paulmd

That’s not the case that’s normally referenced, why don’t you cite the 1991 case while you’re at it ;)

PS: they did release technical details once the mitigations had been released etc. And these were released to tech researchers earlier, and proof of concepts were shown etc. https://youtu.be/QuqefIZrRWc?t=1005

And, like, the fact that AMD released an urgent patch for it should kind of speak to the severity of the issue in the first place. AMD doesn't patch "sudo lets you do root things", obviously, so it necessarily must have been more than that, and this was obvious even at the time. But we have to go through this dance with literally every single AMD exploit.

AMD has a unpatched exploit in all Zen3 and below processors that leaks data from kernel at a faster rate than meltdown did. It was discovered by the same researchers that discovered meltdown. AMD has chosen to leave that unpatched, and put out a weaselly deflection about "it doesn't cross address boundaries" but they also still refuse to turn KPTI on by default because it would hurt their benchmarks. And without KPTI there is no address boundary to cross, that's the weaselly part. AMD very craftily made it sound like they're saying there's not an issue, but in fact they are fully confirming the finding from the researcher, including the suggested mitigation (enabling KPTI), they just don't recommend that you do it. The statement is deliberately short to avoid inclusion of too many details that might dispel these misleading impressions.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22summer_lipp.pdf

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/a...

proof of concept: https://github.com/amdprefetch/amd-prefetch-attacks/blob/mas...

tested a few months ago and it's still working: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850526

This follows that same researcher (who previously discovered meltdown) uncovering a prior series of vulnerabilities in the cache ways predictor that also nullify KASLR... which AMD refused to patch because it "didn't leak actual data, only metadata"... the metadata being the page-table layouts. That one is still unpatched too - as the researchers note, AMD never actually mitigated this either, just more weasel words.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-amd-side-channel-attac...

https://mlq.me/download/takeaway.pdf

(this one literally doesn't even seem to have a security bulletin page for itself so I guess they have fully shoved this one down the memory hole now, but here's the news item from wayback) http://web.archive.org/web/20200325045817/https://www.amd.co...

After 6+ years of watching the community defend this behavior, downplay exploits from their favorite megacorporation, etc, it just gets old. Not liking how CTS labs did it or whatever is fine. It doesn't mean there's not a serious exploit, and so often that is where people end up with these AMD exploits, they like AMD so much that they argue against the existence or significance of the exploit, attack the researchers or whine about research grants, etc.

"Does this really deserve this CVE score" is a constant refrain in AMD vuln threads and it just gets so old. As tptacek noted... intel ME vulns are frontpage news and have people asking where they can buy a processor without ME in it. Literally nobody cares that AMD has had these vulnerabilities left open and unmitigated for years and years even though they're actually worse (as judged by the researcher who found both these issues and meltdown).

People would have flipped the fuck out if Intel left meltdown unpatched and released misleading statements implying that it wasn't an issue etc. It is wild just how much AMD is playing on story-mode difficulty with the average enthusiast, and honestly most people don't even realize they're doing it. And that drives me nuts - just decide if security issues are a problem or not, and if the answer is "not" then let's just turn all the mitigations off and see how long they remain un-exploited. If we want to have the security version of the drug-assisted olympics then fine, there is value in having dragsters that just do the thing as quickly as possible, right? But the double-standard people apply to anything AMD is crazy. Talk about your "tyranny of low expectations".

the radio literally has a squelch knob on it, and turning the knob is required if you want to not hear static constantly or if you want to hear your traffic when they call you, so if you somehow manage to own a radio without knowing what squelch is it’s kinda on you.

let’s give users at least a little bit of agency here

Wasn’t that judgement recently vacated for failing to prove the case, though?

not only are they not going to do that, Sony’s android phones delete the firmware if you unlock the bootloader

it's funny that they have to debunk the "root is root, why would AMD patch this" that goes around every time there's a serious issue that allows guest-root escape from virtualized containers.

the same thing happened with the ryzenfall/masterkey exploit, where people were just in utter denial there was an actual exploit there, because root is root! People literally spent more time talking about who released it and their background image than the actual exploit. AMD obvious cannot have exploits, that's only an intel thing. /s

"alleged" flaws" (rolls eyes) https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/845w8e/alleged_amd_zen...

assassination attempt* https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/849paz/assassinat...

doxxing the researchers: https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/845xks/some_backg...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/84tftt/clarification_a...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8589t2/cts_labs_clarif...

