No it couldn't have. The design was discovered (to be fair, thanks to Itanium's failure) to be fundamentally broken. The compiler can't know what will be hitting the CPU when the program is actually run.

Yes it does know, because the CPU only executes one massively wide instruction at a time.

The problem with VLIW is that the compiler technology back then wasn't very sophisticated. These days the modern optimizing compiler is shockingly good at optimization - even figuring out what you're trying to do and re-attempt to do it in a better way. (E.g., if you need to count the "1" bits, which is a common operation, you implement it in C with a while loop. Modern x86 CPUs have POPCNT, which is a single instruction that does exactly that, and the compiler can see you attempting to count the bits manually and replace all that code with the single instruction).

VLIW might actually be practical today because compilers have gotten many times better than even 20 years ago. The only difference moder CPUs are over VLIW ones is that the instruction scheduler is a hardware block in a modern CPU, whereas VLIW has it explicitly scheduled. But many times the compiler can provide hints to the hardware scheduler so it can better distribute the work.

Compilers are scary good at optimizing these days - I suggest checking out Matt Godbolt's Advent of Compiler Optimization series he did in December where he shows you what the modern compiler is capable of. Even telling you what caveats you might introduce in your code that disable optimization. (Matt Godbolt is one of the creators of Compiler Explorer).

. It's sad to see the world's most successful democracy be torn apart by a bunch of old, greedy, white men who hate everyone who doesn't look like them or have as much wealth as them.

And longest lived, at that. You might not believe it, but the US is the world's oldest democracy - all other western democratic nations have only emerged far more recently.

Though, the bigger worrying thing is to realize the end of the British Empire was only 70 years ago in the 1950s, and that happened because the US threatened to sell off its UK Pounds on the open market, basically crashing its economy. (The UK decided it wanted to take over the Suez Canal from Egypt and blockaded it).

The only reason I mention this the end of the American Empire might be nigh and Venezuela might be the tipping point. Because who is butthurt now the US wants to take over the oil? China and Russia. Granted, China is only the #3 holder of US debt (Japan is #1), but it's a potential thing.

The whole reason the US wants oil is not because it wants oil. It's because the US wants oil be priced in US dollars. BRICS have their own currency to deal with, and China might see this as an opportunity to suddenly push for oil to be traded in something other than US dollars. This would cause great problems for the US economy if this causes the US dollar to crash. It's hard to imagine, but the end of American Exceptionalism might be nigh as well (the British though the same in the early 20th century - that the Pound would be the currency, and that the British could do no wrong).

Of course, it might survive had Trump decided to not spend and waste all of the goodwill and trust the US had by holding trade wars and trying to annex allied nations. If we're lucky, we might be trading oil in Euros. If we're not so lucky, it'll be Yuan or Yuan-adjacent.

I might finally be able to build a decent gaming PC?

You can if you disregard future proofing for now. Older platforms capable of running DDR4 memory are coming back into vogue because DDR4 memory prices, while still inflated, are still roughly half the price of an equivalent amount of DDR5.

This has meant things like AMD AM4, and Intel 13th and 14th gen CPUs are back which can be paired with a decent midrange GPU.

The other meta if that PCs with 16GB of RAM would become common again, with 32GB being "high end".

It's not all bad news though - because of this, software developers are having to optimize their software to run on less RAM - bloated software is fine if you're sporting 32GB of RAM with 64 being '"high end". But when people are dropping back down to 16GB, and "entry level" being 8GB, things have to change.

Rare earths, despite their name, aren't really all that rare. The US has a lot. The only reason they're "rare" is because it's hard (read expensive) to extract the elements from the minerals, often using very nasty chemicals and very polluting methods.

China was usually the place to buy them because it was cheap and well, we can look the other way on environmental rules. Because surprise surprise, no one wants that pollution in their backyard, making it very expensive to refine in the US.

All tariffs have done was onshore the refining, likely with a lot of money under the table to ignore environmental concerns and planning, so they can be refined with more profit (and more disregard for the eventual taxpayer supported superfund site and inevitable lawsuits).

So it's good when it's properly managed, but given what's happening, "properly managed" is likely to be interpreted as "make more profit and make billionaires richer" to the detriment of everyone else.

