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London Review of Books articles aren't allowed to discuss the book being reviewed for the first five paragraphs. It's an obscure British law or something.

They used Ink: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

I've used it myself. It has some rough edges in terms of rendering performance but it's nice overall.

Well within the time period when even minor news was routinely posted to the Internet, so it's searchable. On the other hand I have a really common name.

Absolutely. If I hadn't been assured there would be a lawyer afterwards (he represented us as a group btw), I wouldn't have done it...

I strongly recommend that anyone doing civil disobedience join up with an organization which can provide training, logistical support, and at least some degree of legal support. The first two are if anything even more important given that these situations tend to be chaotic and tense. The book Waging a Good War documents the intensive training that activists underwent during the civil rights movement which was crucial for their success.

Of course the situation is much more lawless now in places like Minneapolis and ICE is much more undisciplined than the police, which makes civil disobedience much more challenging and dangerous. That just makes training and legal aid all the more necessary.

Hmmm. When I was in college, I protested and went to jail multiple times in the US, though I was never convicted (the organization I was with provided for legal representation). I don't believe it has ever damaged my career. I'm curious if your experience has been different?

I took the time to figure out where you took the shots from. You were not kidding about risk, especially for 201 Toland, Jesus Christ.

The North Korean place names for foreign places reflect the native pronunciations, while South Korean place names reflect English pronunciation. Syria is "suria" vs "siria" for example.

Large scale collective farming I guess. The US' farmland in the central states was also organized by a centralized process (homestead act) leading to similar geographic patterns on a bigger scale. https://maps.app.goo.gl/idNBdXv5oKSF1oVo7

Not sure why this is downvoted. Kim Jong-un declared that reunification is no longer a goal in 2024 and tore down the Reunification Arch.

Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.

When I lived in Chicago, no one was silent about Chicago's violence. It was widely acknowledged as one of the city's biggest problems and there was a ton of effort put into stopping it by the government and nonprofits, including grassroots initiatives.

To steelman what you're saying, it's true we lived with it so long that it came to seem normal in a way if you weren't personally affected. But "everyone has been silent" is just not true.

Question for Arabic speakers: The Arabic transliterations don't have vowel markings (harakat). So how are you able to reproduce the pronunciation? Are you able to just guess and get it right most of the time? Same with place names that you've never seen (the name of some random village you see on a map), how do people have any confidence that they're saying it even remotely correctly?

If it's Krasznahorkai we're talking about, one sentence could be very long indeed.

It's a lot of trouble and hard to get right, but you can make it at home! The ingredients are easy to buy online. It keeps in the fridge for a long time, though after a while it stops tasting like makgeolli; the clear sediment-free layer starts resembling white wine.

https://www.maangchi.com/recipe/makgeolli

If you like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, you owe it to yourself to read this deep dive into the philosophy behind it. https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/

It has been a long time and my memory is based on hearing about it rather than using it, but I believe there was a notion of a rider's "home" datacenter (based on where they signed up from), and there was some complexity from propagating a rider's data from there to all other datacenters proactively, so that things would just work no matter where in the world they were. And I think the datacenter serving the area where a user was currently located could accept writes for that user, meaning that it would have to get written back to the home datacenter... you can see how this got complicated.

Nice write-up. What's the deal with the transcription of the place names into Devanagari?

I worked at Uber a long time ago - there was some amount of overcomplicated engineering but you genuinely can't completely shard by city because a big part of Uber's value proposition is that you fly into a city for the first time and Uber just works.

You may be interested to know that the author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues has just recently passed away.

In the 1600s, English settlers and native Americans probably had similar standards of living (i.e. a bit above subsistence). Maybe a 2x difference which I'm not sure would have been in favor of the Europeans, given that the natives had had so much time to learn how to farm, fish, hunt, and forage in the area.

Bhutan vs the West is a huge difference in comparison.

Glad to see that the author is highlighting verification as the important factor in design productivity.

We at Silogy [0] are directly targeting the problem of verification productivity using AI agents for test debugging. We analyze code (RTL, testbench, specs, etc.) along with logs and waveforms, and incorporate interactive feedback from the engineer as needed to refine the hypothesis.

[0] https://silogy.io/

The Antmicro team are doing good work with making Verilator support SystemVerilog / UVM tests but from what I understand it's not complete yet.

I've also heard from various people that although Verilator is generally fast, it tends to choke on compiling sufficiently large designs, whereas the Cadence and Synopsys offerings eventually get it done.

Still, Verilator is an awesome piece of software. Maybe the biggest thing recommending it: it's totally free, so the number of simulations you run in parallel is bounded by compute availability rather than licenses.

Shameless plug: I'm a cofounder of silogy.io, which offers hosted Verilator and other Verilog sims, plus debugging and collab tools.

I don't know, Caravaggio killed a guy. I wouldn't want to be friends with this guy but it seems like he's a typical artist. Better than having him where he can really hurt someone, anyway.

I want to plug one of her lesser known books, Always Coming Home. It's set among a tribe of people living in the Bay Area way, way after some apocalypse has erased the memory of our civilization. Much of the book is reports from an anthropologist studying the people.

I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.

Thanks for the support!

I really appreciate the feedback: these are all very valid points.

Bash is just an example; most people should make the test rule call the simulator executable directly or via a thin wrapper script. MyHDL is interesting too. Admittedly this is the first we've heard of it but we'll take a look.

We are working on supporting additional simulators in addition to Verilator.

Also, we are working on an API and command line tool so you can kick off test runs and view the results from the command line. This CLI tool should also support local test runs at some point.

Hey, that sounds really cool, and also sounds like it was a lot of work! As for point 2, we are planning at some point on making everything accessible via API and releasing a CLI, so a VSCode extension should definitely be possible.

CI is a core component of our product, but it's also a building block that we're building lots of DV-specific features on top of. In fact, one of those features is a build wrapper sort of like Make/Bazel for compiling stimuli, feeding them into simulators, and doing post-processing. Essentially what you describe in point 1 but for verification. We'll likely open-source this so other CI platforms can use it too.

For the other problems you mentioned: we're currently just handling the verification piece of the puzzle for right now, we want to do one thing really well first. We feel your pain on the SystemVerilog code generation front, we've had to interact with similarly primitive code generation mechanisms. You can only go so far with the preprocessor and what gets generated during elaboration.

Thanks for your thoughts! We are indeed planning to add support for other vendor tools, including the Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens simulators.

Cost for cloud vs on prem is very specific to design complexity. For the designs we're working with, we have seen that compute is cost effective on the cloud with respect to building out on-prem compute. We expect that to change as we support larger designs, and we have support for on-prem compute firmly on our roadmap.

Thanks for the support!