efaardvark

As recently as the end of the 19th century there were a lot of people who thought that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that therefore research in the future would mostly be concerned with clearing up minor problems and with improvements of method and measurement. People thought we'd discovered everything there was to know. Call it a failure of imagination. We didn't even know about radioactive decay at that point. Then around the turn of the century people realized that certain things can't be explained by classical physics. Things like the orbit of Mercury, and the photoelectric effect. Some of those "minor problems" apparently weren't so minor after all. Lasers, superconductivity, semiconductors, and nuclear bombs have all been discovered or invented since then. We know even more now but anyone who thinks we know everything is a fool. Of course there's more to the universe than we know. We don't even know what over 95% of the universe is made of! There's plenty of new stuff to discover. I'm sure that at least some of it will be amazing.

I know how that works. I've managed (so far) to avoid things like bugs in the ear but I've worked on several projects over the years where the peaks and troughs were pretty extreme. Often a whole team will work for over a decade on a project and success or failure comes down to a few minutes where things are completely out of their hands and all they can do is hope everything goes according to plan. (Usually with millions of people watching the show. No pressure!) But like our former boss liked to quote, "dare mighty things". Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.

Anyone bored these days just doesn't understand the unique qualities of the era in which we currently live. Even just technology-wise my inner 12-yo (who grew up before the Internet, or even home computers) is continually amazed at stuff that's available today. Even though I have spent virtually my entire professional career keeping up with the changes and generally know exactly how they work, there's still a part of me that thinks things like smartphones, gigabit wifi, and flat-panel, full color, UHD LED displays are some kind of magic. Then combine that with similar advances in other fields such as medicine and agriculture and aerospace. Then roll in the social changes produced by ubiquitous availability of said technology. MMO games with ray-traced graphics operating at hundreds of FPS. Self driving production cars. Reusable commercial rockets putting up dozens of satellites per launch. Heck, even just simple antibiotics. Anyone who is jaded by all that is taking way too much for granted.

Linus (re)builds the other Linus's desktop PC, a 3970X threadripper system that I would also love to own. Black, quiet, and lots and lots of cores. Just the way I like it.

Took a stack of gold to the Nether in minecraft and did some trading with the piglins. Got some pretty good loot in trade. Piglins don't appear to trade for anything but gold ingots, but they'll pick up anything gold, or any armor or weapon. Be careful of baby piglins however, as they don't trade but will still take your gold or other items you drop. Brutes will also not trade. One thing I noticed however is that the piglins do seem to "fill up". After a while they'll pick up an ingot but then drop it again instead of giving you something different. My guess is that they have a certain number of internal slots and when those fill up with ingots they start dropping new ingots. Too bad. I was hoping to corral a few and use them for trade. It doesn't appear that plan will work, since any group you get will eventually fill up and stop trading. I don't know if they "reset" if you leave them alone for a certain period of time. It didn't seem to happen while I was watching however.

Good luck wit that. Seriously, if I found anyone like that I'd keep her for myself. (Though I would agree on the "Maybe not as crazy or manipulative.." bit as well.) I've been on a somewhat similar quest for quite a long time now. She either doesn't exist or is already taken. At this point I'd consider anyone who just satisfies the criteria of always voting in elections but hasn't voted "D" or "R" for the past several cycles. Someone who would seriously consider a ticket to Mars on one of SpaceX's Starships if/when they ever get those going would also be a plus. I know, dream on right? Still, there's got to be at least 2 or 3 of them out there somewhere. Probably not going to find them on places like facebook, twitter, tinder, or in a google search though.

Been queuing up stuff all season & this weekend I finally get to watch some of it. Just finished Ascendance of a Bookworm . Got 8th Son and My Next Life as a Villainess lined up after that.

For a while now my brother has been harassing me to play a game called Empyrion. I've resisted for a few reasons. One is because it is a Windows-only game and I'm running linux. Another is I don't have enough time to play games as it is anyway. The last thing I need is another way to waste time. Otherwise it seemed like my kind of thing.. space/technology themed, multi-player (including either PvP or co-op). There's crafting, building, a universe-sized PvE sandbox to play in, and a bit of lore/story to keep things interesting. It is still alpha/early access on Steam but there seemed to be a lot of positive energy about it in the forums and online in general. I've watched a couple let's-plays and waited for the linux version to be announced. Well, this weekend I had some time and Steam notified me of a 60% off sale. I checked around and found some mentions of the game running on linux via Steam's ProtonDB since about a year ago so I decided to take a chance. For $8 it seemed worth the risk. Glad I did! I'm still running through the tutorials and I haven't even tried going online multi-player yet so I might be a bit premature in saying this but so far I am liking it a lot. Technically it has worked just fine. Alpha or not this "windows only" game has been quite stable even under Proton on my Linux system. My old gfx card's fans rev up but the game looks great and the fps are keeping up with my monitor's 60hz refresh. I don't know if this is going to be my new favorite. That top spot has been occupied by Kerbal Space Program for years now and I don't think that's going to change any time soon. However this might give Minecraft some competition for the second-favorite slot! This weekend I had in fact planned to log on to my brother's Realms server to check out the Nether update. Instead I spent (according to Steam) about 10 hours over the two days crash-landed on a temperate planet called "Earha" trying to build and fortify a base against the alien mobs while expanding my technology options. I haven't managed to get off the planet yet, but I do have a base, some construction ability, a small farm for food, some decent weapons for protection from the wildlife, and a lot of prospecting and exploring on-planet yet to do. It is interesting to note that if you're outside in this game and look up you can often see the other planets in your planet's solar system. It took me a while to realize it, but in this game getting off the starter planet is just that, a start. Develop your tech enough and you can actually build a spacecraft to go visit those other planets.. and the rest of the universe beyond. Kind of a combination of Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and a bit of Space Engineer.

