Viewing profile — xgk

Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) was introduced in the 1990s [1, 2], see also [3, 4]. The idea was that MoE scales up model capacity and only introduces small computation overhead. MoEs did…

Indeed, that is the standard approach. It is also how some of the aforementioned languages desugar opaque type synonyms during compilation. It has the slight disadvantage that we c…

There are even more algebras on the same bits, when you take signed integers into account, such as saturating arithmetic . One interesting programming language construct that might…

> CPUs actually implements 5 distinct data types Yes, that's true, but the registers themselves are untyped, what modern CPUs really implement is multiple instruction semantics ove…

> China’s terrible demographics Are China's demographics appreciatively different from other industrialised countries? Questionable. Not to mention that it's unclear why an aging s…

> In terms of design, China has world class companies. And not just companies. This is currently the world's top open-source RISC-V development https://github.com/OpenXiangShan com…

An alternative explanation might involve both of: 1. Stopping technology transfer worked exceedingly well for the west weakening the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 2. A distinct…

Sorry, I should have said: ... (row)hammer hard enough, every sufficiently dense/modern DRAM ...

I think if you (row)hammer hard enough, every DRAM will eventually flip a bit.

This is misleading. I recommend [1] as an introduction to the semiconductor physics behind the Rowhammer problem. Rowhammer is an instance of the "weird machine" problem behind man…

Agree. The extreme secrecy of DRAM manufacturers about the innards of their chips puts an additional obstacles in the way of memory controllers (MCs) implementing efficient Rowhamm…

The possibility of flipping bits in DRAM in a Rowhammer like fashion, was known in the DRAM industry since at least the 1990s (sorry, no reference handy), and Rowhammer-like access…

It has been possible to re-purpose such additional refresh cycles as an additional Rowhammer attack vector, see https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentat...

Have you ever seen any even moderately detailed specification of what the DRAM manufacturers do in this regard? I have not, and I looked. I am deeply sceptical .... I don't believe…

On one side ... On the other side ... Only one of those sides has children in substantial numbers, so this polarity will sort itself out over longer time scales. As somebody living…

questionably from the beginning Agreed. If you look at what's the majority of compute loads (e.g. Instagram, Snap, Netflix, HPC) then that's (a) not particularly security critical,…

Other networking protocols coming from a telco background, in particular ATM and ISDN, were all circuit switched, and had suitable resource reservation for QoS. Acceptance of telep…

studies are bs because We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The problem is that we do not currently know how to carry out studies on the efficacy of programming …

somehow messed with Cs absorption line In a simple case yes, but if all other time keeping mechanisms would also be messed with by dark matter, there might be no way of saying whic…

The clock drift of A1 and A2 could be correlated for some reason that we don't currently understand.

You cannot measure how fast light travels in a fixed time unit without reference to time: you need to define length! Length is currently defined with reference to caesium time: the…

precisely known transitions There is an interesting philosophical conundrum here, in that one could argue it's the other way around: the precision you mention is a consequence of t…

> separate safety from the much more complex liveness True, and with program logics, you can choose partial correctness vs total vs generalised correctness. Itt's even worse in pra…

> to separate specification from verification Exactly. Program logics are superior in this regard: the encourage rather than inhibit separation of concerns. (Not to mention: progra…