The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.

It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.

On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.

With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.

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I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.

Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.

Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.

What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.

And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.

As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

In 2016, I said half-jokingly that I was moving to Canada if he won. Then he won and now here I am in Canada. Granted, I was a senior in high school when he won and I was already applying to a couple universities in Canada. But definitely was worth it. As many issues as Canada has (cough cough housing crisis), I at least trust it to not descend into fully-fledged fascism any time soon.

Yeah, this is a great example of why I make an effort to specify the government when criticizing countries. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? I call Putin and his government evil but never the Russian people at large. China’s genocide of the Uyghurs? I call Xi Jinping and the CCP evil but never the Chinese people at large. Israel’s apartheid state and ethno-religious cleansing? I call Netanyahu and his government evil but never the Israeli people at large (and certainly not Jews at large).

The allure of treating entire demographics or populaces as a monolith and blaming them for the crimes of their government is exactly why genocidal rhetoric is so dang pervasive, and I won’t abide by it.

(Yes, I will also criticize civilians who actively support these crimes, but I make sure to be clear in distinguishing between them and the rest of the civilian population.)

Ah, but that says not to kill people. It says nothing about killing rats! /s

Seriously, though, that’s exactly why we’re so capable of committing atrocities: we dehumanize each other until we consider it acceptable to kill. Portraying Jews as rats and subhuman is exactly how the Holocaust happened, and portraying Palestinians as subhuman is exactly how Israel is currently doing what they’re doing.