HN discussions were not much better, although tpacek is cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576516

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16597626

OK? Well, the iphone mini series did not sell fine, objectively so. It was a bad seller even with the bump from the novelty of apple releasing a mini, and it declined even further the next generation. Probably at minimum it's not worth doing more than one every couple generations.

idk why you guys are continuing to rage at the messenger here, I'm not the one who canceled it and the reason it was canceled is widely acknowledged. Your refusal to accept reality does not constitute a problem on my part.

"squelch codes" probably conveys the meaning more correctly.

people understand the idiom that just because your radio has squelch set (too high, perhaps) that it doesn't mean someone else can't hear it.

otherwise, CTCSS codes works fine, that's the technical description of what it is. and actually they call them "squelch tones" there. it's only motorola that branded them as "private lines", that's their trademark for an adequately-described term. Much like Tesla "Full Self Driving"/"Autopilot", it's kind of a misnomer and definitely breeds (deserved) confusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Tone-Coded_Squelch_...

To bring this point home, for years there was hubub in the industry that Nintendo would bring out some kind of Switch Pro with 4k output and faster guts, rumors swirled around and around until Nintendo finally brought out? The Switch Light.

Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context. And oddly enough, Nintendo themselves have pseudo-confirmed the launch will occur in Q1 next year via various official statements:

https://x.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1787736518762881197

(and then they later confirmed that they won't discuss it this year... so it's going to be Q1 next year.)

And again, to underline this point: the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers. It’s not even just Nintendo being nintendo and favoring older cheaper hardware, they seem to have internally had some pullback or change of heart back a year or two ago such that they decided not to release it.

And obviously at some point the hardware will be relatively weaker than the original switch was at its launch, so at this point they may have to update the hardware again.

But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!” when Nintendo literally had a console generation ready to go, as confirmed by multiple sources, and then just inexplicably decided to pull the plug or delay it for 2 years for inscrutable Nintendo reasons. That’s the Nintendo being Nintendo part - and we have their confirmed-in-financials timeline for release now.

I don't disagree, but the market placement of the iphone has nothing to do with the continued poor sales of the mini series every time it's been tried.

And the mini ran for multiple generations and none of them sold well.

Much like the 3.5mm jack, people just cannot admit that it's not a very popular idea. Extremely popular among a very small niche, incredibly unpopular if not actively dispreferred outside of it.

are you seriously suggesting that sony put used pc hardware in their consoles? that's terrible even as a point of comparison.

Only because they are underpowered with old hardware.

yes, adversity breeds character. did Star Wars get better when Lucas got unlimited money and green screens?

Having hardware limitations forced devs to scope their vision appropriately and focus on the aspects they actually wanted to emphasize.

Microsoft was upfront that they didn’t think a mid-gen price cut was in the cards, so here’s the series s, it’s what we can do and we’ll do it right now, etc.

They were right and not only have prices not really come down, but in some ways they’ve increased.

The unfortunate consequences of a post-Moores law reality. Like yeah nothing is getting 2x better for the same price even every 3-4 years anymore. Your expectations based on past history will no longer hold true, and this has been clear for a number of years now.

You can’t make a gamer understand something when his wallet depends on him not understanding it. People have been in active denial for years, in ways that have crossed into objective denial of reality. The "AMD is just choosing to join NVIDIA and gouge!" stuff has been joined by "and sony is in on it too!" etc. Yes, corporations suck but the margins are not actually very fat here, this is just what it costs now.

No. Mini did notably terrible across every generation it's been tried.

https://www.slashgear.com/1234403/apples-decision-to-cancel-...

iphone 8 plus, bought refurb in early 2019. replaced the battery once (and got a replacement since the battery wouldn't pair). it's getting to be time.

usb-c is a big feature increment for me, and I need to finish the leap away from google voice, since I absolutely know they are not going to bother implementing RCS and will just shutter the service instead. LiDAR also seems extremely useful/cool. On the other hand, I was kinda hoping for thunderbolt support on the pro models eventually. Not sure if I will buy a refurb 15 Pro or a new 16 Pro Max or wait for the next cycle.

that's how you avoid e-waste for real and not as a fashion statement. simply consume less - and that includes not consuming a $300 android phone every 18 months, not just apple - and have it repaired when it needs it. with OEM parts that will last the long-haul and not something off amazon that will need to be changed again in 6 months.

swapping on an m4 with a midrange pcie 4.0 SSD is quite different from swapping on a celeron with a low-end SATA SSD or spinning rust, plus linux/unix/macos is generally much better with swapping sensibly than windows.

believe it or not, an 8GB macos device is generally quite usable even if it's swapping, as long as it's apple silicon family. yes, it's not going to save if you if your working set is more than 8GB and you need everything in the set, but chrome/firefox do not actually need the 32gb you are probably giving them.

When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.

not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.