Of course, the problem would be the buyers of the those rare earths - which may be a problem because the biggest of them is for use in electric motors used in, well, EVs. With the EV benefit withdrawal and the collapse of sales, this just means expensive rare earths have no customers to buy them.

Economies are hard and there are so many intertwining elements that simplistic "drill baby drill" and "return to ICE, no EVs" really disrupts the supply chains. Because what's the point of refining those rare earths if you've got no one to actually buy them?

End result - you've just made life more expensive for everyone for no good reason. The promised rare earth jobs were only temporary because without customers, there's no reason to keep refining it. Meanwhile cars became more expensive - because there's no need to sell bottom dollar vehicles if tariffs keep prices high when you could raise the price and pocket the profits.

Well, truckers who have driven EV trucks have preferred them - they are much easier on the body than diesel engines. The smoothness and quietness of EVs mean their backs and joints don't hurt as much after a long day of driving.

Their instant torque also make them much nicer to drive in city traffic.

Sure the incentives might no longer exist, but the quality of the experience is such that it's likely to be something in demand.

What's likely to happen is hybrid trucks with fully electric drivetrains - so they get the advantages of EV driving, but currently compatible with infrastructure today. The diesel generator can be optimized to run smoother and quieter (like modern generators used for backup power) so they won't affect the ride quality.

I know of several legacy industrial systems running DOS, as they depend on software with built-in drivers which must communicate with long EOL ISA or PCI interfaces. It's expensive, but there are sources for legacy hardware (as well as old surplus) for this very market. Yeah you might pay USD$10K for a machine capable of reliably booting MSDOS 3.3, but it's cheap compared to the $250K CnC lathe or mill for which there are no more modern controls.

The Vortex86 CPU implements the 486 (and some later ones Pentium) instruction set. It also exposes an ISA and PCI interface, and is an in-production part that can be purchased new today.

It will reliably boot MS-DOS, Windows 9x, Linux (but not the latest ones that have eliminated 486 support) off SD cards. It can also boot off USB, emulate legacy devices using USB (e.g., keyboard/mouse), and everything else.

It's a popular chip for many retro computing enthusiasts because of this - you can interface with legacy ISA and PCI cards (especially sound cards), but use modern USB devices like keyboards and mice, SD cards for virtual IDE and SATA hard drives, etc. And has Ethernet support.

It's also a modern CPU, even though it has the 486 or Pentium instruction set, it comes in varieties up to 1GHz. It also uses standard DDR memory.

It was designed for industrial computing uses which is why it has so much flexibility - it has old legacy interfaces for interfacing with devices, and it has modern interfaces to provide mass storage and such because ti's much easier to get an SD card than it is an IDE hard drive or SSD. Or a USB keyboard and mouse to emulate a PS/2 one. Display options include VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort

A proposed ground based solution exists. It's called Broadcast Positioning System, using the ATSC 3.0 TV broadcast signal to provide ground-based positioning information in areas where GPS is weak or non-existent.

It's not currently deployed, but it's a possibility and has been proposed for a long time now.

The problem right now is ATSC 3.0 is a non-starter and expensive to implement, and no one is sponsoring "free converter boxes" like there was during the ATSC transition. ATSC 3.0 tuners are only in the highest end TV sets now (instead of being in most sets - the slow uptake of ATSC 3.0 means manufacturers have reduced cost by not having ATSC 3.0 tuners most people won't use).

It can be highly redundant as TV stations can all broadcast the signal as they need the timing anyways.

We're at Web 4.0 actually.

Web 3.0 was supposed to be blockchain all the way all the time.

Intel, what the heck happened to you? In the past I would have never considered an AMD processor and/or GPU. Now it looks like the only way forward. How the mighty have fallen.

Ryzen happened. Then the Intel 13/14th gen happened that had stability issues. Then Intel's latest gen CPUs bombed because they couldn't beat Ryzen in any metric. The pandemic really helped.

However, Intel 13th/14th gen are making a comeback thanks to AI - because they can run DDR4 memory. AMD's AM5 platform is DDR5 only, and if you've priced DDR5, it's kind of out there. Meanwhile, DDR4 in the same amount is still way overpriced, but is around half the cost of DDR5.

