Xilinx dev tools are awful. They are the ones who had Windows XP as the only supported dev environment for a product with guaranteed shipments through 2030. I saw Xilinx defend this state of affairs for over a decade. My entire FPGA-programming career was born, lived, and died, long after XP became irrelevant but before Xilinx moved past it, although I think they finally gave in some time around 2022. Still, Windows XP through 2030, and if you think that's bad wait until you hear about the actual software. These are not role models of dev experience.
In my, err, uncle? post I said that I was confused about where AMD was in the AI arms race. Now I know. They really are just this dysfunctional. Yikes.
Xilinx made triSYCL (https://github.com/triSYCL/triSYCL), so maybe there's some chance AMD invests first-class support for SYCL (an open standard from Khronos). That'd be nice. But I don't have much hope.
So I knew that AMD's compute stack was a buggy mess -- nobody starts out wanting to pay more for less and I had to learn the hard way how big of a gap there was between AMD's paper specs and their actual offerings -- and I also knew that Nvidia had a huge edge at the cutting edge of things, if you need gigashaders or execution reordering or whatever, but ML isn't any of that. The calculations are "just" matrix multiplication, or not far off.
I would have thought AMD could have scrambled to fix their bugs, at least the matmul related ones, scrambled to shore up torch compatibility or whatever was needed for LLM training, and pushed something out the door that might not have been top-of-market but could at least have taken advantage of the opportunity provided by 80% margins from team green. I thought the green moat was maybe a year wide and tens of millions deep (enough for a team to test the bugs, a team to fix the bugs, time to ramp, and time to make it happen). But here we are, multiple years and trillions in market cap delta later, and AMD still seems to be completely non-viable. What happened? Did they go into denial about the bugs? Did they fix the bugs but the industry still doesn't trust them?
It's roughly that the AMD tech works reasonably well on HPC and less convincingly on "normal" hardware/systems. So a lot of AMD internal people think the stack is solid because it works well on their precisely configured dev machines and on the commercially supported clusters.
Other people think it's buggy and useless because that's the experience on some other platforms.
This state of affairs isn't great. It could be worse but it could certainly be much better.
Yeah, if this article wanted to be remotely even-handed, examples are plentiful. How many times has the Laffer Curve been trotted out to claim that reducing taxes on rich people will increase receipts, only for it to not happen that way? Or social cuts rationalized for the purpose of balancing the books, only for the savings to be spent on reducing taxes for rich people, leaving the books unbalanced? The purpose of a system is what it does.
Of course, the article didn't want to be even handed. Its primary intent wasn't really to explore POSWID as a general concept that applies nearly everywhere in politics. Its purpose is what it did.
> How many times has the Laffer Curve been trotted out to claim that reducing taxes on rich people will increase receipts, only for it to not happen that way?
Never. The problem with debating the Laffer Curve is that tax receipts always go up, only occasionally dipping for recessions. It's not possible to correlate tax receipts to tax policy in that way without inventing your own model for what would have happened under your alternative policy (which can of course say whatever you want it to say). Taxes decreased, receipts go up. Taxes increased, receipts go up. The only thing that stops receipts from going up year-on-year are big recessions, and even then they always bounce back to higher than pre-recession levels afterwards.
> given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines
Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.
Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.
They were able to assess the efficacy by looking for illness, not death. It takes some verrrry "special" framing to twist this into anything but an enormous success:
> BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6).
Yet the deaths clearly mattered when multiplied up to population scale, because COVID was able to fill up the hospitals.
The vaccines were so good at their job that the hospitals were full of unvaccinated people even after most people got vaccinated, and this astonishing feat of efficacy persisted for quite some time.
Normally I'm sympathetic to a bit of healthy cynicism, but when the official narrative is backed by extremely strong extremely public corroborating evidence, sorry, I'm not going to sacrifice the safety of myself and those I care about to indulge someone else's politically-driven blindness towards said evidence.
There is a disturbing trend on the right to reject literally anything a state org says as if it were some sort of brave rebellion against the system.
The CDC says wear masks? Suddenly it becomes a "mind control" issue.
The FDA recommends not drinking raw milk? Republican lawmakers are literally sickening themselves drinking bacteria-laden dairy products in front of their colleagues to "trigger the libs".
The FDA issue emergency authorization to get a COVID vaccine to the public as quickly as possible during a pandemic, and suddenly Conservatives are claiming that COVID never killed anyone, it's the Vaccine that's killing people, even as the unvaccinated make up the lion's share of the casualties.
If you dive deep enough into the antivaxxer movements (a deeply right-wing movement), you'll find people arguing that drinking industrial bleach (Miracle Mineral Cure) is the solution to every health issue that "they don't want you to know about", even as they are shitting out pieces of their intestines (Google "rope worms"). Of courset the government saying "don't drink bleach" makes them double down.
I am all for a healthy distrust of the government or any other ruling authority, but it feels like roughly half the the U.S. population is so brain-broken that they have fully embraced contrarianism as a worldview.
We have millions of devices in the field older than that on the same D-cell LiSOCl2 battery they shipped with. Some of them even take magnetic measurements with powered excitation!
In my corner of the world (electric/water/gas utilities), we had been using proprietary techniques that matched the "NB-IoT" description for 20 years, and they weren't new then. It was fun to watch the public dialogue walk the same path for a while and rediscover some of the main tricks, but there were other important tricks left untouched (broadcast firmware downloads, highly compressed debug logs, low power clock synchronization so that you can do timeslots for ultra low power, mesh heuristics) probably because they were a massive pain in the rear and the people who would have risen to the occasion saw that the major ecological niches were already occupied by players who got in 30 years ago when this all became viable. (Disclaimer: I didn't actively chase down NB-IoT talks so I might just have been missing these things.)
If your market is large enough that managing your own infrastructure is attractive (vs cellular), you were also able to afford a few EEs and RF guys 30 years ago, and your needs are already met by a competitive ecosystem of players who have been walking this path for a long time. It doesn't leave much to compete on except price, and you don't want to compete on price.
That makes me envious. I've figured out the debug log compression part myself, but the rest is beyond my reach.
> If your market is large enough that managing your own infrastructure is attractive
This. I imagine proprietary is perfect when you are deploying in a single country with single RF plan. And your customer utility company that is willing to maintain a bit of extra infrastructure. But if you want to deploy on several sites scattered across all ITU regions, and each site is a huge plant with devices from maybe fifty different suppliers, it's just a no-go.
