log☇︎
795200+ entries in 0.754s
nubbins`: but i don't think there's enough to gain from blocking all unsigned apps for them to risk it
herbijudlestoids: after a rigorous discussion on bitcoin, i always top it off with a quick
nubbins`: don't get me wrong, they'll fuck ya raw all kinds of ways for a buck
asciilifeform: apple is the 'good cop' in a classic 'good cop / bad cop' number.
asciilifeform: never forget why MS bailed out apple in the '90s.
nubbins`: asciilifeform, that'd be the worry, but i don't think it'll happen any time soon
decimation: I believe they have unofficially said as much
decimation: that's the obvious next step for apple to take
asciilifeform: nubbins`: don't be surprised if mac os '11' or whatnot simply refuses to run 'unsigned' apps
asciilifeform: decimation: vendor usually specifies a max current. and then you go, X cm^s, Y watts dissipated, need such and such heat sink...
nubbins`: that said, nothing more than a mild inconvenience to disable the feature, i'm sure
nubbins`: asciilifeform, i always was curious about the "walled garden!!" type people who also owned consoles
decimation: It seems that at some point you are going to need more current
decimation: suppose your design occupies most of the gates and ends up clocking nearly all of them at max rate.
asciilifeform: nubbins`: welcome to the Nintendoized world
asciilifeform: decimation: the vendor toolchain usually calculates your maximum clock rate, based on theoretical path delays (usually a conservative figure, as you'd expect)
decimation: Plus, good luck achieving max clock rate and not melting the chip
nubbins`: had to right-click and select open
nubbins`: i downloaded an osx program the other day, double-clicked to open, "this application was not created by an authorized developer" or some such
asciilifeform: today there are fpgas with several mil. of gates, costing in the high five figures (u.s. dollar)
asciilifeform: a few thousand gates, max
asciilifeform: no one would've dreamed of trying to implement a cpu on one
asciilifeform: they were well-documented and extremely simple, because they were originally just a substitute for buckets of PALs/GALs
decimation: and they probably only open that because they are a two-bit player
asciilifeform: interestingly, the earliest (late '80s) fpgas did not have this problem
asciilifeform: docs only, or the complete chip mask and sources for the latter ?
decimation: And yet, bunnie points out that freescale has opened the docs for their ARM clone
decimation: Or will they always be beholden to chasing after some lock-in dream?
decimation: Do you think there will ever be a day when hardware makers find it in their interest to peddle hardware that has an accessible interface?
asciilifeform: this is how soviet clones of DEC chips ended up exact duplicates, complete with the (poorly translated, with a dictionary, by DEC) profanities
asciilifeform: (it's in there, after all.)
asciilifeform: you can get the mask.
decimation: Presuming you have the mask?
asciilifeform: you don't actually need to understand very much about an IC design to clone it.
asciilifeform: avoid the dev work
asciilifeform: that was sort of the whole point
asciilifeform: but presumably they simply use pirated tool chain
asciilifeform: the chinese, according to some, do make clones of various Xilinx units
decimation: I guess it wouldn't include said trickery
asciilifeform: likewise, the vendor software usually includes a mountain of 'travelling salesman' optimization trickery licensed from hell knows where
decimation: So, why doesn't some no-name Chinese fab make a relatively "generic" chip and take over the market?
decimation: So they insert an artifical layer of indirection in the hardware and give you an opaque software layer to undo it
asciilifeform: they have an incentive to make it as painful as possible to write anything from scratch
decimation: Interesting. So these companies make their money by building proprietary cores on top of their proprietary chips.
asciilifeform: if not, then not.
asciilifeform: if your design maps well to what you have, you get decent (minimal) 'footprint' and speed
asciilifeform: likewise, each vendor (and even particular flavours of fpga from same vendor) provides slightly different building blocks on top of the usual LUTs
asciilifeform: and the whole shebang is speed-limited by its 'weakest link' (longest delay)
asciilifeform: because each logic element (incl. switch matrix) in the path is an extra few ns. of delay
asciilifeform: if you don't optimize for a particular fpga, you can't get anything close to the maximum rated clock of the sdram in question
asciilifeform: and therefore have mediocre-to-poor performance on most jobs
asciilifeform: because the opencores libs aren't optimized for a particular fpga
decimation: Why hasn't something like "opencores" largely replaced that?