This has put immense pressure on AMD ans they were transitioning to AM5 platforms and discontinuing AM4 (which can use DDR4 or DDR5). Intel has suddenly become relevant again as has older AM4 builds (which were basically set as "do not use AM4" only a year earlier) because of this.

You know, there's also a huge selection of books called "non-fiction" which you can also read. They cover a variety of topics and can present your technical material in new an interesting ways.

So branch out and look around the library because there are a lot of books that are not necessarily "literature" (face it, the vast majority of people who read books read pulp - it's just like the vast majority of money in movies is blockbusters).

Sometimes it can be interesting background, like learning how WiFi started from trading commodities in Chicago and how it evolved.

Some books are even just aimed at the super geek - like books about the software running on the Apollo Guidance Computer. A mix of hardcore datasheet but tempered with how things were done but goes into details on the executive and on the virtual machine it implements. (If you want more, look up "Luminary and Sunburst: An Apollo Memoir" by Don Eyles).

Michael J. Fox's memoir during the time he did Back to the Future is also fascinating if you're a fan of the movie ("Future Boy").

It's just silly to think you can never read a "book". I'm starting a new one about the CPU used on the F-14 Tomcat, which was so heavily classified that we were stuck with the Intel 4004 when quite literally there was a much better higher performance processor already created, and how the 4004 is NOT the first microprocessor out there. I haven't read it yet, so it should prove interesting.

It's a day behind

You say that like ti's a bad thing.

Not all news needs to be known the second it happens. Sometimes a headline works, but the details can be worked out later.

Heck, many reputable online news sites are often late with their news because they want to make sure their reporting is accurate, so a day late means it had more time to be researched and all that.

Plenty of other sources also delay their reporting - John Oliver's Last Week Tonight is often a couple of weeks behind simply because it takes that long to do the necessary research.

It's also a useful thing if you don't care about certain topics, but having a day later provides a static update on topics you don't really care about

Given the way companies buy reporting these days, late reporting is often better. Think hardware companies refusing to give review units ahead of release time if they don't get a glowing review, so the reporting that's critical may get a review unit after release, or they may just go out and acquire one themselves and run it through their gauntlet of tests but the article comes out a week later.

Our cells inherit a lot of stuff as well. In the early days, mitochondria were actually separate organisms until sometime in the past, a cell decided to absorb it. It made sense - the mitochondria took nutrients in and produced ATP out, which cells used to absorb to power themselves. Eventually a cell decided to absorb mitochondria into themselves and feed it with nutrients and take the ATP that comes out.

That's why mitochondrial DNA exists and is often a separate line from your normal DNA.

Indeed. I am always shocked when I see many of the same employees year after year. That is just unheard of anywhere else in retail. And they are all pleasant and helpful. And, generally, seem happy.

Costco pays its employees VERY well. As in, it's not that Costco pays well for retail, they pay well overall. And their benefits are great. They are generally on the "best employer" list all the time. Turns out treating your employees well and paying them well causes them to stick around.

Look at an employee's name tag and the color tells you how long they've been there. Less than 25 years is white. Silver tags for anyone who's been there for over 25 years, and gold tags are for anyone who's been there for 40 years or more. The fact that it's actually a thing should tell you Costco employees stick around.

Now that's really unheard of,e especially in an industry where the average annual turnover rate is 200%.

Most people are using IPv6 without even knowing they're using it. The cellular packet protocol used by LTE and 5G is IPv6 internally. Your phone gets an IPv6 address and tunnels IPv4 traffic through it. Your carrier uses CGNAT to bring those packets to the Internet.

Granted, only some carriers right now allow full IPv6 connectivity to the Internet from your phone, but it's all there. Heck, your carrier might just assign you a static IPv6 address to represent your account, and roaming data you actually keep your IPv6 address and the prefix is used to route the packet to your carrier (mobile IP is fun - you actually get what is a virtual VPN back to your carrier who then puts the packets onto the Internet for you).

Next up loyalty oaths.

That's already happening - new federal employees must swear an oath of allegiance to Trump to follow his policies and such.

Though I think Project 2026 has something to say about that as well. Yes, there is a new Project 2026 document which contains some of the stuff in Project 2025 that hasn't been done yet (e.g., banning pornography) but adds more stuff that they would like done as well