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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • So you can find things by “that spicy chicken recipe” instead of having to remember what it was actually called, or slog through a gazillion chicken recipes in your history when you realise that “spicy” was nowhere in the name. Basically stemming/thesaurus search on steroids.

    It’s quite likely to be opt-in as I imagine ingesting the sites you’re looking at is a significant computational load. The translators are also opt-in, there’s enough stuff inbuilt to detect languages but not to translate, you have to download those models first. And they’re quite good btw.

    Another thing I could see them offering is stuff like tl;dr bot. It’s probably not for everyone, but I definitely can see that it can be a useful feature for many people.





  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyztry fingers but hole
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    2 days ago

    I don’t know how I should be the one to come up with a better shorthand if I’m the one being taught and not understanding.

    There is no better one. Your hand is the only obvious, also, convenient, piece of equipment you always have at the ready that is capable of clearly and intuitively representing three mutually orthogonal vectors. They also happen to be quite freely orientable in space. There are exactly two distinct ways axes can be constructed in 3d, and your left and right hand naturally show the one or the other, try it: While making fancy fingerguns you can never have all fingers be parallel, if two pairs are parallel then the third is antiparallel. You could use fancy terms like chirality but that literally means handedness.

    And if you had tried to come up with something better you’d probably have realised all that.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyztry fingers but hole
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    3 days ago

    Does this help? Short of making sure that your fingers actually are mutually orthogonal. The perspective in OP’s picture is all fucked up and also not consistent between the hand and arrows.

    “x,y,z” of course is an easy order you learned it in primary school, for it to make sense for the physics you need to… do nothing. Order is arbitrary. The handedness is dictated by the signs of the vectors, I guess if you were to flip the sign of some natural constant the whole thing would suddenly be left-handed.

    It of course is also not an explanation of why the stuff is like it is. You say handedness plus assigning things to fingers is terrible as a shorthand? Show me something better, then. Meanwhile, generations of graphics programmers could and can be observed holding out their hand like that and rotating it every which way to make sense of what other people preferring different orientations did. Or keeping track of local vs. global transforms. Gotta know where the wheels are even if the car is flipped over.

    (and, yes, for some reason there’s no 3d software which uses x as the up/down axis. Whether that means that the industry has a bit of sanity left in it I’m not so sure it might be an accident).




  • The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

    The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.

    Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.



  • Seems so, yes, really shouldn’t surprise that the basic idea is known in the UK. Certainly not something you can get for breakfast over there, though, had to survive on nothing but full English because the purpose of their croissants is to spite the French and don’t get me started on weetabix. Actually, coming to think of it quark is probably the only thing it’d actually work in.






  • Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.

    And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.



  • 5500 here. I can’t use any recent rocm version because the GFX override I use is for a card that apparently has a couple more instructions and the newer kernels instantly crash with an illegal operation exception.

    I found a build someone made buried in a docker image and it indeed does work, without override, for the 5500 but it’s using all generic code for the kernels and is like 4x slower than the ancient version.

    What’s ultimately the worst thing about this isn’t that AMD isn’t supporting all cards for rocm – it’s that the support is all or nothing. There’s no “we won’t be spending time on this but it passes automated tests so ship it” kind of thing. “oh the new kernels broke that old card tough luck you don’t get new kernels”.

    So in the meantime I’m living with the occasional (every couple of days?) freeze when using rocm because I can’t reasonably upgrade. Not just the driver crashes, the kernel tries to restart it, the whole card needs a reset before doing anything but display a vga console.



  • Cursive is fundamentally less legible and harder work for most students to learn.

    It’s way easier to read for dyslexics as q d b p all look actually different, not just flipped/rotated (which makes them the same thing, try it with a pair of scissors). I don’t know what they’re teaching in (I presume?) the US, but this is quite legible. There may be instances where it’s an undue burden, teachers here are trained to spot that and accommodate, just as they do with dyslexia where you’ll get two grades for spelling: One raw, and one with all the dyslexia-typical mistakes (but only those) calculated out.

    Pencils, as said, are a good thing: Makes sure that you’re not using too much force. Re-sharpening the thing from scratch every other word gets annoying fast. If there’s coordination issues then that may be a problem but ultimately it’s probably better to bite the bullet and focus on training to not break the lead than it is to hand the pupil a ball point pen because then they’re bound to cramp up.

    And just because you got me curious I tried to figure out what part of my body I’m writing with – and TBH aside form “right arm” I can’t really make it out because it’s all so interconnected and all over the place. I think up/down (the page) is mostly shoulder, and so is continuous left to right, while per-letter left-right and off/onto the page is a combination of underarm rotation and fingers. Never got taught explicitly how to do it, but I remember the primary school teacher occasionally telling kids how to not do it. There’s probably multiple ways to do it well.

    Oh, and apparently I was wrong: My state did get rid of cursive, then results tanked, now they’ve re-introduced it, but only from year two on, and the ministry is waiting on data to come in. My guess is that they’ll re-introduce cursive from year one. Somehow all the previous generations didn’t have an issue using two different fonts at the same time: It’s not like our books were written in cursive. I doubt Gen Alpha will have. They may be cringe, but they’re not stupid.