Wow, computers are about to get much, much slower.

This is a new bug (Spectre) that also cannot be microcode-mitigated.

It affects AMD CPUs, too. This is not the same speculative prediction bug as yesterday’s.

This new variant means that soon enough code will be updated (via compiler) to not allow predicting indirect calls. It will also affect all switch statements that are compiler-optimized. All commonly-used modern compilers do these sort of optimizations by default so removing this capability will make some code vastly slower – some of it will probably be only 5 to 10% as fast as it was before, after patches for this come out.

In other words, I won’t be updating any of my machines for a long, long time as I don’t care enough about (fake) security to make my machines massively slower.

I’d guess the average machine when these two bugs are fully patched will be 50 to 70% slower in most applications.

Unacceptable.

Holy shit, this is bad.

I will not be installing any updates on any OS for a long time because I have no interest in my computer getting 30% slower in the name of “security.”

What a fail for Intel. Well, that explains why my AMD stock went up nearly 10% today.

At work, I discovered the solution to a major problem.

No one for a long time believed it was the solution.

“It just can’t work that way,” they said. “It just can’t and it doesn’t make any sense.”

I wrote an internal white paper describing the problem, why it came to exist, and how to ameliorate it. I advocated, preached, cajoled and educated. All to no avail for quite a while.

Eventually, someone on management believed me and said, “We are going to do it his way and that’s that even if no one thinks it makes any sense.”

Six months later, something that frequently caused massive heartache, customer issues, and marathon troubleshooting calls attended by a dozen+ people now no longer happens at all.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

My only New Year’s resolution is 5K.

And I am already there.

All scones are foul. How does anyone stand to eat that dried husk that used to be a pastry?

What purpose do they serve and why do they exist?

Scones are like the TGIFriday’s of pastries. Just terrible.

If free will is not something that actually exists, it seems an awful lot of wasted energy and effort to maintain a useless illusion.

It sounds sort of like the idea that some Christian fundies have that Jesus put dinosaur bones in the ground to test their faith.

I’m being a bit glib here, but the anti-free will contingent’s arguments while they could be well-formulated, often aren’t much better than the above.

We got walled gardens because they hugely benefit the companies that impose them and the vast majority are too stupid for anything else.

It’s an attractor, and one that is not easily possible to resist.

I woudn’t say the “best” sandwiches, but Publix subs are quite good for the price.

I’ve had subs at places that cost 2x as much that weren’t nearly as tasty or fresh.

Part of the reason is that Publix makes the best bread of any grocery store by far (yes, far better than Whole Foods and places like that), so that alone improves the sub a great deal. Publix bread is in fact better than that which you get at “artisanal” bakeries where it often cost 4x as much (For instance, I can get a $3 Publix loaf of sourdough that at those type of specialty bakeries is more than $10. And the Publix loaf is both better-tasting and lasts longer.)

Publix subs are definitely better than any chain sub place I’ve been to, though.

For the price, they are perfect.

(Compared to the bread you can get in Europe, Publix bread is only mediocre, but for the US that means it’s spectacular.)

What do people get out of therapy? I can’t imagine it. Why does that help? It all seems like a huge scam to me.

It’s not like nothing terrible has ever happened to me, but so what?

‘Uh, therapist, I was brutally bullied for years. It sucked.“

Therapy’s over at that point for me….

I think it’s one of those human things I just will never understand because my mind just doesn’t work that way.

(Yes, I know, therapy is more involved than that, and more nuanced, but it would not be for me.)

I will never understand the rise of Facebook. I know as the average intelligence of the internet fell, such things were more likely, but I had no idea general stupidity would threaten the entire web.

I mean, it’s a complicated situation. Facebook and Twitter are easily the best news/blog reading platforms ever invented, better than any RSS reader for most people. By putting most of the web’s information all in one place, they offer incredible speed and convenience, which is hard for people to ignore.

Why is Facebook easier for people? I can’t understand it. Facebook is a garbage mess as far as I can tell.

However, it also confused me that when people still used browsers as they were intended to be used, 9 out of 10 folks could not type a URL in the address bar no matter if you gave them explicit, repeatable, step-by-step instructions – no matter how many times they tried.

That is something so simple even a child could do it, yet most adults were completely stymied even with repeated instructions.

I want to think the best of people. I really do. But when I believe they can go no lower, they start fracking and crawling into spaces so subterranean that no appeal to reason or intelligence can ever hope to disinter them.

I’ve always thought people in general were pretty clueless and stupid. Unfortunately, I vastly overestimated their intelligence and their drive to improve themselves.

It’s far worse than I thought, in other words.

One of the primary but sub rosa reasons for the mathematicalization of so many fields is not for the sake of rigor or better results (the results are often worse), but rather it fills time and prevents better and more insightful questions from being asked.

It’s not a conspiracy – not quite – but it’s not an accident, either.

Math is most often used for the appearance of thought while anything insightful is carted out and burned.

See the field of economics in particular for examples, but it is occurring everywhere.

I mostly disagree with this, though I am not a software engineer. My discipline is related, though, and all this will do is to cause it to become a math IQ test and many people who’d otherwise be qualified will be pushed out or will never be able to enter.

I’m very good at my field, but if it had been like this I’d never have been able do what I do now as I’d never be able to pass the hurdle of the math IQ test that’d be put in place to effectively moat the discipline.

Why I need to know advanced calculus to design server environments, I have no idea, but that’s what would occur.

“Professionalizing” IT fields means that it’d exclude roughly half the people in them – and not the best half at the actual field, mainly the least privileged and those also not interested in or talented at tainting their brains with math formalisms rather than knowledge.