Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
> For those who have been in the industry longer, why do you think it’s still important to stay strong in CS fundamentals?
Dictionaries have made me feel like studying languages is pointless. People, why do you think it’s still important to stay strong in languages when dictionaries exist?
It can, sure. However, I will not pay to be lectured to on topics I have no interest getting lectured on. I'll keep my money, they can keep the sermon. Let's see who has more to gain from listening to the other. If they want my money, what I want to hear/see matters a whole lot more than what they want to preach to me.
They simply forgot the golden rule: he who has the gold -- makes the rules. Let them rediscover it.
OK, but the same response still applies. There still are plenty of arguments against UBI, and you still need to actually refute them rather than just dismiss them with "they're false or moot".
I’d agree with you in a debate, for sure, but I’m just stating my opinion. Of course, opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one lol, so I’m not saying im necessarily right.
But I do think in the special case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors, I think the only way we can hope to sustain an economy of any kind would be to redistribute the output of those machines significantly, or we would end up with a concentration of power around capital that utterly eliminates the economy as we presently understand it.
As for moot, I mean that in this case, you aren’t taking anyone’s work to benefit others, so the usual arguments of socialism or wealth redistribution don’t have the same basis in injustice. Ultimately, the production of pure automation springs directly from the resources of the earth, and the earth is everyones, so it makes sense to redistribute the production to a significant extent.
As for false, I mean that the “no one will do anything” and other claims about UBI destroying productivity have all been refuted in study after study, and in the societies that already practice UBI. In this way, UBI is very distinct from needs based welfare, which is often imagined to incentivize low production, since low productivity is actually a requirement to qualify.
Ubi causing runaway inflation is another example of a thoroughly refuted claim that is easily given the lie by looking at extant UBI systems.
UBI seems to work best when it significantly removes or even eliminates stressors of survival (basic housing and food, medical care) while leaving lots of room to aspire to greater success. Throw away the stick, but leave the carrot.
It’s basically mirroring what behaviorists find time after time, that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement. Also, it makes people more willing to take risks like starting a business, getting an education, or having a family. All of which are positives for developed nations.
> But I do think in the special case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors, I think the only way we can hope to sustain an economy of any kind would be to redistribute the output of those machines significantly, or we would end up with a concentration of power around capital that utterly eliminates the economy as we presently understand it.
That would definitely be true in the case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors who can do everything. I'm not sure we would get that, even as the end state. (We're probably at about the end state of "electricity can do everything", and yet there's still large amounts of manual labor. It can't do everything.)
> Ultimately, the production of pure automation springs directly from the resources of the earth, and the earth is everyones, so it makes sense to redistribute the production to a significant extent.
Unfortunately, under current law, the earth is not everyones. Real estate and mineral rights are pretty well entrenched. (For that matter, so are national governments. Given that resources are not evenly distributed, that matters.)
So getting to your philosophical starting point would require a massive transformation of existing human society. (Of course, robots doing everything might have that effect...)
> Ubi causing runaway inflation is another example of a thoroughly refuted claim that is easily given the lie by looking at extant UBI systems.
What are your examples of "extant UBI systems"? And to what degree are they true UBI?
> That would definitely be true in the case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors who can do everything.
I think we will see enough of “everything” to invalidate the current paradigm of economic function. Something like 80 percent of all activity that does not involve high-touch customer interaction where people will prefer the more personal feeling of another human over the superior technical performance of a robot.
>Unfortunately, under current law, the earth is not everyone’s. Real estate and mineral rights are pretty well entrenched.
This is true, but we also tax those holdings in acknowledgement of their communal nature. Ideally, ownership would revert to the best steward, but we all know how that works out in practice lol. The status quo is only possible because the state retains a monopoly of coercive force. If the economic model is undermined, this monopoly is among the first of casualties. So while I don’t disagree completely, I’d have to say that we end up in a sort of race condition problem if the state hesitates too long to assert communal right to autonomous production.
> What are your examples of "extant UBI systems"? And to what degree are they true UBI?
Unfortunately all “UBI” experiments or implementations are limited in scope, because there is always a time or geographical limit to their application. So “true” UBI, which would largely eliminate the leverage that increased local wealth would have against market forces, has never been tried. As a result, existing trials have possibly been contaminated because the gradient at the edge is a problem.
Additionally, UBI in our context would be applied in an economic desert scenario, which means that wealth would not be increasing in the mean.
As for examples, there have been a few, but I’m on the can staring at my phone and I’m way too lazy to go back and try to search up the several examples of UBI experiments, so I’ll just leave you with the one I’m most familiar with because I lived there; Alaska’s permanent fund dividend. At 1-2k per year per human, it is a pretty big infusion for many families. Once again I’m too lazy to dig right now, but there has been many investigations of it’s effects on the economy, and the net result was that prices went -down- dramatically in response to dividends in an effort to capture market share. I would not expect to see this effect though, in the scenario we are exploring - once again it’s a gradient effect, I believe.
> massive transformation of existing human society.
something like a 3rd industrial revolution? As someone who is innovating in the developing technology in the sector, I believe that we are in for a much more sudden and extreme shift than both of the previous Industrial revolutions combined, compressed into a couple of decades. The first two spanned about 120 years of disruptive change between the two of them.
