> freelance roles, self-employment, and side hustles
> However, the work has traditionally come with some downsides—namely not having the steady, dependable income a corporate job brings.
What I also wonder is how they manage taxes and healthcare where traditionally corporate job handles, a simple W2 and company issued insurance. The tax law in the US feels overwhelming without a dedicated CPA
this sounds more like survivorship bias no? You can keep playing lucky if you want, but that's more on being lucky. I like to keep risk low and so the objective is reducing the need to be "lucky", to get more consistent results without luck and this is where having those economic fundamentals work. Economics is more than stock-picking, that's more of a finance thing imo.
>The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.
this is what I believe as well, too many people on HN seem to be lose grasp of the big picture in favor of a few dollars today. (but the big picture can only go so far i.e. Keynes's "In the long run we are all dead"). BUT the big issue that I fear many people are overlooking is the post-PC era. I made a thread on g the other day but didn't get much traction there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era
I believe home computing will become more expensive and progress slows down as traditional businesses and "gamers" that currently fuel that affordability dry up and economies of scale inverts. Things like Talos and OpenPOWER will remain more stable in my opinion as they already priced in these niche market demands unlike other archs that seem to depend on a big net of users that every day is growing smaller as people migrate to cloud only solutions. I think it's advantageous to invest into OpenPOWER as an eccosystem even if RISC-V picks up since there's already big dollars behind it that doesn't depend on scraping the bottom of the barrel for funding. I plan to write this up with actual numbers some other day, maybe estimate a sort of timeline when this might start happening
Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products.
It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.
OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a big enterprise market for scientific and financial computing. The OpenPOWER derivatives use IBM's POWER 8/9 chips.
I started looking for an alternative to commodity desktops when news came out that there were ring 0/-1/-2/-3 vulnerabilities in chips and I realized I had no idea what code was running on my computer. A lot of people just applied the mitigations and shrugged like it was perfectly normal that they couldn't really control their own computers.
When Raptor came out with their offerings, I thought it was great: full ownership of my computer, and as an added bonus some premium IBM chips from another architecture. I know people who spend more than I spent just on graphics cards every year.
>It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.
exactly, I think it'll be better now to settle in with OpenPOWER rather than later to not get caught off guard. This whole affordable PC era was a temporary illusion and we can't relie on vendors providing us mitigations since even those eventually cease. Personally I still can't afford a Raptor machine atm but I'm getting in by working on stuff in QEMU with the recommended openPOWER debian release
it is expensive, as far as I understand it (I'm still just learning about it all), it is for those need total auditability, they mention EU a lot but also this seems catered to actual individuals who really want a truly open system that doesn't scarifice performance (RISC-V seems great for embedded but is still not there for high end workflows). To me, this sounds like a reasonable price for what they're providing but I understand it's definitely outside the price point of many but I must wonder if there's anything more besides price, is it really just that they're too expensive and this is why there's so little talk about it?
I have vague memories of PPC instructions sucking compared to alpha, sparc, and x86, 20 years or more ago. I've got no specific memories what my objection was; but I recall dropping my plans to support it as a platform after a very quick look at it.
Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.
It seems unlikely that Power completely lacked atomics. This is a very vague recollection since it's been a long time, but I feel like there were some differences. I think PowerPC used a load-linked/store-conditional with a stronger guarantee than a CAS (compare and swap) on x86. For example, if x = 1 and you CAS it to a new value, another thread might have changed it to 8 and then back to 1 in the meantime and it'll still succeed (the ABA problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem).
I think x86 also has a stronger memory model providing less flexibility, but greater consistency.
PowerPC uses LL/SC for synchronisation, which is very different to the classic x86 approach. Maybe you didn't like that? But i think Alpha and ARM use that too.
> Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.
That would have been PPC 601 and perhaps [entry level] 603 models. Motorola/IBM first released a single processor PPC, then they added support for multiprocessor systems which did have atomics – https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180814-00/?p=99...
Other than that, I immensely enjoyed hand writing PPC assembly – it is a very straightforward RISC design, the «rlwinm» / «rlwimi» instructions are fun – once you figure out how to use them.
The developer did nothing wrong, reimplemented it from scratch and gave you a mention in the original readme. If anything this happens all the time like Oracle v Google. What you do now is create something even better (and keep it closed source) but he is not required to do anything
it's more that with the Fed's rate hikes, cheap money is in decline and so people have to think harder about whether or not it's worth building that next speculative project without carefully really thinking about the certainty of returns.
Surprised to see this here, was just reading about it on the bard page a few minutes ago since I been killing time waiting for chatGPT to come back up for Plus Users. I think it would be really cool if we could get a Bard extension for Google Colab, maybe some integration with the Colab Pro would be really interesting analogous to the Data Analysis Plugin
I've had the best experience so far with chatGPT Plus using the Data analysis plugin, well I WAS having the best experience until it went down today. Still waiting to get back to it
Pretty neat, I like how uncluttered it is compared to the regular site on mobile. Bit confused with the icons on top, I guess the first one is top stories and the star is trending?
> However, the work has traditionally come with some downsides—namely not having the steady, dependable income a corporate job brings.
What I also wonder is how they manage taxes and healthcare where traditionally corporate job handles, a simple W2 and company issued insurance. The tax law in the US feels overwhelming without a dedicated CPA