jjmarr

My family has spent centuries marrying into an alternative claimant to the Grand Duke of Tuscany who did not inherit through Ferdinando I. We were planning to use this as an excuse to invade Italy and put the scion of our own dynasty on the throne and establish ourselves as royalty in the annals of history.

Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan.

Not sure what to do now, should I find a wife with a better claim?

The United States is rare. Most countries (seemingly including Romania[1]) have adopted either a cadastral/Torrens title system in which the land registry is definitive legal evidence of who owns a particular piece of land. If you purchased a piece of land and that wasn't recorded in the registry, you are SOL because registration is what conveys title.

The United States on the other hand has a massive title insurance industry, which wouldn't exist if this system was implemented. So you can make random handshake agreements all you'd like and sue over it.

[1] https://www.elra.eu/the-principles-underlying-the-land-regis...

The CUDA/HIP APIs are mostly C-like APIs but are really C++ language extensions. e.g. you need triple angle brackets when calling a GPU kernel. The compiler turns that into placing the kernel onto the GPU and running it.

The GPU kernel code itself needs to be compiled and for CUDA that is done with the proprietary nvcc, which is clang-based. HIP is better because it's an open-source llvm backend/frontend but you'd still need to add GPU-specific support to zig/rust/whatever.

People are perfectly content to accept pollution if it provides actual jobs not just money for tech bro douchebags living on a yacht in Tahiti.

And for fuck sake never talk about how much you hate society and want to put people out of a job.

Let's say for the sake of argument, AI eliminates most jobs. In that case, the government will need to replace income tax.

Will the American government have an easier time taxing the physical datacenter in the United States or the billionaire that owns it in Tahiti?

And will the American government have any ability to tax a datacenter built in Dubai because there was too much bureaucracy in Virginia?

They could learn a thing or two from the industrialists of the early 20th century.

We could learn a thing or two from the industrialists of the 18th century, who built all their infrastructure in the United Kingdom because it was convenient for them.

The British government's early advantage in factories snowballed into the largest empire on Earth and they maintained the advantage until WW2.

Unfortunately I'm a GPU programmer. C++-based CUDA/HIP is still the standard regardless of how much people would rather use Rust to program GPUs.

In reality, one massive update is too big to digest and it never happens. So you're stuck on out-of-date packages having lost the ability to update.

That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.

Right now it can't click on anything so it'd probably fail at the minigames. But it'd be super funny to see a 4 person LLM lobby fail at games.

I made a general purpose harness integrated into MelonDS and got Claude to play Mario Kart by feeding it continuous video.

It made forward progress in the Figure 8 circuit after I helped it through a menu but kept slamming into a wall so it wasn't on track to win in less than an hour.

Also got it to play Age of Empires: Age of Kings using the same technique but it failed to click on anything.

DS specifically is very fun because it's touch based but the UI components aren't accessible. So it is extremely challenging for LLM's spatial reasoning skills.

I want to improve the harness more and have the LLM dynamically create its own tools based on drawing grid box overlays on a screen in a feedback loop, so it can say "click on the 'end turn'" button instead of "click 240,320" and it would 'just work' in any game.

I also want to eventually play games with it... I didn't really have friends to play my massive DS library with as a kid so it'd be nice to finally have someone that can roast me or react to my skills. And learn my playstyle enough to punish me.

Unfortunately haven't had the time due to work at my day job and needing to clean out my apartment.

More like the billions of people that use non-Latin languages, or even Latin languages w/ accents.

Alan Greenspan (fed chair from 1987-2006) was famous for deliberately confusing forward guidance. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are the historical anomalies for clearly communicating their intent.

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

Quote from Greenspan himself:

As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, 'no comment' was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. I would hypothetically think of a little plate in front of my eyes, which was the Washington Post, the following morning's headline, and I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. Then, instead of just stopping, I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn't saying something profound when I wasn't. And that became the so-called Fed-speak which I became an expert on over the years. It's a self-protection mechanism ... when you're in an environment where people are shooting questions at you, and you've got to be very careful about the nuances of what you're going to say and what you don't say.

An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.

I'd rather just give my passport and do one of those face turning challenges to play competitive video games. Then if I get caught cheating, my real life identity can't play anymore, rather than make a new account and "get better at cheating".

If I am a habitual cheater in literally any other sport on Earth, governing body figures that out and issues me a lifetime ban. At that point, I'm blacklisted. Even my Tuesday night dodgeball league can issue bans that actually stick because they know my real identity.

You can buy an autoclicking device or software that recognizes screen pixels of enemy avatars and instantly clicks to kill them. This works in "remote streaming" situations and is ~30% of the cheating dataset detected by Riot's kernel level anticheat:

https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/vanguard-on-demand

A “pixelbot” is a computer vision cheat that injects player input for the purposes of aiming at heads or casting spells with perfect timing. Coming in “external” (hardware microcontroller) and “internal” (python script) varieties, pixelbots can be extremely impactful in VALORANT due to the low time-to-kill, sometimes just simply pulling the trigger for the cheater when an enemy enters their reticle (also known as a “triggerbot”).