I disagree with the notion that that's what their word choice implies. Also, there doesn't need be magical solution that's not being implemented for there to clearly be a severely heightened level of precarity in the economy that has a hugely negative impact on people who haven't had time to build a financial safety net, build their careers, or buy a house when it was feasible, in large part due specifically to aggressive, malicious, sometimes coordinated extractions of rent and land value
Writing that like that makes you sound like one of those “I didn't get help when I was younger so why should anyone else get help now?” types who highlight their own entitlement and luck by trying to frame others as entitled.
You might not be, but it sounds that way to me.
And if you think this knee-jerk reaction is unfair, let that be a lesson to you! :)
A P550 based board is the best you can get for now (~2-3x faster than the Banana Pi). In 2-3 months there should be a number of SpaceMIT k3 chips that are ~4-6x faster than the banana pi and somewhat reasonably priced (~200-300). By the end of the year, however, you should be able to get an ascalon chip which should be way way faster than that (roughly apple m1/zen3 speed)
I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.
What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.
The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.
M4 is 38 TOPS at INT8 precision whereas SpacemiT K3 is 60 TOPS at INT4 precision so at best they would be equal in "AI" performance but they are not because the rest of the K3 chip is much less capable than M4 (as I would expect).
E.g. M4 total system memory bandwidth is 120GB/s whereas K4 is 51GB/s, single core memory bandwidth is 100-120GB/s vs ~30GB/s. M4 has 10 CPU cores and neural engine with 16 cores whereas K3 has 8 CPU cores and 8 "AI" cores, K3 clock frequency is almost half the clock frequency in M4 etc. etc.
But anyway thanks for sharing, always good to learn about new hardware.
I remember taking down some notes wrt SiFive P870 specs, comparing them to x86_64, and reaching the same conclusion. Narrower core width (4-wide vs 8-wide), lower clock frequency (peaks at 3GHz) and no turbo (?), limited support for vector execution (128-bit vs 512-bit), limited L1 bandwidth (1x 128-bit load/cycle?), limited FP compute (2x 128-bit vs 2x 512-bit), load queue is also inconveniently small with 48 entries (affecting already limited load bandwidth), unclear system memory bandwidth and how it scales wrt the number of cores (L3 contention) although for the latter they seem to use what AMD is doing (exclusive L3 cache per chiplet).
I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.
That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.
I don't know what bubble you are living in, but the i5-9600K is many steps up beyond "SBC class".
The Raspberry Pi 5 results on Geekbench 6 are all over the place. A score between 500 to 900 in single core and a 2000 multi core score.
Radxa 4 is an SBC based around the N100 and it basically gets the same or slightly higher performance as the Raspberry Pi 5.
Meanwhile the i5-9600K gets a score of 1677 in single core, which is 83% of the performance of the entire Raspberry Pi 5 and gets a score of 6199 when using multiple cores, that's 3x the performance.
I'd call this at least "Laptop class" and you even admitted yourself back in 2025 that you're using a processor on that level.
My bubble includes a number of SBCs and embedded boards from Advantech, frequently using Ryzen embedded (V1000 class) CPUs.
SBC is too vague I suppose. Past the Raspberry Pi form factor SBC class, there are many* SBC vendors with Core i5-1340P and similar CPUs today. That's a 2023 device, and just past a 2018 i5-9600K, aligning well with what I claimed.
In 2025+, such a CPU is not a desktop class device, and is sufficient only in low cost laptops (but in much lower power form.) A MacBook Neo A18, for example, is considerably better than a i5-9600K.
It would be great if Tentorrent actually yields such a product, and if, based on later performance projections that appeared in late 2025, Ascalon is actually faster, but, as I said, the world will not change much. RISC-V developers will appreciate compiling like it's 2019, but that's as far as it will go.
* LattePanda Sigma, ASROCK NUC, DFROBOT, Premio and many NAS and industrial devices.
TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.
Wait, this is a modern-ish ISA with a software-managed TLB, I didn’t realize that! The manual seems a bit unhappy about that part though:
> In the current version of this architecture specification, TLB refill and consistent maintenance between TLB and page tables are still [sic] all led by software.
(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)
MIPS (the arch of which RISCV is mostly a copy) is even easier to emulate, unlike RV it does not scatter immediate bits al over the instruction word, making it easier for an emulator to get immediates. If you need emulated perf, MIPS is the easiest of all
There are two interesting differences of ISA between MIPS and RISC-V: that MIPS does not have branch on condition, only on zero/non-zero and that MIPS has 16 bit immediates with appropriate sign extension (all zeroes for ORI, all ones for ANDI). The first difference makes MIPS programs about 10% larger and second difference makes MIPS programs smaller (RISC-V immediates are 11.5 bits due to mandatory sign extension, 13 bits are required to cover 95% of immediates in MIPS-like scheme), a percent or so, I think.
ANDI is not 1-extended (though that would be nice) it is 0-extended. MIPS only has 2 extension modes for immediates - sign extended and zero-extended. all logical ops are 0-extended, all arith ops are sign extended.
Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
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