asciilifeform: the major vendors earn far more renting out 'cores' (read: libraries, for things like ethernet and pci) than through selling the chips per se.
asciilifeform: the reason for this secrecy is interesting and perverse
asciilifeform: the correspondence between each bit of the bitstream and the internal logic of the fpga is a $billion secret
decimation: I mean that it can program itself after design time
asciilifeform: the protocol for pumping in the 'bitstream' is simple and documented;
decimation: asciilifeform you mention on your blog your efforts to discover the inner workings of FPGAs - have you made enough progress to create a self-modifying compute unit?
decimation: If not bitcoin, than some other cryptocurrency. And if any cryptocurrency, than bitcoin.
mircea_popescu: Apocalyptic i'll just publish the thing when we're done
Apocalyptic: herbijudlestoids, just /ignore people that annoy you
Apocalyptic: keep it in the chan mircea_popescu if you can
mircea_popescu: herbijudlestoids dja know how to use the pm system ?
herbijudlestoids: your summary is about as useful as the stupid analogy that decimation gave earlier.
asciilifeform: "can you prove to me the entire troop of us hedge funds aren't little maddofs running around, shielded..." << i can prove that this /must/ be so
herbijudlestoids: i wish people would stop interrupting your interesting comments with inane bullshit so i can try to understand ☟︎
Dimsler_: refer to current price of facebook stock
mircea_popescu: maddoff's balancesheet, before the collapse, showed some assets.
herbijudlestoids: but i can prove to you quite easily through factor decomposition that most US hedge funds are not doing anything special at all
mircea_popescu: ok. let's get to the bottom of this.
herbijudlestoids: not sure that statement made much sense to me
mircea_popescu: can you prove to me the entire troop of us hedge funds aren't little maddofs running around, shielded by "industry standards" ?
herbijudlestoids: madoffs investments collapsed because of a cluelessness about the real value of assets?
decimation: US stocks are a trival case of the CEO's pirating money from the "investor's" 401k accounts
Dimsler_: unless you're buying tobacco or liquor
Dimsler_: well the problem with US stocks is they all suck
mircea_popescu: a cluelessness about the real value of assets, which may as well mean "buying US stocks" as it may mean "moving money from our account to our account"
mircea_popescu: well... what exactly is this misrepresentation ? what is its substance ?
mircea_popescu: why was this ?
mircea_popescu: herbijudlestoids let's examine the following avenue : maddoff's "investments" collapsed like so much termite eaten furniture.
Dimsler_: bitcoins not that popular
mircea_popescu: should have been in the wot two years ago.
mircea_popescu: the fact that andressen horovitz is not in the wot today dooms it.
mircea_popescu: decimation the people are more important.
decimation: There are only a few more orders of magnitude of growth left before it becomes the world trade currency
Dimsler_: are we talking about btc speculation?
mircea_popescu: should have started earlier, but there was still space.
mircea_popescu: if back in april wanna-be investors had actually invested, the us still had a chance.
Dimsler_: what are we talking about
herbijudlestoids: but the opportunity has not gone
mircea_popescu: there's options you have, and then there's options you actually can take.
mircea_popescu: now, people do have options. it's just they won't take them.
mircea_popescu: herbijudlestoids the article was discussing investors, you know ?
mircea_popescu: well, i dun know what you think, obviously. im merely noticing that what you say comes from this one point of view.
herbijudlestoids: if the possibility came and went then the implication is that people *today* have literally no option for investment...so BTCs are out for those people?
herbijudlestoids: im not trapped in any such mental representation and dont really believe for example that a BTCUSD price punctuation event would need "permission" to occur lol
mircea_popescu: ll be one of those things that "could hav been"
mircea_popescu: or how, or where to.
mircea_popescu: your choice is not whether the boat sails, or when.