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Cake day: October 2nd, 2020

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  • yes, as i said

    from the article it’s not clear what the performance boost is relative to intrinsics

    (they don’t make that comparison in the article)

    so its not clear exactly how handwritten asm compares to intrinsics in this specific comparison. we can’t assume their handwritten AVX-512 asm and instrinics AVX-512 will perform identically here, it may be better, or worse.

    also worth noting they’re discussing benchmarking of a specific function, so overall performance on executing a given set of commands may be quite different depending what can and can’t be unrolled and in which order for different dependencies.


  • from the article it’s not clear what the performance boost is relative to intrinsics (its extremely unlikely to be anything close to 94x lol), its not even clear from the article if the avx2 implementation they benchmarked against was instrinsics or handwritten either. in some cases avx2 seems to slightly outperform avx-512 in their implementation

    there’s also so many different ways to break a problem down that i’m not sure this is an ideal showcase, at least without more information.

    to be fair to the presenters they may not be the ones making the specific flavour of hype that the article writers are.




  • this is a complex topic and probably belongs in a different thread.

    essentially i don’t personally believe in punishing citizens of a country for the actions of its politicians.

    at best its misguided, at worse it basically empowers politicians on both sides who draw power from friction between citizens of different nations. typical divide and conquer bs.

    why do you not think a software developer wouldn’t have to

    wouldn’t or shouldn’t? if you mean wouldn’t, it’s not surprising and its not the dev’s fault they have to comply with policy, so the criticism is not with them.

    if you mean shouldn’t, i don’t agree with punishing athletes either, but regarding foss specifically, isn’t the “friendly competition” of olympics equivalent to that? sort of. in some ways yes. in other ways its actually the opposite.

    collaboration is actually the opposite of competition.

    and while there’s a case for the benefits of healthy sports competition, i don’t believe it truly fulfills the spirit of international goodwill to the degree it says on the packaging. foss and other forms of international collaboration for the betterment of greater society are definitely on a higher rung - in my opinion at least.




  • happy to get into into these subtopics, but it’s also possible i may not be understanding you properly because i agree with alot of what you just said.

    what are you attributing the close to 0 probability to?

    if you wanna say “whats the probability that CMG was at least partly talking out their arse about their capabilities (and especially any claim they were currently in possession of that capability)?”

    i’d also give it like >90% probability they (CMG) are full of shit. in which case you could say i agree with you (to within say 10% error margin).

    if you’re instead saying the probability is ~100% that audio surveillance capability cannot possibly currently exist outside TLAs because “someone would’ve published it already” then i really cannot agree. (and afaict that ars article does not support that stance either)


  • Not disputing the three letter agencies

    The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.

    sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?

    oppressive regimes

    most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.

    further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?

    trivial to discover and flag as malware

    can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices

    Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.

    historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]

    in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware conclusive downstream binary analyses studies please link

    which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.

    i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.

    tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.

    but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”




  • When you work in an industry where the entire collaborative workflow of everyone is based on software that doesn’t run on Linux, then not running that software is equal to not being able to work in that industry.

    there’s no denying that’s true, though ofc it has alot to do with microsofts very agreessive and anti-competitive practices.

    though its all a bit tangential, the main issue i think comes down to what someone means when they say “everything”. certainly if someone said “you can do everything”, i’d expect them to qualify what is (should be) obviously a slight exaggeration as parlance. they don’t literally mean “everything” they just mean most everyday things. i think its fairly common in everyday speech for someone to be able to work out thats what they meant.

    in the few rare cases when someone literally means absolutely everything, then yes that silly statement would be incorrect. and if strictly intended with that meaning would certainly qualify as misinformation.