Snuck in another couple hours of Empyrion today. Gotta say.. it looks a lot better than minecraft out of the box. It definitely has a whiff of mc about it though. I'm playing survival (of course) and the first things I had to do was chop down some trees, dig up some stone to build a base to keep the spiders out, build a fabricator (aka crafting table), dig up some iron, ... tell me if any of this sounds familiar. But then there's the dinosaurs, the vehicles, and that ugly thing down by the lake that always tries to bite my face off when I go to get some water. Had to figure out how to make a shotgun for that last. No shotguns or hovercraft in minecraft!

Well, decided to go with Empyrion today. I've never actually played this game before (though I've heard a lot about it from my brother) so I'm just running through the tutorials in single-player mode for now. So far so good. Steam's Proton has given me absolutely no trouble so far. My old RX480 card is giving me 50-60fps. As for the game itself.. it is alpha. No obvious bugs so far, but the interface is kind of klunky in places, the progress is uneven, and the tech tree is occasionally opaque. A couple times the tutorials tasked me to build an item but there is apparently no way to know what branch of the tech tree you need to unlock to build a certain item. Maybe it is just me being a noob but I've got a couple hours on it now and I just don't see it yet. Also, they have several types of vehicles (and a base) and some parts can't be attached to some types of vehicles. That's ok, but sometimes you can't tell which part goes with which vehicle, and a couple times now I've built the wrong part. (For instance, there is one fuel tank for the power generator for the base and another one for the hovercraft. The picture of each is different but they're both called "fuel tanks" in the crafting menu, and the one for the hovercraft can't be used with the base generator or vice versa. Eventually I'll be able to tell them apart by the picture but the first time I had to do the eeny-meeny-miney-moe thing and picked the wrong one.) All that said, for an alpha I'm liking it. Worth the $8 early access price. It'll be nice to see the final version.

So I was all set in my mind to sit down this weekend and do some Nether exploration in minecraft now that the 1.16 nether update has dropped. But now I log in to Steam and find that Empyrion has a 60% off sale that drops the price to $8. Decision, decisions. Actually I'm not sure how well or even if Empyrion works on my system. Empyrion is a Windows-only game and I'm on linux. I've seen reports that it is working with Steam's Proton for over a year now so unless the recent release broke something it sounds like my chances are good. I haven't seen any reports one way or the other since the update however. Either everyone is too busy playing it to bother commenting on it, or it broke and everyone has given up. It is still an alpha release too and I don't want to pay for something that doesn't work or for something that I'm going to have to fiddle with to get it working. Too bad there's not a demo.

I've been trying to find time to play since it dropped but this annoying "life" thing keeps getting in the way. Maybe this weekend I'll get some time. My brother says the Nether is now full of Endermen, or at least the interesting new places are. Sounds annoying.

There really isn't any at this point. At least not in the general case. Besides huge files and massive amounts of memory there's really no benefit. Maybe data transfer rates could double for a given clock rate on a bus that was twice as wide. But if all you want to do is move masses of data around without processing it in any way you probably want to use optics and serial buses, especially if you're going any distance greater than the dimensions of your average motherboard. That said, there are already parts of even common PCs that have data buses of 128 bits or more in width. Some gfx cards for instance have data buses that are much wider than 128 bits. I think I read somewhere that the Xbox has a 384 bit bus between the GDDR memory on the card and the GPU itself. GFX cards are all about parallelism for speed and the routing isn't too complicated because you're only going between two points.. memory and GPU. Some gfx cards have internal bus widths of up to 4096 bits!