I’m sure it’s very convenient and granted everyone needs batteries, but still, “they fail and I throw them away and buy new ones, I currently have 10” is objectively insane and I have to think that buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.

“I said it sounds like he’s just feeding e-waste to landfills and hackernews started crying”

maybe think about buying some 18650 batteries and a power bank or something, idk. You can get cold-weather 18650 cells which improve outdoors performance a lot, and good quality 18650s last a half decade or more.

Really disappointing how right to repair just turned out to be a fashion accessory for most people, and the actual boots-on-the-ground aspects like oem parts availability and not using disposable junk batteries didn’t sink in, people are literally happy to have a backpack full of 10 Amazon batteries they change out every 6 months if it means they get to bash apple and feel smug about it. The discussion around usb-c vs lightning went much the same way - people were exuberant at the prospect of filling the landfills full of discarded cables (on a port that's been around for a decade), as long as they were the right cables. People bashed the self-service/OEM parts availability for being some kind of plot or conspiracy. People bashed it because the OEM factory repair tools apple will rent or sell you are too big and clunky.

There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles, independently of some of the fandom and some of the actors involved with R2R with their own personal foibles and financial interests. Specifically thinking of component-level repair as not being in the interest of certain major backers of R2R, for example. There should be an accounting of what the actual cost is for that decision, vs the aspects of R2R increasing the churn on these essentially-disposable amazon batteries and other junk and so on. Those things need to be attributed in the total lifecycle cost too, if bunches of people keep doing the same thing you are that's a real social problem. Ten batteries, and I just swap them out when they fail and buy new ones to throw away. One of the most polluting and dangerous and toxic parts of the phone. Good lord.

I hope you are at least sending them for proper disposal, but even that is not currently even close to full recycling efficiency iirc.

you literally make an appointment on the website and check in and then walk to the back of the store and drop your phone off

I’ve never seen a literal “this product sucks because I refuse to learn about it” given as an explicit argument before, usually it’s just implicit, thank you for this

A single 3090 won’t even fit the model. OP is talking about running a 405B model, it needs close to 200gb of memory just to open it which is why we’re talking about mac studio and it’s 192gb unified memory.

This is exactly like when the AMD fanboys got a burr up their ass about the “$50k Mac Pro” with 2tb of memory… when you could the same thing with a threadripper with 256gb of memory for $5k, and it’s just as fast in Cinebench!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/f1a0qp/15000_mac_pro_v...

your gaming scores on your 3090 with 24gb are just as irrelevant to this 200gb workload as the threadripper is to those Mac Pro workloads lol

you can calculate the area of the tensor and raytracing units by measuring+comparing die sizes between the nearest 20-series and 16-series chips. Contrary to the assumptions a lot of people made from the cartoon diagrams, it's actually relatively small, together they make up approximately 18% of the cluster area and it's below 10% of the chip as a whole. The area is roughly 2/3rds tensor unit area and 1/3 raytracing unit area, so RT is around 3% of total chip area and tensor is around 6%.

https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/baajes/rtx_adds_1...

This could have changed somewhat in newer releases, but probably not too drastically, since NVIDIA has never really increased raw ray performance since the 20-series launch. And while there have been a few raytracing features around the edges, raster and cache have been bumped significantly too (notably, ampere got dual-issue fp32 pipelines... which didn't really work out for NVIDIA that well either!) so honestly there's a reasonable chance it's slightly less in subsequent architectures.

no need to apologize, I was just using a windstar as an example of a generic 90s minivan, not as some super specific example. :)

that's an interesting comparison tool!

but yeah my point is more related to size and capacity than things like chassis. the fact that the windstar is comparably sized is the point I was trying to make.

it's a fair point that the hood is significantly different though, and I think that seems to be one of the biggest takeaways from the discussion here, that's specifically problematic and dangerous as a design element.

and if your point is that a truck chassis overall increases the weight and so on, and just makes it a heavier, more dangerous vehicle... that's probably true to some extent too, although a van chassis was never exactly "light". I still don’t fully agree with the implication that there’s a meaningful difference between a windstar or Astro van and a traverse as far as vehicle classification. They’re all utes really.

flippant tone aside, this is a thing that actually happened!

not just after they release, but they would definitely show "abridged" versions of movies on daytime TV, with a little bit trimmed off to open up some space for commercials etc

just another thing that netflix ruined

There’s lots of vehicles that can’t get on a freeway. There’s a sign on every freeway onramp. That’s something we literally already handle so that’s not the problem.

If that were the case they would be classed as Neighborhood Vehicles and so on. You can buy a golf-cart or 4x4 and drive it on public roads after all. Just not a freeway.

