14th gen intel have "big" and "little" cores. Unless you specify to pin cores in the VM, if at any point the virtualization swaps cores then your X86 performance on Intel goes down the drain.

Also laptop perfomance is incredibly suspect. Not only does cooling, etc have huge effects, but Intel is clearly behind AMD since many years (14th gen is a refresh of an old architecture).

Laptop benchmark: https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september

Server benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12 https://www.phoronix.com/review/google-axion-c4a/5

Based on server performance while ARM is making strides, AMD still has the performance crown.

Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com .

It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air.

It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term.

The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive.

So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.

If someone knows 80% of the topics on an exam like the back of their hand and doesn't know the other 20% they shouldn't get a B, they should pass the subjects they know and be asked to retake and relearn the subjects they don't know.

When people know they can make mistakes and the result is not a perpetual black mark on their record (any grade not an A) but they are given the chance to improve and demonstrate this improvement then perhaps they might be more willing to admit and understand mistakes instead of cheating.

People taking a good idea and extending it to do bad does harm twice: in the bad act itself and in making a good thing seem bad.

I am strongly against US starting wars and as you say blowing people up.

I am also strongly against the US being defenseless in the case of a national emergency.

No one is running LLMs on current gen NPUs so if we will in the future its a long time coming. Unless they can demonstrate some real (and not marketing) wins I remain skeptical that a large NPU for LLMs is the future.

I can totally see NPU accelerating simple tasks, but to be worth the silicon they have a ways to go imo.

99% of people don't need or want a dev workstation. My travel laptop is 7+ years old and I couldn't tell you the difference between it and a current flagship in terms of browsing and everyday tasks.

I will not lie, I find LLMs useful but the desktop experience is pretty polished already. NPUs seem to be an attempt to ride the AI bandwagon with very little to show for it so far.

For desktop TPM at least to me they seem a bit of a black box with many past vulnerabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Platform_....

I think at cold boot as long as one doesn't store the encryption key in the TPM (external hardware key?) then one should be secure. I am not so sure about post boot however, once the system is already running.

This actually prompted me to research a bit on the scale of the security impact of SMM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode

https://doc.coreboot.org/security/smm.html

It seems that coreboot is aware and supposedly for some computers can be implemented to catch calls to SMM (ideally this would prevent the attacker from triggering SMM - if they do it's game over).

I do suspect though that if the system bus is not protected from malicious calls then someone can trigger SMM and have carte blanche to one's computer.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2167684/hackers-find-a-new...

https://hothardware.com/news/researchers-discover-rootkit-ex...

I don't know what processes Apple / Android use but I suspect ARM chips don't have SMM and that they tie certain functions to their secure enclave. In X86 its backwards, with SMM having control over the TPM (at least in some implementations).

Though some SMM vulnerabilities are patched by now given its history I take X86 security with a grain of salt. I think the potential for a secure platform is there, but I suspect one would want to make their own boards engineered with security in mind to be certain (I hope this happens in the future - it seems to be happening in the server space already).

"Trusted Boot" is a meme on x86. If you really want something like that you need to do what Oxide Computer is doing and rip out UEFI for good and implement your own secure boot chain.

Qubes is great but at the end of the day cannot protect against evil maid attacks to the level that pixel or apple phones can. Its great at making sure a browser exploit cannot steal your banking credentials you have open in a different virtual machine but cannot overcome the limitations of the platforms it builds off of.

So I understand why the GrapheneOS folks do what they do.

See also: "X86 considered harmful" by the founder of Qubes OS (posted in 2015!)

https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf

https://github.com/jopdorp/build123d-freecad (it also supports cadquery)

Set it up today and I am really liking build123d in general. I've always wanted something code-based for CAD and I can't believe I missed something this promising.

Frankly even the visualization tools that you can plugin like OCP Cad viewer mean that outside of complex assemblies you can do everything in your editor of choice.

Certain industries employing quasy-slave labor to this day and getting away with it is one thing only: a stain on our society.

Long has been the fight for freedom from oppression and it is not over yet. Just like Martin Luther King was assassinated fighting for colored civil rights, Cesar Chavez was assassinated fighting for humane conditions for immigrant workers.

If immigrants are what's "needed" for America to function then they should be naturalized and granted fair wages just like anyone else.

