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Comment Re:Buy Chinese EVs? (Score 1) 92

Interestingly though, while 20% of European sales of new cars are already BEVs, it's not the Chinese cars dominating. Chinese brands only have about 3% of the market, while BEVs made in China by non-Chinese brands like Tesla account for 8% of all car sales. The BEV market in Europe is dominated by Stellantis and Volkswagen. with some heavy dose of Korean brands.

Comment Re:Just shows he does not really understand hardwa (Score 1) 79

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Comment Re:BSoD was an indicator (Score 1) 79

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

Comment Re:I'm not saying we're aliens (Score 3, Interesting) 42

My take is completely different. If the building blocks of Life are so abundant, obviously, they are forming spontaneously without biological predecessor. We are built from ribose, nucleobases and phosphates, because they are everywhere. (And this throws a big wrench into the idea of Silicon based life, because we don't see the silicon equivalents of our base molecules appearing in comets and asteroids.)

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 1) 254

The cars I mentioned use 0W40. A car with shorter oil change intervals than 10K is probably not marketable where I live. Given that the average total time on the road is about 18 years, and the average yearly mileage about 10K, this would mean that the average car is driven for 180K miles with those long intervals.

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 1) 254

Ask your company fleet manager why they get rid of them at 90K miles if they’re working fine.

Because it was a leasing car, and after 5 years, the leasing contract ran out and could not be extended. Colleagues of mine with more road trips put more than 125K miles on their cars before their contracts run out. And the local mechanic who was doing the oil change (five times during my run) was not laughing at all, because it was his everyday work. In fact, I went to the mechanic whenever the car engine light came up and demanded the oil change. Only one time, when I came in after 17K miles, he was a little wary because I was postponing the oil change for too long for his taste.

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 2) 254

In most of the world, 10K oil changes are the norm. My last car had 15K oil change intervals, and got 60 mpg. Never had an engine problem. As this was a company car, I had to return it after 90K miles. Engine was an Volkswagen 1.6 liter TDI with 110 HP. Current car is owned by my wife, similar sized engine with similar range from Stellantis (1.6 liter HDI), 10K oil change interval, currently at 100K miles. Never had an engine problem.

I don't know what the U.S. car's problem is with those short oil change intervals. Low quality oil maybe?

Comment Just shoddy... (Score 4, Interesting) 95

What seems most depressing about this isn't the fact that the bot is stupid; but that something about 'AI' seems to have caused people who should have known better to just ignore precautions that are old, simple, and relatively obvious.

It remains unclear whether you can solve the bots being stupid problem even in principle; but it's not like computing has never dealt with actors that either need to be saved from themselves or are likely malicious before; and between running more than a few web servers, building a browser, and slapping together an OS it's not like Google doesn't have people who know that stuff on payroll who know about that sort of thing.

In this case, the bot being a moron would have been a non-issue if it had simply been confined to running shell commands inside the project directory(which is presumably under version control, so worst case you just roll back); not above it where it can hose the entire drive.

There just seems to be something cursed about 'AI' products, not sure if it's the rush to market or if mediocre people are most fascinated with the tool, that invites really sloppy, heedless, lazy, failure to care about useful, mature, relatively simple mitigations for the well known(if not particularly well understood) faults of the 'AI' behavior itself.

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 126

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

Comment Re:Quality Work Can't Be Rushed (Score 1) 126

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Comment Re:The enshittification begins (Score 2) 42

It may not be attracting to you but it is certainly popular. ChatGPT has about 800 million active users as of April https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/. Now, that's using data in part from OpenAI, but other metrics which are not from OpenAI paint a pretty similar picture. ChatGPT's website is one of the world's 10 most visited websites according to Similarweb and has been consistently that way for over a year now https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ . Whatever problems ChatGPT has, lack popularity is not one of them.

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