Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: Obligatory

You didn't read the actual article, did you?

Re: In the Olden Days, Microcode

Yeah, the difference is that the microcode is supposed to be encrypted and signed (and in the case of AMD, apparently obfuscated as well, not that this is any real security), because since the days of the PDP-11, something called computer security has become a thing. If you think it's not necessary, please go and install Windows XP on your PC and connect it to the internet.

Arguably, BIOS updates should be more secure (and who knows, maybe some motherboards do have BIOS that is cryptographically signed?), but the underlying point is: you can't actually trust that, either. The thing is, you can make arbitrary modifications to anything you own, but the idea here is that you can't make modifications that appear to work to a CPU's microcode unless you know exactly what you are doing. A "standard car analogy" might be that you can do whatever you like to the ECU in your car, but if you don't know what you're doing, the most likely result is that your car won't start.

Re: 'likely a reference to XKCD'

I like to think that they looked at Randall Munroe, then at Scott Adams, and then back at Randall Munroe, gave a nod, looked back at Scott, shook their collective heads, then back to Randall, and said, "nah, not that ****wit, what was that xkcd reference again?"

Re: if trust is a true issue

Once you've bought it, you can wipe it (and check for other issues that, unlike this one, can't be fixed with a patch).

You probably need to read this (again?)

Reflections on Trusting Trust

If you can't trust a compiler, even one you have compiled yourself (because you can't trust the tools used to compile that compiler), then you certainly can't trust that the microcode, on the sealed CPU, which you can't see the inside of has been wiped, if there's a potential for the tools that do so (on the same chip) to be compromised in such a way that they don't have to be truthful about having performed that wipe.

Edit - this is probably the (very appropriate) sentence to focus on:

In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode [my emphasis].

And there we have it, Ken Thompson foresaw this exact issue in... August 1984.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Re: Aid?

I wouldn't know, since he doesn't even have the with about him to make it a proper hyperlink. I suspect it's a callback to another of his dreary bullshit-laden threads, but the joke's on him, I'm under no obligation to give a shit, and I'm certainly not getting drawn into reading his old agitprop. Living in his head is nobody's punishment but his own.

Re: Idiots took over

I'll just add, that, sadly, places like Sweden have problems with the far right as well. It's a global problem. People have forgotten.

Re: Aid?

The other two were msn and some site nobody has ever heard of.

None of the above are primary sources, and nobody has any reason to believe that any of them are balanced and unbiased.

I sometimes wonder whether you actually know what a primary source is. I suspect you do, and are deliberately spreading bullshit.

Re: Aid?

Haha good one, you cited fucking Breitbart. Why not just add Putin's personal memoirs as an authoritative source, and I think we're done.

Re: Idiots took over

Tyrannies always end. Usually involving gallows, firing squad, or guillotine, but sometimes being hanged upside-down from a lamp-post does the trick.

This is not an incitement, just an observation. Push the people down hard enough, and they spring back up when they realise they have nothing left to lose.

Those who concentrate all the power and wealth to themselves, at the cost of all else, should have learned to see it coming, but history has demonstrated time and again that they do not.

Re: POV of an American

There are obvious parallels between MAGAs and the SA, the main difference is, of course, that the SA were led by Röhm, who was a mere military officer, and the MAGAs are led by Trump himself, whose role here as the unquestionable head of state is much more of a parallel to Hitler. The SS were led by Himmler, and Hitler deliberately pitted Himmler against Röhm. In a sense, Musk could be considered as an analogue of Himmler, but he doesn't really have an equivalent of the SS under him to do his dirty work, he just has a few sycophantic keyboard warriors who aren't exactly the sort to go round smashing in doors and dragging their rivals into the street at 3am. Trump also, in a sense, owns the "Proud Boys," the Jan 6th insurrectionists, and other far-right white supremacist groups, who would be more of a natural comparison to the SS. I can't envisage him pitting those against the MAGAs though, not least because there is probably a fair amount of overlap in the two groups, but also because they are all under his control, so he'd gain nothing by doing so.

Watch and wait for what happens between Musk and Trump, though, and keep an eye on the other players who are going to want a piece of the pie. Zuckerberg is making motions towards pre-compliance, and there are some proper nasty people with solid fascist credentials like Peter Thiel waiting in the wings (incidentally, another one from Apartheid-era South Africa). I'd watch every billionaire, and not just the US-based ones, as one prerequisite for amassing that sort of wealth is having a ruthless desire to draw money and power to oneself, almost exclusively at the cost of others.

