Practising critical thinking & avoiding confirmation bias.
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Joined May 2012
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@Ryan Trollip retweeted
Russia is at war with Ukrainian kindergartens. This is what remains of a kindergarten in Kyiv after Russia’s overnight attack. 58 children will now have to be relocated to another facility.
Ukraine’s children deserve more than sympathy - they deserve protection, and the world must not look away. We urge everyone to put more pressure on Russia now to save more lives in the future
To be fair, very much where you start the graph from.
That said token demand appears to only be at its infancy.
@Ryan Trollip retweeted
US Treasury sanctions Canadian money services firms over Iran-related transactions reut.rs/4eW6X1l
@Ryan Trollip retweeted
BREAKING 🚨 US offers $20 million reward for info on 'Iran's nuclear program': CENTCOM
Dang, highly sophisticated if accurate
Binance just published how $6.34 billion walked out the door.
June: an engineer searches for a popular AI coding tool, clicks a search result, and installs a tampered homebrew. Binance catches it, replaces the laptop, rotates the credentials. the attackers now know who works on the wallet team.
September: another engineer gets a job offer on a real job-hunting site. first-round interview with “HR” over live video. “HR” shares their social media, personal photos and videos included, so he trusts them. second round is with the “CEO” of a company that doesn’t exist. at the end of the call he’s asked to download a take-home “assignment” onto his work laptop.
the assignment quietly swaps out pyenv for a malicious copy. No antivirus flags it.
october 20: the attacker uses binance’s own internal AI tool to get into two more engineers’ machines. One of them has a container deployment token sitting on his laptop.
october 29: container deployed. Signing service reached. $6.34 billion moved.
Binance shut off withdrawals. the money kept moving anyway, because the attacker had already given their own smart contract permission over a hot wallet, on-chain. binance’s off switch didn’t reach that far.
then they tried to revoke the permission. the wallet uses MPC, so there’s no single private key to sign the revoke with. they had to build a revoke procedure on the spot while funds were still leaving.
last stolen ETH went through at 23:56 UTC. almost four hours after the first transfer.
Phew!
Certainly complicates the picture. Can Iran afford to sit on its hands and wait until Trump is out.
Everything now depends on the war with Iran and oil prices. Does the massive blue wave cause Trump to de-escalate and pull back or does he double down and resume bombing? Brent is at $102, down from $118 at the end of last week. It's betting on the former.
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
It's not complicated. Today the demand for AI is huge because it is a language model that can write code. But where do you think all that code's gonna run?
In the early 2010s, Intel's Xeon Phi (a descendant of their Larabee x86 GPU project) was a 57-72 core CPU coprocessor with an early form of AVX-512.
This is often branded today as a failure and a proof that massively parallel CPUs are destined to fail. Except AMD is now selling their 256 core Epyc 9996 and doesn't seem to be having such trouble.
What's the difference? Part of it is software and timing. We've just gotten much better at building software that can make use of so many cores. Telling people to write code that uses dozens of cores was a lot scarier to people 15 years ago than it is today. It wasn't fully understood how to do meaningful parallelism safely, and there was a lot more skepticism that it could be done at all. They also couldn't just ask Claude to do it.
Another part of it though was just bad architecture design; Intel at the time was very fond of connecting cores via a "ring bus". All cores are connected in a ring, and if one core wants to talk to another for any reason, it must send a packet that walks all the way around the ring until it lands at the desired core. The memory controller may have its own stop on the ring.
For 4-8 cores this isn't so bad, but it scales very poorly with dozens of cores. If your ring bus has 3 lanes and the average packet takes 20 hops to reach its destination, you hit 100% congestion the moment your code averages even 0.15 packets per clock cycle. In practice, you can still get bad congestion problems even well below this rate. Not to mention, dozens of hops for common memory operations is slow, and Xeon Phi was an in-order core with a very minimal ability to absorb cache miss latency. Time spent waiting on very slow and congested memory was time a core often could not spend computing anything else.
This isn't a proof that high CPU core counts are a bad idea. CPUs have since switched to various forms of mesh and tree topologies, solving the problem. These other topologies are trickier to build correctly, ring buses were legitimately simpler to get right, but they don't scale.
@Ryan Trollip retweeted
🤖 Made with AI
Who's suprised
Breaking News: A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. nyti.ms/3Ukob1t
Yes, but there were giant holes in it. It allowed Iran to continue its ballistic missile development, with missiles developed to carry a nuclear payload.
