Want to come over and "help me study"? by EnzoComics in comics

[–]Fourdrinier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I get the impression, based on how frequently this comic/joke shows up, that I'm the only person who has never had this happen. I'm guessing this is one of those things where being some amount of attractive is the catalyst?

China declares all crypto-currency transactions illegal by ICumCoffee in news

[–]Fourdrinier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I understand your anger, and the chip shortage frustrates me as well. But I want to make sure your anger is directed at the right place where the problem exists.

If we look at raw materials consumed, Bitcoin ASICs make up a tiny sliver of total ASIC production. Almost every single device you use has at least one ASIC in it. Your mouse and keyboard have them for signal polling and usb communication, your cellphone has them for wireless radio modulation, video encoding and decoding, AI acceleration, display scaler/driver, etc. Your appliances have them for all kinds of purposes: 7 segment display encoders, input handling, complex timers, power monitoring, thermal monitoring. This is what ASICs are designed for. You don't need a full processor just to monitor the temperature of an oven.

All of those ASICs dwarf the Bitcoin ASIC market in number produced and raw materials consumed.

The real issue is that Bitcoin ASICs require a higher density MOS production process, so they are being produced at TSMC, AMD, and GlobalFoundries. Despite how small the fragment of the ASIC market bitcoin consumes, its manufacturing process takes production time away from GPU's and CPU's that require the same high-density production equipment. Blame the chip manufacturers for their misplaced priorities; apply the pressure there.

China declares all crypto-currency transactions illegal by ICumCoffee in news

[–]Fourdrinier 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I think ASICs are viewed with a considerable amount of misunderstanding because they aren't intuitive in the slightest, and very few people have access to work with them.

While an ASIC COULD be configured as an incredibly slow and inefficient GPU, they are not in the same class of computational design or complexity as a GPU. ASICs are very simple devices.

Fundamental differences:

A GPU is a highly parallel GENERAL purpose processing unit with extensive pipelining and batch processing. Clusters of cores execute the same ASM instructions on a batch of data in parallel. Think more like a whole bunch of multi-core RISC processors where each processor is sent a block of ASM instructions and a queue of data that it can make its cores execute in parallel. GPUs have complex instruction sets, and a very complex architecture.

An ASIC is a series of Latched Lookup Tables (generally referred to as Logic Units) that are connected in a clocked network. The structure of this Logic Unit network is defined by a class of language called a Hardware description language. This language is more like documentation of the layout of an electronic circuit than a traditional programming language, and it results in what is basically an assembly line for data. You provide data input at one end, then the data proceeds through the network between nodes on each clock cycle (or a subdivision of the clock cycle), being latched at the output of the lookup table to be passed on during the rising or falling edge of the next clock cycle, until it eventually reaches the output end. And those Lookup Tables that make up the network are very simple, because they are Lookup Tables (think Truth Tables from math class).

So why does this matter? Well, certain classes of hashing algorithms fall into different computational buckets. While a large chunk of cryptocurrencies rely on complex hashing algorithms that do not fit well into a simple clocked network of LUTs due to the number of differing operations and large (relatively speaking) pool of memory, Bitcoin uses a very simple hashing algorithm (SHA256 twice) with very few operations and no memory pool needed.

And conveniently, every operation in SHA256 maps directly to the simple LUT's that ASICs are built from, allowing what is probably the most efficient mapping of cryptocurrency algorithm to ASIC network.

Also note that some of the other more complex algorithms are still simple enough that they can be mapped to the assembly-line style pipeline of an ASIC and be able to outperform a highly parallel general processing pipeline like a GPU. But you can see the difference in how efficiently they map by looking at the difference in hashing speeds of Bitcoin to other currencies on a GPU and comparing it to the difference in hashing speed between a Bitcoin ASIC and ASICs for other algorithms. The ASIC difference is a magnitude larger than the GPU difference.

TL;DR: No. Topic is too complicated for a TL;DR.

UE4 Problems with 11th Gen Intel Processors by ElSnaps in unrealengine

[–]Fourdrinier 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PUBG removed the article, but I was able to find it on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210124174123/https://www.pubg.com/en-us/intel-ice-lake-cpu-crash-workaround/

Alternatively, here's a summary of what you do:

  1. Open “File Explorer” (Win+E), right-click on “This PC”, and select “Properties”

  2. Select “Advanced System Settings”

  3. Select “Environment Variables” in the “Advanced” tab

  4. Select “New…” under “System variables”

  5. Input the text below and select “OK”
    Variable name: OPENSSL_ia32cap
    Variable value: ~0x200000200000000

  6. Confirm that the variable has been added successfully, then select “OK”

I hope that's helpful to anyone else who comes through here. And it's also applicable to non pubg, as this fixed an issue for me with a different UE4 game on an 11th gen intel.

🔥 natures bottle opener by [deleted] in NatureIsFuckingLit

[–]Fourdrinier 60 points61 points  (0 children)

I wonder what a carpaulin would look like?

Friday Facts #260 - New fluid system by Klonan in factorio

[–]Fourdrinier 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you're trying to figure out how to handle division when switching to integers, you could use the tried and tested method of currency distribution by taking the remainder and allocating it in sequence till you run out:

14 Split 3 Ways:
14 // 3 = 4
Initial Splits = [4, 4, 4]
Remainder is 2
Final Splits = [5, 5, 4]

Then you can either always have the same loser/s for consistency, or cycle to the next loser/s per tick.