It was very fun. Brick Battle, Galleons, the game with many towers. The explodey terrain put Roblox on the map initially.

The problem is the opportunity cost of destructible terrain was too high. Developers could get fun for lower effort by creating linear levels with better design/graphics/etc as destructible terrain makes everything "blocky" without significant developer work.

Counterpoint is Roblox, which had one of the most innovative game engines ever. It could multiplayer simulate thousands of blocks of destructible terrain in 2006.

This feature was mostly ignored by the playerbase because developers found it easier to create static setups and focus on iterating on other parts of their gameplay.

Because the TPM effectively rate limits brute forcing of the key.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...

For example, when BitLocker is used with a TPM + PIN configuration, the number of PIN guesses is limited over time. A TPM 2.0 in this example could be configured to allow only 32 PIN guesses immediately, and then only one more guess every two hours. This totals a maximum of about 4,415 guesses per year. If the PIN is four digits, all 9999 possible PIN combinations could be attempted in a little over two years.

Japan has stigma towards used houses.

Airports are such a place. That is why they have duty-free stores that are exempt from taxes so long as you take the goods out of the country. The onus is on the consumer to pay taxes at their destination.

Most countries then have a "personal exemption", where consumers are exempt from paying taxes on a certain value of goods.

Building a "Canadian equivalent" of something else is a great way to get money from the Canadian government right now.

In addition to direct subsidies/grants, the government has a buy Canadian mandate.

Technoethical sells a refurbished T400 with GNU Boot.

https://tehnoetic.com/laptops/tet-t400s

Libreboot actually isn't free anymore by FSF standards because it has binary blobs for the Intel Management Engine. Neither is Coreboot which has blobs for many other things. Most modern computers cannot boot without binary blobs for ME, which is why GNU Boot was created.

If you want a modern/new computer, Purism sells them with the management engine "neutralized" but it's still not free by FSF standards because they haven't bypassed it entirely.

https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/

No, because you're doing decimal floating point, which eliminates the rounding errors of binary floating point.

I've never understood this argument. I regularly run insmod and/or modprobe to load kernel modules.

I'm guessing it's because Linux constantly breaks ABI for out-of-tree kernel modules. And because every version of a distro can have a different kernel it's a nightmare of a support matrix.

That and Secure Boot establishing a chain of trust. Valorant requires Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 which means users can't modify the kernel driver. I'm not sure if Valorant wants to distribute their own Secure Boot keys and sign all the distro kernels + their module.

That's literally the official FSF position.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:

...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.

They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.

They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.

"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.

So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.

There was even a Humble Bundle for mostly Chess-inspired indie roguelikes.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/checkmate-chess-games-col...

"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.

So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.

This is brilliant, except for the "alignment won't stop this part".

Now, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever?

The whole crux of the piece to me is that the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI because every human who can has an incentive not to, while also having an incentive to prevent anyone else from controlling the AI.

An LLM will never try to overthrow me because I will overthrow myself.

From page 175 of the AMD CDNA4 ISA:

https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/instinct-te...

V_MUL_U32_U24

,Multiply two unsigned 24-bit integer inputs and store the result as an unsigned 32-bit integer into a vector register. D0.u32 = 32'U(S0.u24) * 32'U(S1.u24)

Notes

This opcode is expected to be as efficient as basic single-precision opcodes since it utilizes the single-precision floating point multiplier. See also V_MUL_HI_U32_U24.

Nvidia GPUs used to do the same thing and theres a umul24 intrinsic if you care to use it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5544355/cuda-umul24-func...

This is super-super-niche since it basically only applies to 32-bit integer multiplication.

You likely won't run into it unless you're doing high performance embedded systems or GPU programming on non-NVDIA cards, and for some unknowable reason, your workload does a 32-bit integer multiplication in the hot path.

Just don't allow casting to u24, as it makes no sense unless you define u24 to be u32 sized as I think c standard does.

The reason u32->u24 casting must be well defined is because some hardware (e.g. many GPUs, microcontrollers) only have floating point multipliers. A 24 bit unsigned integer (stored in a 32 bit register) can be losslessly converted to a 32 bit float by the hardware, multiplied, then converted back.

This is much faster than doing 32 bit multiplication in software, however, you still need to tell the compiler about this constraint.

From playing Stellaris, it was all bottlenecked on a single threaded pop simulation which is why it got so laggy in the endgame.

Most "CPU intensive" games I've noticed are like that.

It has gotten worse. Shadow of the Erdtree requires you to kill a boss (Mohg) hidden within a SECRET AREA (Mohgwyn Palace) hidden within ANOTHER secret area (Consecrated Snowfield).

And the Consecrated Snowfield is only accessible if you find two parts of a hidden medallion, the first in a castle later in the game than the lift it operates. The second is hidden in a jar underneath a mountain. But you can't just smash the jar, you have to talk to the NPC inside the jar twice before you'll get the medallion.

The market rewards abstruse design.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) predicted this.