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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • Reminder about Henry Lee Lucas, who would just confess to any murder because he kept being provided amenities in prison for doing so.

    Do we have any significant evidence that Sam Little definitely committed these murders? To be clear, Little is definitely a serial killer. I just have my doubts that he isn’t just being used as a scapegoat since HLL.

    From Oxygen

    The FBI confirms Samuel Little is “the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history,” and says he has been “matched to 50 cases” of the 93 murders he claims he has committed. The FBI also releases a timeline of Little’s life and crimes in hopes of identifying more of his victims.

    So half are still unconfirmed, and the other 50 are ‘Matched’ to him by some unknown criteria, which involves sketches












  • I understand some instruction expansions today are used to good effect in x86, but that there are also a sizeable number of instructions that are rarely utilized by compilers and are mostly only continuing to exist for backwards compatibility. That does not really make me think “more instructions are usually better”. It makes me think “CISC ISAs are usually bloated with unused instructions”.

    My whole understanding is that while more specific instruction options do provide benefits, the use-cases of these instructions make up a small amount of code and often sacrifice single-cycle completion. The most commonly cited benefit for RISC is that RISC can complete more work (measured in ‘clockcycles per program’ over ‘clockrate’) in a shorter cyclecount, and it’s often argued that it does so at a lower energy cost.

    I imagine that RISC-V will introduce other standards in the future (hopefully after it’s finalized the ones already waiting), hopefully with thoroughly thought out instructions that will actually find regular use.

    I do see RISC-V proponents running simulated benchmarks showing RISC-V is more effective. I have not seen anything similar from x86 proponents, who usually either make general arguments, or worse , just point at the modern x86 chips that have decades of research, funding, and design behind them.

    Overall, I see alot of doubt that ISAs even matter to performance in any significant fashion, and I believe it for performance at the GHz/s level of speed.