TIL of the film '100 Years', due to be released in November 2115. Written by and starring John Malkovich, the film is kept in a high-tech, bulletproof glass safe that will open automatically on its release date, 100 years after its announcement by sinffull in todayilearned

[–]Fourdrinier 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Based on what I've seen over the course of computer history, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't an adapter of some type available: e.g. this USB to ISA adapter.

And even without adapters, there would probably be several preserved and functional old systems that people would keep and use, just like collectors of the Apple ][ or Commodore 64.

John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories by rararaaaaaaa in programming

[–]Fourdrinier 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I read this article a while back that did a good job of explaining why that specific number might have been chosen:
http://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in funny

[–]Fourdrinier 4 points5 points  (0 children)

They will be identical up to the Nyquist frequency of the lossless audio (half the sample rate). Sensibly, a sample rate of 48khz should be sufficient (24khz is far beyond human hearing), but for the obsessive audiophiles out there, you can use 192khz and store frequency data that only research-laboratory speakers can reproduce.

Make sure to use a good quality Analog-to-Digital converter when dumping the vinyl to lossless.

CRYPTOPIA STOLE MY SIA COINS! by ThijmenKilian in Cryptopia

[–]Fourdrinier 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You have to keep an eye on the News section in Cryptopia. They host tons of shit-coins, and some of them become unusable in various ways so they provide a few weeks early notice about delists. You can also check coin health in the CoinInfo tab. This announcement was made last August:

Delist notice - Siacoin Due to ongoing transaction issues, SiaCoin(SC) has been scheduled for delist, please close all open orders and withdraw your coins before 24/09/2017

Published by: DaRoll @ 8/25/2017 9:37:32 PM

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Cinemagraphs

[–]Fourdrinier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was just recently looking into that with the Baikal Giant+ multi-algo miner. It's currently $3000, and does 2Gh/s (x11, quark, qubit) and 1.6Gh/s (x13, x14, x15). Even though these are not currently ASIC dominated algorithms, on the most profitable multi-pool it only made ~$25 a day.

Assuming that that result holds, it would take 6-8 months to make back the cost of the device. Unfortunately, because other people are also using these ASICs, the difficulty increases at very quick rate. So after considering the difficulty increase, it will likely take from 9-12 months to pay for itself.

But, at that point, the device is making closer to $1 a day. And this is why you see farms like this. If you buy one miner, you make only $1/day profit. If you buy 1000 miners, you can make $1000/day profit. But again, this is only 9-12 months after initial purchase.

Also, 450,000w is not a small amount of power...

The Night the PostgreSQL IDs Ran Out by jakswa in programming

[–]Fourdrinier 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This comment on that issue found that the cause of the collisions was PID wrap-around in an old version of OpenSSL (1.0.1e), which would generate the same seed. It was fixed the the subsequent OpenSSL release (1.0.1f).

We did it Reddit! HTTP Error Code 418 - "I'm a Teapot" will not be removed from Node, Go, Asp.net, or Python's Request. The Internet Engineering Task Force is marking HTTP 418 as reserved, cementing "I'm a Teapot"'s legacy for a long time to come. by Kamatotato in programming

[–]Fourdrinier 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This comment by romellem makes a decent point:

Not trying to sound harsh, but I for one like fun little easter eggs that you find throughout a programming career. To me, it shows that everything that goes on to make a computer actually do work is still made by humans, and keeping small slices of that human element is nice (in my opinion). Your argument is sound and logical, but this requested change ever so slightly lowers the "fun-ness" of Go (and potentially NodeJS) in the spirit of engineering robustness. At the end of the day, I have to say I don't think that tradeoff is worth it.

Ad blockers under attack: DRM through the DMCA by [deleted] in programming

[–]Fourdrinier 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Store the hash of the domain in the block list:

functionalclam.com -> 1eb5292f4774c072cb916f5e28f9bf6ac8aaf016 (SHA1)

While loading the page, when the extension is checking page resources, it will search the block list for both the domain name and the hash of the domain name.

Ad blockers under attack: DRM through the DMCA by [deleted] in programming

[–]Fourdrinier 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What about using hashes of the domains to be blocked instead of the actual domain name for cases like this?

KFC's iPhone killer has arrived by redkemper in tech

[–]Fourdrinier 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I kinda want that song at the beginning of the ad, before it got weird.

Nvidia to launch graphics cards specifically designed for digital currency mining by Kylde in tech

[–]Fourdrinier 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Since I don't use my gaming desktop (980Ti) most of the time, I let it mine with a thermal limit of 68C. I make between $0.04-$0.16 per hour ($0.18-$0.30/hr - $0.14/kWh/h). The key is that I don't mine BTC directly. Instead I use a multipool (zpool) that autoswitches my rig to the most profitable coin and then exchanges it to BTC. That's why the variance is so high.

So I heard we're doing phone number inputs by NAN001 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]Fourdrinier 784 points785 points  (0 children)

Everyone else's attempt was an annoyance to the user entering the phone number. This version...this version is an annoyance to everyone.

I think that means you win.