I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.

It's far from perfect but it does achieve its stated goal: of resurfacing real people on the internet.

It recently got some NLNet funding and I hope to see it flourish - to my knowledge there aren't any other projects trying to claw back control of the internet towards the commons.

https://about.marginalia-search.com

While unlikely, the ideal would be for the government to provide a foundational open search infrastructure that would allow people to build on it and expand it to fit their needs in a way that is hard to do when a private companies eschews competition and hides its techniques.

Perhaps it would be better for there to be a sanctioned crawler funded by the government, that then sells the unfiltered information to third parties like google. This would ensure IP rights are protected while ensuring open access to information.

The purpose of a search engine is to display links to web pages, not the entire content. As such, it can be argued it falls under fair use. It provides value to the people searching for content and those providing it.

However we left such a crucially important public utility in the hands of private companies, that changed their algorythms many times in order to maximize their profits and not the public good.

I think there needs to be real competition, and I am increasingly becoming certain that the government should be part of that competition. Both "private" companies and "public" governement are biased, but are biased in different ways, and I think there is real value to be created in this clash. It makes it easier for individuals to pick and choose the best option for themselves, and for third independent options to be developed.

The current cycle of knowledge generation is academia doing foundational research -> private companies expanding this research and monetizing it -> nothing. If the last step was expanded to the government providing a barebones but useable service to commodotize it, years after private companies have been able to reap immense profits, then the capabilities of the entire society are increased. If the last step is prevented, then the ruling companies turn to rentseeking and sitting on their lawrels, turn from innovating to extracting.

This reads like someone with the means to eat good food eating junk food and then putting themselves on weight loss drugs to counteract the effects. I'm sure temporarily it might work but I don't believe that the shocks that produce meaninful cooling effects are without consequence - in fact, I suspect they double the consequences by adding yet another factor to the destabilization.

I could be wrong, and it could a short term solution to stop the bleeding, but I have a deep suspicion of adding more things to the atmosphere given our history with the CO2 in question, tetrafluoroethane, etc.

Lookin at the wikipedia it does sound a lot like "chemtrails". They describe airplanes as being able to disseminate these aerosols and these days when I look up at the sky there is always a straight line of "cloud" forming behind airplanes.

Echoing another comment, before unification, Italy (1860s) had its "warring states period".

The North were independent small monarchies, including the Savoia, from which came the unification push with the help of Garibaldi.

In center Italy the Church ruled with an iron fist. In fact, when Rome was besieged and the Church lost, all of Italy was excommunicated by the Pope. (They then bactracked on the policy once they saw people just kept going about with their lives).

In the South was a repressed agricultural state that was so terrible to live under people invented something even worse: the mafia. (This is also why so many Italian Americans come from the South - they were escaping in search of a better life).

A song (in Italian) somewhat about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poaPh00AmDQ

There is basically no "open source" in mechanical engineering. So you are relegated to super heavy legacy applications that coast by through their integrations with other proprietary tools. Solidworks is much heavier then FreeCAD but FreeCAD didn't have integrations with simulation tools, with CAM software, used a different geometry engine than industry standard, etc, so when a company tried to turn FreeCAD into a product they failed.

The only open source one sees in mechanical engineering comes out of academia, which while interesting, faces the problem that once the research funds dry up or the project finishes the software is dumped into the open in hard to find places, and is not further developed.

I remain hopeful in the potential for open source, I believe that to have a truly accessible and innovative industry a greater level of openness is needed, but it is yet coming.

I think CAD is a good place to start, as it is not a space where lots of hidden and closely guarded tricks are needed like in Finite Element Analysis. For personal uses FreeCAD is getting there. Snappier than Solidworks, but the workflow layout needs some work.

I am also looking at projects such as https://zoo.dev. In mapping the design 1to1 to code (while keeping gui workflow as well) I think they have a real chance of offering enough value that new companies will be interested in trying out their approach. It opens the doors to automation analysis, and generation that while possible with something like Solidworks is cumbersome and not well documented.

And if laqmakers are silent, then publicising, collecting, and sharing this knowledge to all ends of the earth through mainstream and independent journalism, paying a few hundred dollars out of their Silicon Valley salaries to put up billboards shining a light on the misdeeds of tech companies towards their own customers and society.

Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.