Re: DOGE

Just a minor correction for you here: This is an IT-oriented website. IT is more correctly considered an engineering discipline (at least, if done right), than a scientific one, unless you are conducting basic research into things that can be made into computers (and most of that sort of research was done well over half a century ago).

Some of us (myself included) come from a scientific background, and there is such a thing as "computer science," although that bears little resemblance to the Scientific Method.

As for "kneejerk reactions," most educated people's reactions to the bloviated self-aggrandising blowhard that is Trump, is that he is talking bollocks. It's hardly jerking the knee to recognise fallacy when it's so obvious to anyone with even half an education, and most people here are more than capable of discerning truth from fiction.

Re: It does'nt matter

It takes a 2/3 majority to impeach. Given that half of congress are Trump's puppets, it's not happening.

Re: OK

Facts? Where we're going, we don't need facts!

(With apologies to the Bobs, Zemeckis and Gale)

To be fair, NI is a special case, and the power-sharing is in place because of the already deeply polarised cultural and religious bias, based on what is basically a hangover from English colonialism.

What is of note, is that that polarisation is diminishing over time, especially since that power-sharing has been in place. The political makeup of the NI assembly has yet to follow entirely, but it is moving in a more moderate direction.

Re: @cornetman

No, it is his fault, he is always, by choice, combative (and almost always factually wrong).

It must be very, very sad to live inside his head, it must be a very lonely and hostile place.

The dangerous thing about comparison to the Nazis isn't that it's inaccurate (it's far too accurate in this case), it's that we have encapsulated Nazism into some sort of bubble of aberrant behaviour. "Things the Nazis did," as if nobody else ever did any of those things.

The scary bit about this, is that genocides, for instance, have been common throughout history. Look at pretty much any ancient civilisation, right up to the Romans, and violent death was common. The important thing of note here is that it has become steadily less prevalent over time, until we have (almost) reached a point where people killing each other is not a norm any more. The Nazis shocked not because of what they did, but because it was anachronistic. Mass murder is (on the whole) something from the ancient past, and very much should stay there.

After the second world war, when the full horrors became known, pretty much everyone who was left standing (including the German people) said "never again". The thing is, plenty of those people had their fingers crossed behind their backs, because they knew they weren't acting entirely nicely themselves. The British invented the concentration camp, Churchill (held as a paragon by many, in their ignorance), was a deeply bigoted person born into a life of extreme privilege (in one of our country's most ornate palaces), who espoused the mass murder of the Kurdish people, the US enacted Operation Paperclip to scoop up war criminals whose usefulness outweighed the interests of justice, Stalin committed mass murder himself, and so on. Nobody was sparkly-clean in this.

Over time, people have forgotten the face of fascism, and how it arrives. It has passed out of living memory, and snuck back in by the back door. The societal memory is of the Holocaust, and not really of all the other things that went with it. Hitler didn't turn up and start the Holocaust on day one, his reign of terror started by demonising minorities and political opponents. The beginning of this was deportations. The exterminations started small-scale by rounding up and murdering disabled people, combined with turning a blind eye to political violence (such as Kristallnacht), just like the Jan 6th pardons.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. -that nasty bastard, Churchill

Re: OK

"Advantage of 2 very wealthy people doing this like Trunp [sic] and Musk, ia [sic] that they really do not need the money,"

The notable thing about billionaires, is that nobody needs to be a billionaire. A couple of million is easily enough to live comfortably on for a fair amount of time.

They don't need the amount of money they already have, it's pretty apparent that they could have stopped at the "don't need any more" a long time ago, there's absolutely no indication that they are going to stop.

This holds true for absolutely every billionaire on the planet. This is as good an argument as any for widespread changes to prevent billionaires; they are a disease upon humanity, because their wealth-hoarding strangulates economies and literally causes others to go with not enough, and die.

Re: OK

"Lots of activity on X"

Oh, okay then...

It really is laughable, but also deeply saddening that some people are so easily taken in.

Let me spell this out for you in small words that you can understand, sorry, "get", easily:

"X" is owned by Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is acting very much like a Nazi.

Elon Musk is a buddy of Trump (for now).

What is found on "X" is not fact.

Re: POV of an American

You're making an assumption that it will be Trump's NotLK and not Musk's (or someone else's). Who is the SA, and who is the SS in this scenario?

Also, more importantly, although it's a comparison I have made myself, it's a bit of an assumption to assume that history is going to go down in exactly the same way twice.

