?

    Me, I'd say Zen4 was a 256-bit core, but you could argue any of the above numbers.

    Basically, it's a measurement that lost all meaning so people stopped using it.

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • We can, but it's awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don't need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

    If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.

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