We have not gone to 128 bits because there is a cost for doing so and we don't really need it. There's a whole bunch of reasons for the cost. At the hardware level we use parallel buses. That means that every bit gets it's own data line. If two wires touch then the computer stops working. If two wires even just get too close then there's crosstalk and your computer becomes unreliable. Routing all those wires across the motherboard to connect the CPU, memory, PCI buses, etc. becomes a problem the wider the bus is. An 8-bit bus is easy to design. 16 bits is also pretty easy. 32 bits starts to get troublesome. 64 bits is downright tricky. This is also a problem for chip design internally, for similar reasons. Ok, so why even go to 64 bits then? Well, with 32 bits you can only count to 4 billion. If you have a file that you want to reference a particular byte of data in then your file can only be 4 gigabytes in size. If you have memory addresses that you want to reference then you can only have 4GBytes of memory and still be able to reference each byte individually. Lots of people want to use files more than 4GB in size or have more than 4GB of memory in their computers. Yes, there's tricks like using two 32-bit registers to hold a single 64-bit number, but now things like your math libraries and other code at the software level get complicated and slow. Worst case they have to do twice as much work and run half as fast. It is worth it to go to 64 bit buses and let the hardware do most of the work, even though it makes the hardware a bit harder to design and more expensive to build. Going to 128 bits would make the hardware extremely hard to design and build, as well as expensive. At the same time going from 64 bits to 128 bits on address buses and integers doesn't buy you nearly the gains that going from 32 to 64 bits did. With 64 bits you can reference data in files that are up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes in size, or individually address over 18 thousand terabytes of memory. Very few people have files that big or computers with that much memory. (yet.) Maybe we'll get there some day, but for now it isn't worth the costs.

Found out today that Empyrion is "gold" in Steam's ProtonDB. My brother has this for Windows and has been bugging me to play it with him. Crafting and space ships. What's not to like? I did like Planet Nomads. This looks way better, like Space Engineers but with a plot, and bits of No Man's Sky. I might have to give it a try.

For some reason Kawai Complex seemed like a good idea tonight. Goofy and fun.

1.16 is officially here! Didn't have any time to play with it today though. Probably not tomorrow either.

Really the only thing that CISC has going for it at the moment is the huge investment that the industry has made in the x86 ISA, mainly Windows. In a lot of ways Intel + Microsoft have held the industry back in terms of effectively using newer technologies like RISC. If you don't need any of that then RISC can take you into hardware performance territory that you simply can't get to with CISC architectures. For mobile for example you really have to use something other than CISC for power reasons. That's why virtually all phones and tablets use something like an ARM processor and not something from Intel or AMD. Apple has reached the limits of x86 a long time ago, that's why it is going with its own ARM-based CPUs even in its desktop and laptops starting as soon as this year or next. (It was supposed to be this year but got delayed due to the virus.) All of Apple's phones, watches, pads, etc already use ARM-based processors. Even MSFT tried to go ARM with their mobile/surface platform, though they kind of flubbed it. Of course Unix based OSs were designed to be ported. Linux for example can run almost anywhere. Pretty much the ONLY place still requiring CISC is Windows on x86 desktops/laptops.

I'm ok with the looks, even the "pregnant" one with the disc slot. Of course I'm also anti-RGB lighting that seems to be all the rage now so what do I know about design? The bigger problem for me is the "Sony" label, especially with the admittedly nicer-looking "Digital" model. Yeah, sure, download only. From Sony. What could go wrong? For me I'm much more interested in the PS5 as an indicator of where the industry is going than in actually owning one myself. Thanks, but I'll probably be sticking with a PC. A nice 4th-gen Ryzen, with gobs of RAM, and an RDNA2/3 GPU. Yeah, that's the ticket! I figure I've got a year or maybe two before I have to upgrade my current system.

Whether it is ARM or something else I think x86 as an ISA is going away at some point. The licensing overhead is just too much to sustain. IMHO something RISC-y is a better solution technically anyway, at least as long as general-purpose CPUs rely on electrons. Heat limits mean that clocks can't be pushed any higher than around 5Ghz, so to get more compute power per "chip" (die) we need more cores. CISC instruction length is a handicap in that situation. It is also easier to design RISC CPUs hardware-wise. ARM is in a good position to take over because it is already well-known on the server, mobile, and embedded side(s) of things. Linux, BSD, and even Windows can already run on ARM processors. Even ARM has licensing fees associated with it however. Not nearly as much as x86, but enough that people already over-sensitized to such things from having to deal with x86 might over-react and consider starting from scratch to be a desirable situation. That might give an opening for something like RISC-V. There's already a debian linux port for RISC-V, and development/experimental hardware to run it. We'll see.

Just got a box of light bulbs. Exciting, right? Just part of my ongoing quest to find decent LED bulbs now that my state has basically outlawed the old incandescent and halogen bulbs. This batch is on the recommendation of a co-worker on a similar quest. At $20 for a six-pack I was kind of expecting these to make me coffee in the morning but they're apparently just light bulbs. That said, these do dim well, fit in the space of a regular "A19" bulb, don't noticeably flicker*, and even at just 14 watts they're as bright as the old kind. I just got these so I still have to see how long they last of course. I've yet to find any LEDs that last as long as a good incandescent, never mind some of the claims of 20 years or more. *except a little bit at extreme dimming levels where it is actually tolerable.. kind of like flickering candlelight.