The wider point to be aware of, is that narcissistic personalities, of which there are more than just Trump and Musk, tend to work against each other, not with each other. They work together when there is a common goal, but these people are ruthless, and as soon as one sees an opportunity to gain more wealth and power by betraying the other, they will. There are other players here who are considerably less wealthy and powerful than either Trump or Musk are, so I'd suggest looking to see who else has that glint in their eyes. All the worst people are in the room here, metaphorically.

For a case in point of what abandoning relatively cheap soft power looks like, just take a look at the UK's stagnating economy under Brexit.

Re: OK

Well, I think technically, most of one of those people supposedly ended up in a pyre at the wrong end of a Soviet flamethrower, so there wasn't a great deal left to rot, but yes.

Re: DOGE

The more worrying thing is that it is heading towards the Department of Genocidal Extermination. You only have to see the extreme racism that Musk promotes on his propaganda platform to see what he has planned next (currently at the "make acceptable" stage before the "put into action" stage). Nazi Salutes, AfD rallies, promotion of Tommeh Ten Names, retweeting of white supremacy and openly racist memes, the examples are myriad and concerning.

These people telegraph their intents very openly, it is only people's wilful blindness and unwillingness to think the worst of others that mean that they come as any sort of surprise at all.

Would that be the last President who issued a bunch of pre-emptive pardons as a protection against vendettas? It actually seems remarkably prescient from someone with obvious age-related cognitive decline.

Perhaps it's time for the US to think about not putting a very old white* man in charge? Ah, that's a nope then.

*Underneath the orange paint anyway.

It's actually probably frighteningly close to the truth. Look to who is demonised the most, to see where the pogroms will start.

- Immigrants (undocumented)

- Trans people

- Other LGBTQ+ people

- Immigrants (documented)

- Political opponents

- Anyone who isn't white

- Women

In that order, probably. Possibly, in some states, women will be much closer to the top of the list. Removal of reproductive healthcare already puts lives at risk in several states.

Re: Idiots took over

About minus three months.

Passionate opinions on both sides are welcome.

This, here, is the problem.

Reducing everything down to "two sides", where one of those sides is fascism, and the implication that fascism is "just a political opinion".

Point out that fascism inevitably ends in exterminations, and the response will be "but Stalin murdered people too", thus reducing the argument to which form of mass murder is best.

Here's a crazy idea: fascism can fuck off, Stalinism can also fuck off, and Nazi apologism cloaked as superficial reason like yours can fuck off, too.

Go on, fuck off.

There's a reason that many nations have both a President and a First Minister (or equivalent). Concentrating too much power in one individual leads to tyranny.

Sure, it might lead to constitutional "difficulties" where a head of state and legislative leader have opposing political opinions, but I'd take argument and inefficiency over dictatorship, and the inevitable mass murders any day. Trump hasn't started openly killing anyone yet, but then most Germans didn't know about the death camps in the 1930s and 1940s until it was too late. The threat here is no exaggeration.

Re: OK

There's no reason why not at all, just that some people aren't going there, they're going to the same place as Hitler when they die.

Re: OK

Many others felt that way about the corrupt corporatism, marginalisation of minorities, and demonisation of opposing political opinions in 1930s Germany as well. To those that are utterly ignorant of history, the parallels are not apparent, to everyone else, we are deeply concerned about where the US is going, and very rapidly.

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

Show me on the doll where the bad man grabbed you.

For reference, this is an article about Palantir, which is run by a whole different set of Nazis to the US government. Nobody mentioned Trump until you stepped in with your goose-legs there.

I'm going to direct you to the Wikipedia article on Godwin's law, specifically the bit where it quotes Godwin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

I urge people to develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully. If you think the comparison is valid, and you've given it some thought, do it. All I ask you to do is think about the human beings capable of acting very badly. We have to keep the magnitude of those events in mind, and not be glib. Our society needs to be more humane, more civilized and to grow up.

Something something "master race", something something, Peter Thiel is a Nazi...

I seriously hope our government is currently disentangling his spyware from our public services, but since Starmer appears to have been born without a spine, I don't hold out much hope.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

Oh dear, oh dear, CJ himself hooked by an account that is obviously parodying him with its very name. The lack of self-awareness really is stunning.

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

Your stupidity certainly does make you a joke, yes, but it's good to know that you're laughing at your own idiocy as well. It goes some way to rebuilding faith in human nature.

(Yes, I know that's not what you meant with your catty RWNJ firebrand persona, but I really don't give a shit, and everyone else is laughing at you, not with you)

Re: could also have been zero-rated

Don't be silly, there are a lot of benefits to Brexit. The fact that those benefits go to China and Russia are by-the-bye,

"Resistant" means little, if the investment turns from being a large capex with a long payoff to being a large capex with no payoff.