It literally, directly, unequivocally is protectionism and insisting otherwise is ahistorical and factually incorrect. It’s a vestige of a 1964 protectionist trade war with Japan that the US auto-industry lobbied their way into keeping even after the other provisions were lifted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

“if you don’t like trucks having 8-foot-tall grilles maybe you should just go back to living in the woods!”

what a thought-provoking and non-inflammatory prompt you provided us

Well, those are flat-out illegal here and importing them is made illegal except under a narrow set of circumstances so that the auto industry doesn’t have to compete.

Both of those are SUV-class vehicles and a minivan is pretty much the quintessential SUV. Other than styling there really isn’t a difference between a traverse and a windstar or whatever.

In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost.

And yet we live in a world where an AI 370 processor has less than 1/4 of the single-threaded perf/w of a “totally equivalent” M3 Max processor. One of those things can’t be true.

Who are you going to believe, Jim Keller or your lying eyes?

And it only gets worse when you realize that he didn’t vaguely say the thing people claim he said… people have spent 4 years now arguing against observable reality using a quotation from Keller that he didn’t even make lol.

It’s entered the public consciousness that these keys exist but they aren’t nearly as unlimited as you think.

Default Release (or standard release): This is the most common type of key on Steam, which is usually tied to a Steam store or retail Steam Key package. These keys are appropriate for retail boxes or sales on other digital stores. Customers can activate this type of Steam Key at any time, but the product will unlock only after it has been released on Steam. Games and applications launching on Steam may receive up to 5,000 Default Release Steam Keys to support retail activities and distribution on other stores. After that, all Steam Key requests are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. There is no guarantee that you will be provided additional keys.

Steam is not there to be a free CDN for you; it’s one thing if it’s 5-10% of your sales or for charity like humble bundle, it is NOT unlimited and valve will refuse if you are abusing it.

Moreover this also has to be viewed in the context of valve’s forced “most favored nation” clause - if you undercut steam on the site they will reduce the price on steam accordingly, and if you still are abusing the key system they will stop granting you keys.

Again: steam’s business model wouldn’t work if they were being a cdn for people who don’t even pay for them. That’s not at all how it works, you are misinformed if that’s what you’re suggesting/implying. Sure, they allow some offsite sales… which must be at the same price as on steam, and they can “adjust” your revenue accordingly if you do the thing you are implying.

Steam isn’t voluntary on PC, since that’s where the users are.

And that’s the same dilemma as with any of the other gatekeepers like MS or Sony or Apple. Right now sure, you can choose not to play ball with any one of them… but if you want to have users you need to play ball with one of them, and they’re all offering the exact same deal.

People have a-priori determined that “only steam is ok” and that itself is anticompetitive and market-distorting. It’s already a monopsony at that point. It’s the Walmart situation where even if there’s notionally a market with millions of end-users… they’re all fronted by a single merchant with monopsony or oligopsony pricing power. Aka what the EU calls a “gatekeeper”. Market fairness isn’t just fairness to consumers after all, or epic wouldn’t be in court.

And from a gamedev perspective it’s the exact same as apple: if you want to access the pc market you don’t have a choice, steam is the pc market and retains a functional ~100% control of this market (in a gatekeeping sense) such that valve should be subject to DMA-style rules and restrictions. Again just like apple, you can go elsewhere, but if you want these users then valve retains a chokehold on your revenue and you don’t really have a choice.

You can decide for yourself whether that’s a reasonable perspective and consideration but that’s the one that’s been applied to apple and their own App Store. Doesn’t matter if people can sideload (altstore/altserver exists) or use a different device, they worked themselves into a gatekeeper position and should be treated as such.

People don’t like that comparison, steam is a mostly benevolent gatekeeper, at least to users… but other people are happy with apple too, and from the gamedev side the deal is equally coercive. If market access is a thing we protect then steam is a absolutely a gatekeee in the apple sense.

This is the tension with apple too: apple being a gatekeeper is largely good for me as a user (or else I’d change away, which I am very free to do). When they slap, it's generally in my interest for them to have slapped whoever was stepping over the line - like when they slapped Facebook for bribing customers to install spyware. It is, however, bad for studios and corporate entities.

Steam is just a more pronounced version of this dichotomy - they are generally a very benevolent gatekeeper, but they control ~100% of the PC market revenue, so if you are a developer who wants to release on PC, you have very little market choice. Some small indie titles do it, but you're leaving money on the table and certainly no major studio wants to do it. Hence all the third-party stores - and that proliferation is what consumers don't like. The thing is, people actually like steam gatekeeping... and others actually like apple gatekeeping.