I'm unfortunately really unimpressed with the Trackpoints coming out of Lenovo today. I have a brand new ThinkPad that suffers from drift everyday, so it's easy for me to see why other companies aren't including Trackpoints on their products.
There is no good Lenovo hardware anymore. It’s been completely swallowed by the Chinese company that bought it, and even the formerly “noble”/enterprise lines are junk now. Same as HP.
I’d argue it’s a superior mouse even with the drift, even though I agree that the drift is annoying and am amazed they have not been able to fix it all these years.
More to the point x86 instruction streams aren't self-synchronizing. There are cases where you can read one valid stream of x86 instructions starting at byte X, but another completely different one starting at byte X+1. Apart from the security implications this makes wide decode on x86 notably harder than it has to be, though in practice you can make it work by just starting a decode your fetch window at every byte boundary the fist time you're executing something and throwing away the unused decodes, and then mark the invalid positions in the instruction cache so you don't waste that power again.
Essentially every cell phone out there has a VLIW DSP like Qualcomm's Hexagon cores (though AFAIK Qualcomm is the only one who lets you run your on programs on their DSP).
Between the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killing. Malaria alone is responsible for about 5% of all human deaths through history, compared to something like 1% for smallpox.
It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that tell us how concerned we should be. I was shocked to learn that "fallout" in the context of a nuclear war could mean something that could cause you to die in hours, not raise your lifetime risk of cancer somewhat.
I guess we don't have the language because we don't have the experience.
Perhaps we should tune into what the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors use to describe things. I seem to recall they had various phrases for different kinds of fallout ..
There actually wasn't any appreciable fallout after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Fallout is mostly generated when a bomb explodes close to the ground so that its neutrons are able to reach and transmute that ground into radioactive isotopes. The bombs dropped on Japan exploded high up to affect as large an area as possible. Many people suffered terribly from the ionizing radiation produced by those bombs, but all that damage was inflicted in the first microseconds immediately after the bombs detonated.
Right, it was radioactive rain I am remembering someone describing to me when I was in Tokyo, discussing the subject. Not strictly fallout.
I remember there was some controversy over whether folks who were exposed to the black rain were eligible for health and medical support, and what constituted 'black rain' versus 'normal rain' and all the wide spectrum between ...
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
Most radiobiological effects for acute exposures are actually quadratic in dose - this applies to things like mutations, chromosome aberrations, and lethal events.
The quadratic term relates (loosely) to interactions between damage from multiple ionising particles which are present in cells at the same time. When you protract exposures, more damage is repaired before subsequent ionising particles arrive, and you see a reduction in the quadratic term, to effectively a linear form at very low dose rates.
So it's not surprising that spreading the radiation out significantly reduces the yield of biological events, but actually supports a linear trend for mutation yield in low-dose and low dose-rate conditions. (Whether that tracks linearly in turn to cancer risk, on the other hand, is a topic of much more debate.)
People who want to step away from linear no threshold seem to ignore the extreme likelihood people will get cancer at some point. Which means for any given population there will be many people who are really close to the threshold of getting cancer.
Studying the effects of radiation on healthy tissue isn’t therefore representative of the general population. You need population level data, and the sensitivity just isn’t there to be able to detect if their model is correct or if linear no threshold is correct etc.
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
I do not agree that they have good data showing it works the same in humans. I see a lot of stretching of datasets, a lot of squinting, and above all a lot of hope!
I wish they wouldn't call these "open source" models. The output weights are open but that's more analogous to a binary. The source would be the training data and techniques that went into producing the binary/weights.
"Open weights" is also a term in wide use and accurately tells us what we're getting.
Except for a brief spike during Covid unemployment has been below 5% for a long time which has led to more wage growth for cooks and waiters than for programmers.
In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.
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