Re: Short term pain for long term gain.

Don't say it too loudly, but...

VAT on sanitary products (and not just tampons, but incontinence products too) could also have been zero-rated if we'd stayed in the EU. The whole "bureaucrats making us charge taxes" thing was just one of many lines that turned out to have only a passing relationship with reality.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

All round to Roald Dahl's for dinner

I hear he is cooking up a leg of lamb...

(IYKYK)

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

The things known as "room temperature" superconductors are typically complex ceramic compounds, made with rare earth metals, where "room temperature" means "will operate without exotic cooling" not "actually at room temperature". If you want to check down the back of the sofa for the squillions of quid replacing the power transmission with unobtainum would cost, let us know when you've found it m'kay? Then we can talk about how these fragile ceramic wires keep breaking.

Yes, and "consumed" is a massive misnomer, because it wasn't the amount of energy consumed, it was the amount of energy delivered to the pellet under inertial confinement. As pointed out by others here, the lasers in use in this case were about 1% efficient, so it's still two orders of magnitude out on the energy actually consumed. You'd probably need another two orders of magnitude to cope with loss if you managed tog et the output to do useful work, and then several more to make it an economical form of energy generation. As others have, again, pointed out, this is only useful for weapons research. I think most people would agree that developing new nuclear weapons isn't exactly something the human race needs.

As any fule kno, it's not jam first, or cream first. It's butter first.

_{This message has been brought to you by the cholesterol marketing board.}

I'm not being funny here, but "principal components analysis" and similar multi-dimensional pattern analysis techniques were things I was being taught about at university in the mid '90s (and it wasn't a maths degree), decades before someone in marketing decided to brand large statistical models as "AI".

AI's goal isn't even to be "right most of the time," it is to give an output that is superficially convincing enough to make people think it is right on first inspection.

Give AI the job of developing a nuclear fusion reactor? It can't even do fingers right. Don't worry though about your town being replaced by a crater, it'll just hallucinate some positive results.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: I'm surprised some companies don't want to embrace WFH...

Talk to my councillors? That's a good one.

I do actually know one of our city councillors socially; she's not in my ward, though, and would probably agree with the sentiment here. However, my local councillors (and the majority of the council here) are now Green councillors. "What's the problem with that," you might say, "they're a left-leaning party who should be on board with that?". Yeah, the problem is that a whole bunch of them are the same councillors who used to be Liberal Democrats and got kicked out, so they just changed their rosettes. They're career local politicians with no interest in actually representing people's interests. Developers of these high-rise HMOs give the council money, the council is starved of money, so more get built. Same with the university here; they make a lot of money building high-rise dorms for overseas full-fee-paying students*, and some of that trickles to the council. Not enough, though. Blame Tory "austerity" a decade and a half ago for slashing council budgets by 40%.

*I have no problem with overseas students, but the way. Some of my very good friends at university were students from other European nations, and this was a valuable cultural exchange, Brexit scuppered this though, so we now have a lot of rich people from further overseas who are basically being used as cash cows, and who see a British university education as prestigious. There is a wider cultural gulf between a British person and a Chinese person or a Saudi than there is between someone from Spain or Poland, and this makes integration much harder for everyone involved, the foreign students included. The cultural mix is becoming noticeably less diverse as well, which leads to "ghettoisation".

Quite. The world of work is a trade-off between being paid well, to do something nobody else wants to do, and being paid nothing to do something you love. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot where you can get paid quite well, to do something you tolerate.

Re: Just a thought

To be fair, I'd take the thickest Norn Iron accent over the Laahndon trend of making every word that ends in "-er" end in "-aaaaah" instead.

Re: Just a thought

Corporate have done it, and discovered the old adage that you get what you pay for. In my experience, off-shoring and on-shoring of jobs goes in cycles, the same as rounds of redundancies and hiring sprees. The view from 10,000 feet never learns about nuance, because it's invisible from that height.

Re: Just a thought

Most people in this country can't do my job, let alone someone on another continent with a totally different cultural standpoint, no domain knowledge, and in a different time zone to our customers.

Re: I'm surprised some companies don't want to embrace WFH...

Pull down the office blocks, put in some public transport infrastructure (great time to cut and cover metro tunnels) and build mixed-use residential, leisure and shops in their place.

Not, however, what seems to be happening in practice, which is converting unsuitable and crumbling post-war office buildings directly into low-quality "co-living" and student housing to glean the maximum profit.