The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.

Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.

Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.

You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.

Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

The existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

Last year, my sister had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, but she’s still perfectly capable of riding a bike. But the problem is our societal assumption of cars-for-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not means her neighborhood street design is extremely hostile to her getting around by bike safely, and it’s way too sprawling and car-dependent to walk anywhere. There’s also no public transit within a reasonable walking distance.

So I might ask you: Do you believe people like my sister deserve the same right to mobility as the rest of us? If so, why support a system that make life actively hostile to her and people like her? You act as if disabilities are a monolith, and that cars are only ever their saviors, as if cars are never the thing making life actively more difficult for many people.

Enshrinklification of the internet

Oh yeah, I understood this is a pro nuclear meme. I agree with your meme.

Friendly reminder that air pollution from fossil fuels kill ~9 million people per year

It’s funny how people always use play it like “oh, it’s just differing opinions” when what they’re actually defending is indefensible malarkey like nazis and tankies. They know if they made a meme saying we should “try to understand” nazis and tankies, they’d be downvoted to oblivion. And so they hide behind a shield of “differing opinions”.

These cretins have a right to post nazi and tankie shit on their own instances – them’s the beauty of the fediverse. But I also have a right to not want hate speech, genocide denial, and Hitler/Stalin/Mao simps polluting my feed. It’s not mere “differing opinions” when one person’s opinion is “Holodomor didn’t happen, and if it did, the Ukrainians deserved it” or “Holocaust didn’t happen, and if it did, the Jews deserved it” or whatever apologia they wanna peddle.

Our cities would be compact, walkable, jam-packed with quality transit, and nearly car-free. Cargo would be transported with cargo ebikes, barges along rivers and canals, local freight rail, and cargo trams. People would move by foot and bike and trams and metro and high-speed rail.

The surrounding countryside would be home to ecological, sustainable smallholder agriculture, preferably with plenty of technology for efficient precision agriculture. Instead of massive monocultures of corn, we’d have diverse polycultures of dozens of different crops, both annuals and perennials.

Nature would be abundant, protected, and rewilded. We would remove most roads into wild areas and replace with trains and velomobile trails, which would be much lower impact on wild habitats. Every city would have easy, rapid transit access to natural areas by rail, so anyone can go hiking or exploring or whatever they like.

Our economy would be centered around productivity, not rent-seeking and speculation. We would use policy to reduce barriers to entry to create highly competitive markets. We would heavily tax externalities like carbon emissions and fertilizer runoff and PFAS contamination.

We would tax people on what they take, not what they make. Income taxes? Nah, you did the labor; that value should belong to you. Carbon emissions? That materially harms others so you should pay tax on that. Hoarding valuable god-given land? You didn’t make it, so you should pay taxes on the land you deprive from the rest of humanity.

Our democracy would be reformed with a much better voting system like mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR) or single transferrable vote (STV), so we could have healthy multiparty systems.

Our society would publicly invest more in research and development, open-source projects, infrastructure, and anything else that generates positive externalities. You rewilded 100 acres of native grassland? Society should pay you for your valuable labor.

The balance of power between labor and employers would be balanced. A citizen’s dividend or universal basic income, subsidies on positive externalities (like rewilding), and the economic general growth spurred by elimination of rent-seeking would allow for an empowered working class that could capture its own productivity gains, demand better pay, and demand shorter hours. Much like how the professional class can demand good pay and good working conditions currently.

In short, the economy would be centered around Georgist principles, environment and agriculture around permaculture, and democracy around technocratic and representative democracy. A shared, sustainable prosperity for all.