• 0 Posts
  • 827 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle
















  • Technically and legally the photos would be considered child porn

    I don’t think that has been tested in court. It would be a reasonable legal argument to say that the image isn’t a photo of anyone. It doesn’t depict reality, so it can’t depict anyone.

    I think at best you can argue it’s a form of photo manipulation, and the intent is to create a false impression about someone. A form of image based libel, but I don’t think that’s currently a legal concept. It’s also a concept where you would have to protect works of fiction otherwise you’ve just made the visual effects industry illegal if you’re not careful.

    In fact, that raises an interesting simily. We do not allow animals to be abused, but we allow images of animal abuse in films as long as they are faked. We allow images of human physical abuse as long as they are faked. Children are often in horror films, and creating the images we see is very strictly managed so that the child actor is not exposed to anything that could distress them. The resulting “works of art” are not under such limitations as far as I’m aware.

    What’s the line here? Parental consent? I think that could lead to some very concerning outcomes. We all know abusive parents exist.

    I say all of this, not because I want to defend anyone, but because I think we’re about to set some really bad legal precidents if we’re not careful. Ones that will potentially do a lot of harm. Personally, I don’t think the concept of any image, or any other piece of data, being illegal holds water. Police people’s actions, not data.


  • We do, depending on how you count it.

    There’s two major widths in a processor. The data register width and the address bus width, but even that is not the whole story. If you go back to a processor like the 68000, the classic 16-bit processor, it has:

    • 32-bit data registers
    • 16- bit ALU
    • 16-bit data bus
    • 32-bit address registers
    • 24-bit address bus

    Some people called it a 16/32 bit processor, but really it was the 16-bit ALU that classified it as 16-bits.

    If you look at a Zen 4 core it has:

    • 64-bit data registers
    • 512-bit AVX data registers
    • 6 x 64-bit integer ALUs
    • 4 x 256-bit AVX ALUs
    • 2 x 128-bit data bus to DDR5 (dual edge 64-bit)
    • ~40-bits of addressable physical RAM

    So, what do you want to call this processor?

    64-bit (integer width), 128-bit (physical data bus width), 256-bit (widest ALU) or 512-bit (widest register width)? Do you want to multiply those numbers up by the number of ALUs in a core? …by the number of cores on a piece of silicon?

    Me, I’d say Zen4 was a 256-bit core, but you could argue any of the above numbers.

    Basically, it’s a measurement that lost all meaning so people stopped using it.


  • We can, but it’s awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don’t need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

    If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.